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'm over 40. I still play on a travel basketball team. But not for nostalgia. It's survival.

Running a business means carrying stress you can't physically release.

You can't outwork a client who ghosts you. You can't fight a bad quarter. The competitive energy builds up... and you just absorb it.

For 16 years, I've needed somewhere to put that pressure.

The basketball court is mine.

After my hardest days, I lace up and forget everything else. I have to. When someone's driving to the basket, I can't think about the deal that fell through or the hire who didn't work out.

The game forces me into the present moment. Nothing else exists.

Win or lose, my company is fine the next morning.

That mental separation is the point.

Exercise alone won't do this. Running doesn't reset my brain the same way. But real competition, with real stakes and real opponents, flips a switch.

The buildup releases. Perspective returns.

Every founder I know who's lasted 15+ years has something like this. A place where competitive energy goes and business stress can't follow.

Find yours.

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 been reading r/Entrepreneur all month. The burnout is relentless.

Founders doing everything right. Exercise. Sleep. Healthy eating. Still completely exhausted.

One CEO just closed a funding round and doubled their team. Should feel great. Instead, lower than ever.

Another said they can't afford extended time away. Too much to do.

2026 is starting heavy.

The common thread: isolation.

Carrying the weight of employees' mortgages. Investors' expectations. Making decisions that affect everyone while having no one to process it with.

I know this spiral. I've been running The Good for 16 years.

Working less didn't help me. Optimizing my morning routine didn't either. Finding people who actually understand the weight did.

Entrepreneurs' Organization. Smaller mastermind groups and forums. People who've faced the same decisions and will tell me when I'm being an idiot.

Not for networking. Not for referrals. For reality checks when I've been too deep in my own head for too long.

The founders burning out aren't weak. They're just alone.

If that's you right now, find your people. It's the best investment you'll make this year.

Trevor Lawrence failed spectacularly. But still scored a touchdown.

Watch the play.

He stumbles. Crashes to the turf. Gets back up. Runs it into the end zone.

That's optimization in seven seconds.

Your biggest wins hide behind your worst failures.

Failure is the engine of optimization. Yet most companies treat it like a disease. They punish mistakes. Hide poor results. Celebrate only wins.

They're optimizing for the wrong metric.

Every failed test reveals what customers actually want. Not what we assumed they wanted.

Jeff Bezos put it simply: "Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day."

Research confirms less than 50% of experiments at Amazon, Microsoft, and similar companies improve the metrics they're designed to improve.

Most experiments fail. Even at the best companies.

The difference is they don't treat failure as defeat. They treat it as data.

Google cancels most new products. Netflix tests hundreds of features you'll never see. Booking.com runs over 1,000 experiments at any given moment.

They fail fast, learn faster, and win biggest.

The magic happens when you systematize failure.

Make it cheap. Make it frequent. Make it expected.

Run that risky play. Test boldly. Document everything.

Because the only real failure is never running the experiment at all.

Claude has made half of my authority playbook worthless.

I've spent 16+ years building credibility as an entrepreneur. Published 3 books. Spoke at conferences. Built a content engine.

Half of those signals mean nothing now.

Books? Anyone can have AI write one in a weekend.

Conference keynotes? The audience can ask Claude the same questions afterward and get a more detailed answer.

Thought leadership content? We're all drowning in it.

The old authority formula (credentials + content = trust) is breaking.

But here's what I've noticed still works:

Original frameworks. The thinking you've done that nobody else has.

Specific results. Numbers from real work, not just case studies, with specifics on how you got there.

Relationships built over years. The people who've seen you perform.

Decision-making under uncertainty. AI can synthesize information. It can't (yet) make the final call.

The entrepreneurs building real authority in 2026 aren't collecting credentials.

They're demonstrating judgment.

I'm considering writing another book. Not for the "author" credential.

For the thinking it forces me to do. For the frameworks that come out of it. For the conversations it starts.

The credential is worthless. But the process... that is still invaluable.

You can improve conversion rate while making customers hate you.

I've seen it happen.

The dashboard showed green. Time on site up. Funnel flowing. Revenue growing.

But support tickets told a different story.

Customers weren't happy. They were confused. The extra time on site was people hunting for answers they couldn't find.

Analytics can't see suffering. But AI can scale the search.

So, use AI to cluster your qualitative data.

Feed it support tickets, on-site search queries, call transcripts, negative reviews.

Look for repeated phrases that predict churn:

"I thought it would..."
"I can't find..."
"Why is it asking for..."
"I already entered that..."

These patterns reveal friction your funnel metrics hide completely.

If your team only reviews numbers, you'll keep shipping silent damage.

Here's a prompt you can copy to get started:

"Analyze these [500] support tickets. Group them by common user frustration themes. For each theme, provide: 1) the specific phrases users repeat, 2) estimated frequency, 3) which part of the product/journey it relates to. Rank by potential business impact."

Paste your data. See what your dashboard can't show you.

I found a client's bestseller buried in a 47 item dropdown. But it drove 90% of their sales.

This is choice overload in action.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz proved that too many options paralyze decisions. When faced with overwhelming choices, customers don't choose better. They choose nothing.

Our client had exactly this problem.

Their "Shop" dropdown listed dozens of products with no hierarchy. Just an alphabetical wall of text.

Their flagship product sat somewhere in the middle. Invisible.

The serial positioning effect explains why this matters. We remember the first and last items in any list. Everything in the middle blurs together.

So we restructured their navigation.

Core products moved to the first and last positions. Secondary items organized by customer intent, not internal categories.

Result: $1.4 million in additional annual revenue.

Same products, same traffic, and same checkout.

The only change was removing a psychological barrier customers couldn't articulate.

Your customers make 35,000 decisions daily. By the time they reach your site, they're already exhausted.

The fix is simpler than you think:

Limit top-level nav to 7 items (the brain's processing limit).
Put your most important items first and last. 
Structure around customer goals, not internal departments.

Don't ask them to work harder. Guide them to what they need.

I poured 15 years of hard-earned lessons into Behind The Click. None of them were "the big idea."

First-time authors think they need one transformative insight to justify a book.

That's backwards.

A book isn't one idea explained at length. It's dozens of smaller ideas organized into a coherent argument.

Behind The Click has 4 main sections: Discovery, Information-Gathering, Decision-Making, and Post-Purchase.

Each section answers different questions customers ask along their journey. Each question required its own chapter of tactics and psychology.

That's not one big idea. That's a system of interconnected insights.

Here's the test I use: if you can explain your expertise in one conversation, you don't have a book yet. If explaining it takes 20 different conversations, you do.

My first book started as one simple belief: companies should sell, not just market. That belief required exploring awareness strategies, sales psychology, digital journeys, and conversion principles.

One belief. Dozens of supporting ideas.

Your "big idea" isn't a book.

It's the thesis that ties your smaller ideas together.

Our best product ideas never came from market research.

They came from watching clients struggle with the same problem over and over.

At The Good, we've run thousands of customer interviews across 16+ years. The analysis was always valuable. The video editing to create highlight reels was always... painful.

Researchers spending entire afternoons hunting through footage to find one quote. And, we heard the same complaint from internal teams at client after client.

So our team built Clipses. Interview footage to highlight reels in minutes, not hours.

This is how The Good Ventures portfolio works. UserInput, CommerceCritiques, now Clipses. All born from patterns we saw repeatedly in client work.

Consultants have an unfair advantage for building products.

You see problems dozens of times across different industries, team sizes, and budgets. That pattern recognition is more valuable than surveys or focus groups.

You're not guessing what people need. You're watching them struggle with it in real time.

If you've seen the same frustration 10+ times across different clients, pay attention.

That's a product signal hiding in plain sight.

Time is money, but in SaaS, it's also the key to success.

Over half of downloaded apps are uninstalled within 30 days. Why? Users aren't experiencing value quickly enough.

Accelerating time-to-value isn't just about faster onboarding. It's about creating those "Aha!" moments that turn casual users into loyal customers.

The best SaaS companies are mastering this art through personalized experiences, optimized registration processes, and strategic quick wins.

They're not just building products. They're crafting journeys that lead users to value faster than ever before.

Are you still making users wait to see your product's true potential?

Learn how to speed up your time-to-value and reduce churn in our latest article. Your users (and your bottom line) will thank you.

Click through to discover the strategies that are transforming user experiences and driving SaaS success.

View newsletter: Digital Journey Insights

Learn how strategies like optimizing onboarding, personalizing the user experience, and implementing quick wins can improve SaaS product time-to-value

Open article: Accelerating Time-to-Value: How SaaS Products Get Users to ‘Aha!’ Moments Faster by Jon MacDonald • 8 min read

Accelerating Time-to-Value: How SaaS Products Get Users to ‘Aha!’ Moments Faster

Most SaaS leaders get trial cancellations wrong.

They think users leave because the product isn't good enough. So they add more features. Build more capabilities. Polish the UI.

But the data tells a different story.

Users rarely cancel because your product lacks value. They cancel because they didn't experience that value quickly enough, clearly enough, or in a way that made sense for their specific needs.

The distinction matters more than you think. Because if you're solving the wrong problem, no amount of product development will move your conversion rate.

Here's what actually reduces trial cancellations: systematic optimization of the experience itself.

Our latest article breaks down the five-step framework we use to audit trial experiences and identify exactly where users encounter friction.

Learn about trial optimization and get the five-step audit framework to optimize your SaaS free-trial experience, reduce cancellations, and improve co

Open article: How Do You Reduce Cancellations During SaaS Free Trials? by Jon MacDonald • 11 min read

How Do You Reduce Cancellations During SaaS Free Trials?

Co-Founder @Supergrow.ai | Helping every day creators level up on LinkedIn

B2B marketing is changing fast.

Buyers don’t trust cold emails or ad banners. They trust people.

Teammates. Creators. Communities.

At Supergrow, we’re building for that shift, helping B2B brands scale people-first GTM motions like social selling and employee advocacy through content, engagement, and streamlined workflows.

Our journey started with helping individuals grow their personal brand on LinkedIn.

Now, we’re expanding that foundation to support in-house teams and marketing orgs that want to turn their people into distribution engines.

If you’re building a new-age GTM stack—or exploring how trust, advocacy, and visibility intersect—let’s connect.

Always happy to jam on B2B distribution, product-led storytelling, or what’s next in marketing.

Utsav Patel

A lot is happening at Supergrow right now.

1. Two team members joined us recently. One on the dev team and another on the growth team.

2. We started a pilot with a company valued at $500M+.

3. We have a discovery call with one of the biggest AI companies next week.

4. We're deep into building Supergrow 2.0.

5. And we're actively hiring for two roles: Backend Engineer and Customer Success.

Six months ago, it was just Deven and me figuring things out.

Now there's a momentum that's hard to describe.

I'm genuinely excited after a while.

Not the "post it for LinkedIn" kind of excited. The kind where you wake up and actually want to get to work.

We've been building quietly for a while. But 2026 feels like our year.

Let's see where this goes.

🤞

Building Supergrow - the modern platform that helps teams create, collaborate, and publish on LinkedIn

Three years ago, I was hoping we'd get to 100 customers someday.

Today, Supergrow serves over 1000.

But the number isn't the story.

Last week, a customer sent me a message.

A marketing head said her team went from zero presence to genuinely enjoying LinkedIn.

These aren't massive stories.

When we started, I didn't know if anyone would pay for what we were building.

I remember our first customer paying us $15. I couldn't sleep that night.

Now there are a thousand of them.

I still find that hard to believe some days.

To everyone who's using Supergrow, thank you.

The milestone is nice. But watching you actually get results from this? That's the real thing.

We were crunching some numbers last month and found that 82% of our customers are outside India.

I had to check twice.

Deven and I are both based in India. No US presence. No paid ads targeting specific regions.

And yet most of our revenue comes from the US, UK, and Europe.

I've been thinking about why.

We never made a conscious decision to "go global." We just built in English and started sharing what we were learning on LinkedIn.

Most of our audience here is global. So the people who found us were global too.

I don't have a grand insight here.

But it's a quiet reminder that geography matters less than it used to.

If you're solving a real problem and you're visible, people find you.

Even from the other side of the world.

Who is the Adam Mosseri of LinkedIn?

In case you don't know who Adam Mosseri is, he is the head of Instagram. He regularly posts updates about the platform, explains how the algorithm works, and answers creator questions.

Drop a name if you know.

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ColdIQ grew to $6M ARR with a 12-person team. LinkedIn is their number one acquisition channel.

I've been watching them, and here is how they do it.

They don't just rely on Michel, the CEO, to post. They get the whole team involved.

It's not just marketing. It's a group of experts sharing their actual work:

- Millie shows how she runs LinkedIn strategy.
- Monika shows how she rewrites cold emails.
- Dan shows how he builds Clay workflows.

The results are hard to ignore. The team have 30M+ organic views combined.

It's a win-win.

- For the team: They build a personal brand they own forever.
- For the company: They get qualified leads and inbound every day.

Most companies ask their team to share a company post. ColdIQ lets their team build their own authority.

Michel even set a goal: every employee should hit 10,000 followers.

They run internal challenges. They offer cash bonuses for consistent posting.

They track it like a metric that matters. Because it does.

I'm watching them prove that team-led content is a massive shift.

It's my birthday today.

The mass-sent LinkedIn "Happy Birthday!" messages have started rolling in.

Let's see how many I get before I finish my morning coffee.

I've been hiring for a customer success role for the past few weeks.

Scouting. Filtering. Interviews. Follow-ups.

All while doing everything else.

One thing I've realised: hiring alone is brutal.

There's no one to gut-check your read on a candidate. No one to split the screening with.

You just sit with the decision.

And every hour you spend on hiring is an hour not spent on product, customers, or growth.

I've looked at hundreds of profiles by now. Done more interviews than I can count. And I'm still not done.

The worst part isn't the volume. It's the mental switching.

One minute you're evaluating someone's communication skills. The next you're back to a customer ticket. Then a demo. Then back to hiring.

Your brain never gets to settle.

I don't have advice here. Just saying it out loud.

If you're a solo founder or small team doing your own hiring right now, I see you.

It's a lot.

If you have 10+ people on your team, you have an unfair advantage.

Most companies don't use it.

Companies post from company pages. They run ads. They write blog posts.

All of it comes from one voice: the brand.

Meanwhile, they have 10, 20, or 50 people who could be talking & sharing on LinkedIn.

And most of them aren't.

Every person on your team has a network. Former colleagues. Industry connections. People who trust them personally.

When your head of marketing shares something, their network pays attention in a way they never would to a company post.

You already have the people. You already have the expertise. You just haven't activated it.

I know why teams don't do this. The same blockers come up every time:

- our team doesn't have time.
- they're not comfortable writing.
- they are not motivated

These are real problems. But they're solvable.

Please understand that people don't just trust company pages anymore. 

They trust people.

They follow executives. They look up employees on LinkedIn before a call.

If your team is silent, you're invisible in those moments.

The B2B teams growing fastest right now aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets.

They're the ones with the most visible people.

Your team is your distribution advantage. Most companies just don't realize it yet.

We're not letting people sign up for Supergrow 2.0 directly.

There's a waitlist. Everyone gets a call with us first.

This sounds like a bad SaaS strategy. Remove friction. Get people in fast. Let them self-serve.

But we have specific reasons.

1. We're entering a new market

Supergrow 2.0 serves B2B teams.

Different audience. Different workflows. Different problems.

We need to validate what we've built with the people who'll use it. A call helps us do that.

2. We need to understand their current workflows

We can't build the right product without knowing how teams create content today.

Who writes it? Who approves it? Where does it break down?

Every conversation teaches us something we wouldn't have learned from usage data alone.

3. We're applying learnings directly to the product

These early conversations aren't just research. They're shaping what we build next.

Three people mentioned the same workflow issue last week. We're now prioritizing a feature to solve it.

4. We want to stay close to initial users

The first 50 teams are helping us build this. We want to know them.

Not just their usage data. Their actual experience.

5. We're filtering for the right fit

Not everyone should use Supergrow 2.0 right now.

If a solo creator is experimenting with LinkedIn, 2.0 is not for them.

If you're a B2B team trying to activate multiple experts, we might be exactly what you need.

The waitlist helps us find those teams.

I don't know if this is the right call

Maybe we're being too cautious. Maybe we should just open it up and see what happens.

But right now, talking to every person before they use the product feels like the right trade-off.

We're learning fast. And we're building for the teams who actually need what we're making.

I'll share what we learn.

I was looking at our signup data recently and noticed something interesting.

Out of all the LLMs referring users to Supergrow, ChatGPT is consistently leading.

Not by a small margin. It's been ahead of Gemini and Claude every single month.

I don't fully understand why ChatGPT is so far ahead. 

Maybe more people use it. Maybe it recommends us more often. I honestly don't know.

But it's clear that people are using LLMs to discover and evaluate tools now. This wasn't a channel I ever planned for.

I'm curious if others are seeing this too.

If you're a founder or work in growth, is ChatGPT leading your LLM referrals as well? Or are you seeing a different pattern?

Would love to hear what you're seeing.

One pattern I keep seeing with teams winning on LinkedIn: 

They make posting a game.

They run leaderboards, set up challenges, and offer small rewards for consistency.

ColdIQ, Heyreach, Subjectai, and many other companies are doing it successfully.

But most of them track it manually. Someone maintains a spreadsheet, sends Slack reminders, and checks who posted that week.

It works, but it's a lot of effort to maintain.

So we built it into Supergrow.

We call it 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬.

Teams can now run internal challenges for their members. They can set a goal, track progress on a leaderboard, and reward the ones who show up consistently.

It's simple, but it solves a real problem.

Most employees don't post because there's no structure. No visibility. No motivation.

Challenges gives them a reason to start.

If you're running a team and want your people to be more active on LinkedIn, this might help.

It's live now. DM me and I'll show you how it works.

There is a lot of hate going around Hootsuite right now because of their recent partnership.

I'm not here to comment on the politics of it.

But my marketing mind saw this as an opportunity.

When a market leader faces backlash, people actively look for alternatives. They search on Google. They ask on LinkedIn. They check Reddit.

If you're a social media management tool, this is the time to:

- Create comparison content (Hootsuite alternatives, why we're different)
- Run targeted ads to Hootsuite's audience
- Show up in conversations where people are venting
- Make switching easy with migration guides or free trials

I'm not saying you should trash them. 

But you should be visible when people are looking to move.

The best time to capture market share is when your competitor gives you a reason to.

You check your LinkedIn analytics. You see the numbers. Then what?

I've seen so many creators do this and still have no idea what's working.

When Deven and I were discussing analytics for Supergrow, we both agreed on one thing:
- graphs and numbers alone are not enough.

They look nice. But they barely tell you anything.

You end up crunching numbers yourself, trying to find patterns.

Sometimes you spot something useful. Most times you miss it.

We wanted to change that.

Last week we released a weekly report. And it's built differently.

It doesn't just show you data. It tells you what the data means. What's working. What's not. And what to do next.

Here's what you get inside:

- A personalised content idea based on your performance
-Your best post from last week and why it worked
- Your worst post from last week and why it didn't
- Post-level analysis for each post with what to do, what to avoid, and your next idea

That last one is my favorite. It turns every post into a learning.

And this is just v1 of what we've envisioned.

If you're a Supergrow user, I'd love for you to try it out. Let me know what you think.

Every time I do a demo, one question always comes up.

"Will my reach go down if I use Supergrow to schedule posts?"

I hear it almost every call. And I get it.

There's a lot of fear around this. 

People have heard stories about tools getting their accounts restricted. 

Or posts getting buried because they weren't published natively.

Here's what I tell them:

- Supergrow uses LinkedIn's official APIs. We follow their terms of service completely. There's no scraping. No workarounds. No grey areas. 

Your reach doesn't drop if you schedule through us.

But I've realized that just saying this isn't always enough. The fear runs deep.

So I want to ask two groups here.

1. If you're a user or potential user: What would actually make you believe this? What kind of proof or explanation would clear the doubt for you?

2. If you're in marketing or growth: How would you communicate this? What's worked for you when addressing a fear-based objection like this?

I'm genuinely looking for ideas.

Please drop your thoughts. I'm reading everything.

taplio

The Battle

Jon MacDonald

Utsav Patel

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taplio

The Battle

Jon MacDonald

Utsav Patel

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jon MacDonald's LinkedIn Performance

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