CEO The Good – Optimization for top brands like Nike, Xerox, Adobe, The Economist & many more | Author & Speaker | 6'7" 🏀 | Jr Olympic 🥇🥋 | jonmacdonald.com | 📘 Latest Book 👉 thegood.com/oito

Every bad digital experience costs you money. My mission is simple: remove them all until conversion becomes inevitable.

I founded The Good 16+ years ago to turn user insights into revenue. We're the trusted Digital Experience Optimization advisory for household names like Adobe, Nike, Xerox, Intel, and The Economist.

Together, we've generated hundreds of millions in additional revenue by optimizing the full digital journey from first touch to retention.

I've written three best-selling books on conversion optimization and am a frequent keynote speaker at Google, Autodesk, and industry events worldwide.

Also building tools for UX researchers and consultants. Currently in beta: Clipses.ai. Turn user interview transcripts into shareable video clips in minutes. Helping teams eliminate hours of rewatching footage.

Folks will tell you I love to compete: I'm a former college basketball player (and still playing on a club travel team) and won the USA Jr Olympic gold medal in Taekwondo when I was 10. But, business is the ultimate sport.

Book a 15-minute optimization strategy call → https://thegood.com/contact/

📨 DM me to start improving the digital journey of your website or app… or to debate LeBron vs Jordan as the GOAT.

Jon MacDonald

I built my first website in 1996. Anyone can do that now in 5 minutes.

But nobody vibe coded Adobe's trust in us.

I've heard the same prediction for 16 years. WordPress will kill agencies. Then Squarespace. Then no-code tools. Now AI coding.

Each time, the pundits focus on the wrong thing. They see the interface and assume that's the product.

It never is.

The interface is maybe 5% of the value. The other 95% took years to build.

Enterprise relationships. Regulatory knowledge. Institutional expertise from hundreds of engagements. SOC 2 compliance. The phone call at 2am when something breaks.

There are five things you can't vibe code: brand trust, distribution, regulatory compliance, proprietary data, and customer relationships.

I'd add a sixth. The judgment that comes from optimizing digital experiences for Adobe, Nike, Xerox, and The Economist over 16 years.

A weekend coder can build a checkout flow. They can't tell you why it's underperforming or what to change. That takes pattern recognition from thousands of tests.

Technology always lowers the barrier to building. It never eliminates the need for expertise.

My business has grown through every "this kills that" cycle. I expect this one will be no different.

Digital Experience Optimization + AI Browser Agent Optimization + Entrepreneurship Lessons | 3x Author | Speaker | Founder @ The Good – helping Adobe, Nike, The Economist & more increase revenue for 16+ years

I've spent 16 years optimizing digital experiences for brands like Nike, Adobe, and Xerox.

But the next wave of "visitors" to their websites won't be human.

AI agents are already browsing sites, researching products, and making purchase decisions on behalf of real buyers. Most enterprise websites aren't ready for them.

Profound just raised $96M to fix that. And I'm fired up about it.

Engineers have Cursor. Lawyers have Harvey. Marketers now have Profound.

Their agents aren't just tools. They're autonomous workers that collaborate across your entire marketing team. AEO, SEO, content, PR, demand gen.

That's a massive unlock. We're talking 10x productivity potential for lean marketing teams who are already stretched thin.

Figma, Walmart, Ramp, U.S. Bank are already investing here. The enterprise demand for AI-powered marketing infrastructure is real and accelerating.

Congrats to the Profound team. Answer Engine Optimization is one of the fastest-moving categories in marketing right now, and the brands that figure this out early will have a massive edge.

More on the raise 👉 https://lnkd.in/gtAGfJ5E

I spent 16 years fixing the same conversion failures for Nike, Adobe, and The Economist. But I never realized I was doing product research.

Every engagement at The Good followed a pattern:

A brand calls. Visitors aren't converting. We dig in, find the friction, and optimize it away. Then the next brand calls with the exact same problems: Broken onboarding. Confusing pricing pages. Checkout flows that leak revenue at every step.

After a few hundred of these, something shifted. I stopped seeing individual client problems and started seeing product opportunities.

That realization built The Good Ventures.

UserInput was born from watching brands waste weeks waiting for user testing results they needed in days.

Clipses came from watching researchers spend entire afternoons hunting through interview footage to find one quote. We had the same problem internally.

PredictiveAX came from an even stranger pattern. We'd optimize a site for human visitors, then watch AI agents completely fail on the same pages. Different user. Same site. Opposite outcomes.

Every product in the portfolio started as a manual fix we repeated too many times. The pattern recognition from client work was the market research.

Most founders build first, then hunt for customers. Consultants have the opposite problem. We already have validated pain. We just need to build.

If you keep solving the same problem across different clients, you already have what most founders spend years searching for: validated demand.

I watched COVID nearly destroy 11 years of building The Good. But that crisis built something better.

In 2020, our services business all but shut down for a quarter. Clients froze budgets overnight. Projects vanished.

One revenue stream. One point of failure.

I'd spent a decade helping brands reduce risk through optimization. Testing small changes. Measuring results. Never betting everything on one idea.

Yet my own company was one giant bet.

In 2021, I launched The Good Ventures. A portfolio of small, focused products. Each born from patterns we kept seeing across client work.

No massive funding rounds. No 18-month builds. Small bets with clear metrics and fast feedback.

Jeff Bezos built Amazon's dominance through thousands of small experiments, not moonshots. I applied that same principle to venture building.

Some of our bets took off. Others taught expensive lessons. The portfolio absorbs both.

My EO forum helped me see this clearly. Several founders ran diversified businesses. They weathered downturns that nearly broke mine.

One revenue stream feels like focus.

It's actually fragility.

Diversify like you'd optimize: small bets, real data, and the willingness to kill what isn't working.

I laughed at this LinkedIn reply. But Okta data shows 350 SaaS apps per enterprise.

The reply: "I can now create the same tool in about a day. SaaS is over."

This take is everywhere right now. B2B SaaS stocks lost $1 trillion in value this year. The narrative feels convincing.

The data tells a different story.

Bureau of Economic Analysis numbers show corporate spending on self-built software dropped from 50% to just 15%.

Companies don't want to build tools. Even when they can.

Because building is the easy part. Maintaining, securing, updating, supporting, and scaling is where the real work lives.

That "one day" to build becomes one year to get SOC 2 certified. Two years to earn enterprise procurement approval. Five years to build the integration ecosystem customers depend on.

The average large company runs 350-400 SaaS apps because each one solved a problem they didn't want to own.

It's all been said before... WordPress was going to replace agencies. No-code was going to replace developers. AI is going to replace SaaS.

Each prediction confuses the ability to build with the ability to operate.

SaaS isn't dying. The bar for earning enterprise trust is just getting higher.

I got to be one of five returning guests who interviewed Sani for the No Hacks 5-year anniversary episode.

Five years. 218 episodes. Zero hacks.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because Sani has spent five years doing the work, sharing what he learns, and earning trust the hard way.

Slobodan is one of the smartest people I know when it comes to the agentic web. He's also one of the most generous with his time and knowledge.

We're building PredictiveAX together on the side, helping companies prepare their websites for AI browser agents. Working alongside him has been one of the highlights of my career. 

Listen to this episode. It's packed with insights on where the agentic web is headed and what you need to do about it now.

Congrats on 5 years, Sani 🎉

We haven’t quite figured out how AI understand and uses the web we built for ourselves. I’m trying to do that. | Keynote speaker | Host of the No Hacks podcast (200+ eps)

After five years and 218 episodes I couldn't think of a better way celebrate than letting other people ask the questions for once.

I invited five previous guests to interview me for the anniversary episode. Kelly Wortham, Iqbal Ali, Talia Wolf, Jon MacDonald, Shiva Manjunath. Five different people, five different angles on the agentic web. One of them tried to convince me the whole thing is overhyped. (It didn't work)

Here's what kept coming up across all five conversations:

The basics are the strategy. A fully functional website built for humans gets you 80-90% ready for AI agents. Accessibility, semantic HTML, schema, page speed. The stuff you've been putting off? That's optimization now.

AI agents are already between users and websites. Chrome has 3 billion users and started shipping Gemini. Apple is putting AI into every device. There will be an AI layer in front of every interaction. Your website needs to be discovered, cited, and usable by that layer.

WebMCP is one of those things that could change everything. Right now it takes an AI agent 3-5 minutes to fill a basic web form. WebMCP gives agents a clean interface to your front end. It's still early, but if it lands as a standard, every website can become an agentic website.

The rankings model is dead. Prompting ChatGPT a hundred times and averaging your position to 4.7 is not measurement. Real tracking is just arriving. Bing launched AI analytics in beta last week. Google will have to follow.

Five years of this podcast and the message hasn't changed. No hacks. Just do it well. The difference is that now the cost to not doing it is higher.

Link in comments.

Every SaaS growth guide tells you to run A/B tests, offer free trials, and iterate quickly.

But what if your users are patients whose data you can't touch? Or bank customers protected by strict compliance rules?

I've watched too many regulated SaaS leaders give up on optimization entirely, believing their constraints make growth impossible. They see Canva and Spotify's success stories and think, "That could never be us."

They're half right.

Traditional product-led growth won't work when system failures mean massive fines or when your HR platform needs enterprise-wide rollout to function.

But here's what we discovered: You can validate hypotheses and optimize experiences before they ever touch your production environment.

Our research shows AI-powered heatmaps can predict user behavior with 92% accuracy, without requiring any actual user data. Lookalike user testing reveals friction points without exposing sensitive information. Rapid experimentation validates ideas before a single line of code changes.

It's off-site, experiment-led growth. Same insights, different methods.

Healthcare software. Fintech platforms. Government contractors. They're all growing within their constraints.

Your compliance requirements don't have to be growth blockers. For the full breakdown of tactics and implementation steps, check out the article below.

View newsletter: Digital Journey Insights

The traditional growth playbook falls short when compliance, privacy, and regulations limit your ability to experiment or follow product-led growth pr

Open article: Regulated SaaS Companies Need a Different Approach to Growth. What Actually Works? by Jon MacDonald • 8 min read

Regulated SaaS Companies Need a Different Approach to Growth. What Actually Works?

Chase Dimond

Top Ecommerce Email Marketer & Agency Owner | We’ve sent over 1 billion emails for our clients resulting in $200+ million in email attributable revenue.

I help brands make more money with email marketing.

I’m a Co-Founder of Structured, an ecommerce email marketing agency. Since launching in 2018, our team has helped brands send billions of emails and generate over $200M in email-attributable revenue.

We’re a top agency partner for platforms like Omnisend and Klaviyo.

Shopify featured me as a top email marketing influencer. I’ve also received LinkedIn’s Top Voice Award for Email Marketing, and Favikon has ranked me as the top email marketer across social media.

Some of the brands we’ve worked with include:

Poo~Pourri
Eight Sleep
Health-Ade
Mixtiles
Vessi

If you’re looking to hire an experienced email marketing agency, you can reach me here:

chase@chasedimond.com

——

Outside my agency, I run a number of other fast-growing businesses. I’m fortunate to have over 750,000+ followers and subscribers across my social channels and email newsletter.

I’ve worked with companies including:

LinkedIn
Amazon
TikTok
Gamma
Alibaba
Zapier
ClickUp

I work with a small number of paid sponsors and partners each year.

If you’re interested in exploring a potential fit, please email me with details:

chase@chasedimond.com

Founder

My newsletter is your no BS guide into what's working in email marketing - I'll give you the latest tips + tactics to help you drive more revenue from your email marketing channel. 

Sign up (it's free) here: https://chasedimond.com/chase-email-newsletter

Leadership isn't climbing the ladder. 

It's pulling others up with you.

But here's what most managers get backwards:

They serve upward, not downward. 
They protect their own reputation, not their team's. 
They take credit for wins and deflect blame for losses.

The best leaders flip this entirely.

Here's how to lead from beside, not above:

1️⃣ Share the risk, not just the reward 
↳ Put your reputation on the line for their ideas 
↳ Take accountability when experiments fail

2️⃣ Learn in public alongside your team 
↳ Admit when you don't know something 
↳ Show growth happens at every level

3️⃣ Fight battles together, not for them 
↳ Teach them to advocate for themselves 
↳ Stand shoulder-to-shoulder in tough conversations

4️⃣ Celebrate their wins as team victories 
↳ Amplify their voices in leadership meetings 
↳ Make their success the team's success

5️⃣ Build their confidence, not dependence 
↳ Ask "What do you think?" before giving answers 
↳ Help them trust their own judgment

Great leaders don't just reach the top.

They clear the path for their team to get there too.

Defend your people. Develop your legacy.

♻️ Repost to inspire someone 

Сredit: Carmen Morin ( go follow her )

Top Ecommerce Email Marketer | $200M+ Generated via Email

Take the risk.

Because here’s the math:

If it works → Happiness.
If it fails → Wisdom.

If you do nothing → Stagnation.

Why smart founders take bets:

• Action produces data
• Data reduces fear
• Experience builds judgment
• Judgment compounds

Example:

Apply for the stretch role.
Pitch the bigger client.
Ship the imperfect version.

Worst case?
You gain feedback most people never see.

Best case?
You change your trajectory.

Risk is a teacher.

Silence is not.

Next time you hesitate, ask:

What do I gain if I try?

Credit: TheArtidote on Twitter/X

Most people quit right before it works.

Because effort and reward do not move at the same speed.

Years 1 to 2:

You are bad.
You know it.
Everyone else knows it.

Good.

You are building muscle.

Year 3:

You are decent.
Still invisible.
Doubt gets louder.

This is the danger zone.
Most people exit here.

Year 4:

Your skill is real.
Your voice is clear.
Your network trusts you.

Now one catalyst matters.

A post.
A partnership.
A product launch.

And it looks sudden.

But here’s what really happened:

You compressed 4 years of learning into 30 days of output.

Example:

Builder ships 50 small tools over 4 years.
None break 1k users.

Tool #51 solves the right pain at the right time.
Hits 100k users in 2 months.

People call it overnight.

They did not see the first 50.

The playbook:

1. Treat early years as paid training.
2. Ship in public.
3. Build assets, not moments.
4. Stay until the math flips.

The lag is the price.

Pay it.

If you are in year 2 or 3, this is your sign to keep going.

Great leaders don’t need fans. 
They need challengers.
Fans protect ego. Challengers protect future.

(Credit: Mike Leber)
(Image credit: Eric Partaker)

Early in my leadership journey,
I mistook quiet rooms for strong alignment.

No pushback.
No friction.
Nodding heads.

I thought I was leading well.
I wasn’t.

People weren’t aligned.
They were careful.

And careful teams don’t build bold companies.

If no one challenges you,
you might not be respected.
You might be avoided.

That’s not leadership.
That’s authority on paper.

The higher you rise,
the less truth you automatically hear.

People filter.
They soften.
They protect ego instead of mission.

And slowly ...
you start believing your own narrative.

That’s how smart leaders become stagnant.
And confident leaders become fragile.

Strong leaders design for challenge 👇

1. Seek truth, not comfort
→ Surround yourself with thinkers, not echo chambers.

2. Ask open questions
→ “What am I missing?” is a power move.

3. Stay curious, not defensive
→ Curiosity signals strength. Ego signals fear.

4. Reward dissent
→ Publicly thank the person who challenges you.

5. Model vulnerability
→ Admit mistakes. It opens the door for honesty.

6. Celebrate better ideas
→ Especially when they replace yours.

7. Promote the brave, not the agreeable
→ Advance the voice that risks friction for progress.

8. Hire for courage
→ Skills matter. So does backbone.

9. Put data above hierarchy
→ Let evidence outrank seniority.

Policies shape culture.
But your reaction reveals it.

Here’s the real test:

When someone challenges you,
does your body tense ...
or does your curiosity rise?

Great leadership isn’t about agreement.

It’s about being brave enough to be wrong.
And smart enough to grow from it.

If no one challenges you, 
you’re not leading. 
you’re just managing an echo.

Be the leader who can handle the truth.
And build teams brave enough to offer it.

Perfection is just fear in a nice outfit.

Make it exist first.
Make it better later.

Image credit: itsme_urstruly on Twitter/X

Most of what you fear will never happen.

And what does happen is survivable.

Break fear down:

Fear of death
Out of your control.

Fear of shame
People forget fast. They move on to their own lives.

Fear of losing everything
You rebuild. Humans are wired to adapt.

Here is the 3 Step Fear Audit:

1. Define the worst case clearly
Not vaguely. Specifically.

2. Ask, can I recover?
In most business and career decisions, yes.

3. Calculate the cost of inaction
Regret compounds. Avoidance compounds.

Example:

Launch the idea.

Worst case
Low traction. Public flop.

Reality
You gain feedback. Improve. Try again.

Fear says permanent damage.

Reality says temporary discomfort.

Keep climbing.

Most ceilings are mental.

Image credit: iamfearlesssoul on Twitter/X

A fake caring culture is worse than a toxic one.
At least with toxicity, you know where you stand.

Fake caring hides behind smiles.
It says "we care", but means "please don’t make this uncomfortable".
It praises your work in meetings...then ignores your feedback after.

It’s leadership with empathy in words,
and apathy in action.

Here’s how fake caring shows up at work:

1️⃣ "We hear you" → but nothing changes.
2️⃣ "We’re like a family" → until KPIs drop.
3️⃣ "We value feedback" → unless it’s critical.

The result?
Distrust. Burnout. Quiet quitting.

Because pretending to care kills trust faster than open conflict ever could.

Real care isn’t a slogan.
It’s honesty, follow-through, and doing the right thing even when it’s inconvenient.

What’s one small action leaders can take this week to show they genuinely care? 👇


Image credit: Lorenzo D.

Sometimes we underestimate the quiet power within us.

We look at challenges and think
this might be too much.
Too difficult.
Too far beyond what we can handle.

But often the real limit is not the challenge.

It is the story we tell ourselves about what we are capable of.

(Credit: Christian Kampf)

Courage rarely arrives as a loud moment of strength.

More often it is something quieter.
A small inner voice that says
try one more time.
take one more step.
keep going.

And step by step we discover something remarkable.

We are far more resilient.
Far more capable.
Far stronger than we ever believed.

Sometimes courage is simply the decision to believe in that possibility.

Can I share something uncomfortable?

Doubt is louder than effort.

I’ve seen talented people stall
because they kept second-guessing every move.

And I’ve seen average ideas succeed
because the person behind them believed hard enough to execute fully.

Belief doesn’t guarantee results.

But hesitation guarantees small ones.

Here’s the shift:

Stop asking, “What if it fails?”
Start asking, “How would I move if it succeeds?”

Because you make different choices from belief:

• You follow up.
• You raise your rates.
• You apply anyway.
• You speak up in the room.

Momentum favors the committed.

Not the cautious.

You don’t need blind faith.

You need aligned action.

Are you building from belief…
or protecting yourself from disappointment?

Quote Credit: Leadersonlyco

The most influential leaders aren’t the loudest in the room.

They’re the ones who make others feel seen and respected.

Your communication style, empathy, and respect for others don't just shape your reputation.

They build bridges, foster collaboration, and create a positive work environment for everyone.

Active listening makes others feel valued.
Constructive feedback shows you care about growth.
Kindness and respect build trust and rapport.

It’s in the words you choose and the way you treat people.

That’s where real influence starts.

Quick thought:

The dream isn’t the hard part.

The discipline is.

Anyone can imagine the outcome.

Few commit to the inputs.

Big results are built quietly.

Early mornings.
Tight standards.
Consistent reps.

And humility?

That’s the anchor.

It keeps you learning.
It keeps you improving.
It keeps you coachable.

Ego stalls growth.

Humility accelerates it.

Dream big.

But work in silence.

Image credit: Daily__wisdom_ on Twitter/X

Most ads fail for one simple reason:

They focus on the product instead of the person.

Great copywriting flips that.

It’s not about sounding clever.
It’s about making people feel understood.

Here are a few timeless copywriting principles that still drive results today:

1️⃣ Sell what people want. Deliver what they need.
People buy the promise first.
But they stay for the real value.

2️⃣ Features tell. Stories sell. Emotion closes.
Listing features informs people.
Stories help them see themselves using it.

3️⃣ Every word should connect to the customer’s problem.
Your product isn’t the hero.
Your customer is.

4️⃣ Good copy pulls, it doesn’t push.
Curiosity is one of the most powerful marketing tools.
Make people want to keep reading.

5️⃣ Your CTA should feel like a reward.
Instead of: “Submit form.”
Try: “Get your free strategy.”

6️⃣ People don’t read ads.
They read what interests them.
Your job is to make the message about them.

There are also proven frameworks that simplify writing:

• AIDA – Attention → Interest → Desire → Action
• PAS – Problem → Agitate → Solution
• FAB – Features → Advantages → Benefits
• 4Cs – Clear, Concise, Compelling, Credible

You don’t need to reinvent marketing.

You just need to understand how people think and decide.

Because the best copy doesn’t feel like marketing.

It feels like someone finally understood your problem.

👉 Which copywriting framework do you use most often?

Most people treat Claude like a writing partner.

I’ve started treating it like a proposal team.

Once Gamma is connected, you can build full presentations without leaving the conversation.

Here’s the flow I’m running:
• connect Gamma
• connect Gmail
• connect Notion

Then prompt:

“Pull the discovery call. Grab the project brief. Create a campaign proposal.”

Claude finds the context.

Gamma outputs the deck.

Budget, milestones, deliverables. All there.

If I refine the strategy in chat, the slides will evolve as well.

No copy-pasting.
No version chaos.
No losing momentum between idea and output.

One more thing that makes a big difference:

Set up your brand style in Gamma and tell Claude to use it.

Now, everything generated is already client-ready.

This is what AI should feel like.
You think, it builds.

Give Gamma a spin inside Claude. 

https://lnkd.in/eUJ-Skh3

Brand partnership • Top Ecommerce Email Marketer | $200M+ Generated via Email

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