Ramli John

Author of Product-Led Onboarding (+30K copies sold) | First Round Fast Track Mentor | Content Director at Appcues.

⭐️ Follow me for helpful tips to onboard, delight, and keep your customers coming back to your product.
📔 Author of Amazon #1 bestselling book "Product-Led Onboarding." 👉 𝙎𝙀𝘼𝙉 𝙀𝙇𝙇𝙄𝙎, Founder of GrowthHackers.com: "Product-Led Onboarding is 𝐦𝐮𝐬𝐭-𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 embarking on the critical activity of improving their user onboarding." 


⚡️ I use my multi-disciplinary skills in marketing, design, and software development to help product-led SaaS companies analyze their whole customer's journey and funnel to identify growth opportunities to 2-3X their MRR. 

Often, that means designing and implementing experiments to increase activation rate (trial-to-paid or free-to-paid conversions), decrease churn rate, or increase average revenue per user (ARPU)

If you asked my friends and colleagues how they would describe me, they'd say I'm resourceful, proactive, and entrepreneurial

►► CONTACT INFO
▷ Send a connection request
▷ Write me a note at ramli [at] ramlijohn.com

Founder

A weekly show and newsletter for marketers looking to level up their marketing and career. I interview world-class marketers to uncover the secrets, strategies, and frameworks behind their wins. In each episode, guests reveal three things:  (1) a marketing power-up,  (2) a real-world example of that in action, and (3) a power-up that’s helped them take their career to the next level.

Ramli "RJ" John

When your product team skips user research (and just builds fast with AI)... 🤡


AI lets you ship in days, not weeks. But without user research, speed just gets you to the wrong place faster.

A product leader was about to ship a feature last week. AI-assisted code. Cloud deployment ready. Built in 3 days.

Then someone from customer success flagged something: "This solves a problem our users stopped complaining about 6 months ago."

One conversation. Saved weeks of wasted effort.

We can build faster than ever. AI tools, cloud code, vibe coding—the speed is real.

But speed without direction is just efficient wandering.

The real question isn't "Can we ship this?"

It's "Should we?"

That's where user research becomes non-negotiable.

Here are 5 ways to quickly validate ideas before you ship:

1. Run a 5-second test on your concept (does it communicate what you think it does?)
2. Send a quick survey to your target segment (10 questions max)
3. Do 3-5 unmoderated usability tests on a prototype
4. Interview 5 users who match your ICP (even 15-min calls work)
5. Card sort your information architecture before building navigation

None of these take weeks. Most can be done in days.

Tools like Lyssna make this even faster. You can recruit from 690K+ vetted participants, run moderated or unmoderated tests, and get results before your sprint ends.

Speed is a competitive advantage.

But only when you're building the right thing.

What's your go-to method for quick validation?

PS. Save this for the next time you're tempted to ship something fast without validating it first. Future you will thank you.

Join the AI Product Leaders Summit on 3/24 at PLSummit.ai. Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

The AI Product Leaders Summit is back on 3/24 with 15 speakers. 500+ product leaders already registered. Join free: https://lnkd.in/gWfqMNZN

Every speaker is actively building AI products or leading teams through AI transformation right now. No theory. Just what's actually working (and what flopped).

The lineup:

→ Deepti Pradeep  and her team (Adobe) on how Photoshop got 100k+ of users in 30 days by launching inside ChatGPT
→ Jacob Bank (Relay.app, ex-Google Gmail/Calendar) on the 3 AI agents every product leader should "hire"
→ Mickey Alon (Foldspace AI) on Agent-Led Growth—when your product does the work for users
→ Christine Itwaru & Katy Nardozzi (Userflow) on dogfooding their way to better product decisions
→ Joe Formica (Lyssna) on where AI misleads product decisions (and how to avoid it)

Plus two expert panels:

→ Angela Sze (Sr. Director of Product at Fullstory), Shannon Vettes (CEO/CPO at Usersnap), Lauren Schuman (VP of Product Growth at Close) on shipping AI features without losing customer trust
→ Betsy Shaak (VP Product Voxpopme), Greg Leach (Sr. Director at 7shifts), Partho Ghosh (VP Product @ Uberall), and Priyanka Sahni (Product Lead at Meta) on how product teams are using AI to cut the busywork

Here's what you'll walk away with:

1. How Adobe turned ChatGPT into a growth channel (and whether you should too)
2. Which AI agents actually save PMs time vs. pure hype
3. How to ship AI features without confusing users or breaking trust
4. Where AI creates blind spots in product decisions

March 24th. 10 AM - 3:30 PM ET. Virtual. Free.

Register for free: https://lnkd.in/gWfqMNZN

What's the biggest challenge you're facing with AI products right now?

PS. Tag a product leader who needs to see this. They'll thank you for it. 😊

It's been 2 years since I've had a podcast show. Tomorrow, that changes! Product Leaders Lab by Delight Path drops at 8 am ET. 🎉


I waited because I didn't want another show. I wanted something that actually aligned with what I'm building—a media and community brand for product leaders.

The first episode is "The AI Adoption Pressure."

Your team is scrolling LinkedIn, seeing posts about AI replacing jobs. Leadership is pushing hard on adoption. Everyone's overwhelmed. No one knows where to start.

Two product leaders faced this exact moment. Same pressure. Completely different approaches.

Greg Leach (Sr. Director/GM of Expansion Revenue at 7shifts) built a cross-functional AI committee. Volunteers from every department. Monthly demos drawing 100+ people. Department budgets for experimentation. Bottom-up learning across the entire company.

Joseph King (Sr. Director of Product at Crucial Learning) took a different path. His team invested in sending four leaders to Kellogg for AI certification. Frameworks first. Leadership alignment before company-wide rollout. Top-down, methodical approach.

Both worked. But for very different reasons.

This episode breaks down what each leader did, why they chose their approach, and what you can learn from both paths.

No generic advice. Just real decisions, real trade-offs, and real outcomes.

🎧 Search "Product Leaders Lab" on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Tomorrow. 8 am ET. See you there!

The Product Leaders Lab podcast show drops 2/24. 🎉 I can't wait to share real stories from product leaders. Here's a sneak peek at what's coming in Season 1:

→ Greg Leach (Sr. Director of Expansion Revenue @ 7shifts) - How creating an AI adoption committee with 15% of his company reduced automation tasks from hours to minutes—without hiring a single AI expert.

→ Michelle Green (Director of Product @ Cohley) - Why showing designs to customer success before they're "completely baked" saved her team from building the wrong AI feedback flow.

→ Christine Itwaru (VP of Product @ Userflow) - What happened when her "hands-off approach" to build trust led to the biggest launch failure of her career—and how she recovered.

→ Matt LeMay - How he recovered from a feature launch failure and how his team showed him grace.

→ Joseph King (Sr. Director of Product @ Crucial Learning) - How this product leader cut through the AI noise—turning curiosity into capability and education into strategic advantage.

→ David Pereira - Why stepping back from product decisions as a new leader felt like giving up control—until he realized his team was his product now.

→ Shannon Vettes (CPO @ Usersnap) - How she made the biggest bet of her career only 6 months into her leadership role with an AI feature that changed the trajectory of the company.

→ Netali Jakubovitz - How she created an entirely new role called "Prompt Ops" to scale AI across her platform without drowning her team.

And many more. I'm still recording episodes for Season 1.

The Product Leaders Lab by Delight Path is not another interview show. Here's how it works:

One tough scenario. Two veteran product leaders who've lived it. Completely different approaches. Documentary-style editing (20-25 min, not 60+ min rambling).

If you're a VP, Director, or Head of Product with a defining leadership moment you want to share, DM me or tag them below. I'm looking for more guests!

Launching Tuesday, February 24, 2026. Stay tuned!

Building a community for product leaders (VP and Director-level). Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

Most product onboarding fails because of "click tax." More clicks = higher drop-off. AI can fix this. Here's how...


First, here's what the traditional flow could look like:
→ Click on Document Templates
→ Pick a template
→ Update the template
→ Save and send

4 steps. Each one adds cognitive load. In B2B, it's worse. You've got multiple personas with different expertise, different outcomes they're chasing.

One-size-fits-all education doesn't work.

AI can fix this. The shift: Don't educate → generate.

Instead of teaching users how to navigate your platform, help them generate the outcome directly.

Anvil did this. Now users just describe what they need: "Create a template for a B2B SaaS purchase agreement."

Then they watch it get built. Custom-made for them.

From 4 steps to 2. From education to generation.

Tools like Foldspace AI are making this possible without custom code. Your team doesn't have to build an agentic experience from scratch.

This is where activation is headed. Less hand-holding. More instant value.

How are you using AI to reduce click tax in your product?

Product Leaders Lab show drops next week. And honestly? It's never been harder to be a product leader.

The pressure to ship AI features. The endless stakeholder alignment. The decisions that keep you up at night.

Product Leaders Lab by Delight Path is where real product leaders share how they handled their toughest moments.

The decisions.
The tradeoffs.
The consequences.

Featuring stories from leaders at Google, Spotify, and more.

No theory. Just real leadership.

📅 First episode drops February 24

🎧 Follow & subscribe:
YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g2FsrjUb
Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gWwS-Rv8
Apple: https://lnkd.in/gAzQJb7Q

See you there.

Building a peer community for product leaders (VP and Director-level). Founder @ Delight Path. 2x best-selling author. New book “Eureka” now available. Author of “Product-Led Onboarding” (+40K copies sold).

Episode 1 of Product Leaders Lab is officially LIVE. 🎉 Leadership is pushing AI. Your product team is overwhelmed. They're watching what you do next. What do you do? 

Two product leaders faced this exact moment. Same pressure. Completely different solutions.

Greg Leach (7shifts) built a cross-functional AI committee. Volunteers from every department. Monthly demos drawing 100+ people.

Joseph King (Crucial Learning) was one of four leaders from his company who joined the Kellogg School of Management's AI certification. Frameworks first. Leadership alignment before rollout.

Bottom-up vs. top-down. Both worked. But for very different reasons.

This episode breaks down what they did, why they chose their approach, and what you can learn from both paths.

🎧 Search "Product Leaders Lab by Delight Path" on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

💬 Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments.
🔁 Share this with a product leader feeling the AI pressure.

PS. Thank you to the founding partners of the Product Leaders Lab: Userflow, Lyssna, and Foldspace AI. They've made this possible and whole 10-episode season possible.

PMs have been waiting on devs to build prototypes for decades. That's changing with Claude Code. So, I'm hosting a free workshop about it.

Jerome Valdez (Head of Product Design at Plotly, 20+ years experience) will share his process for building AI prototypes with Claude Code and Cursor—the tools he uses daily to ship working prototypes in hours, not weeks.

In this session, product managers will learn how to:

→ Validate ideas before committing engineering resources
→ Test concepts with users and stakeholders faster
→ Stop waiting for dev capacity to explore new directions

Jerome's tested Replit, Bolt, Lovable, Gemini, Windsurf, and more. He'll show you which tools actually work (and which don't).

This isn't theory. It's a live demo of his real workflow.

📅 Thu, Feb 26, 2026
🕛 12:00 PM EST (1 hour)
💻 Virtual (Zoom)
💰 Free

239+ product folks have already signed up.

Sign up for free here: https://lnkd.in/g5dGd3qB

Can't make it live? Register anyway, and I'll send the recording. 

But, you'll miss the live demo and Q&A.

See ya there!

A product leader recently told me their team spent 6 hours a week just looking at dashboards. Not fixing things. Not improving onboarding. Just checking metrics to see if something broke.

"We have all this data," she said. "But we're always reacting, never ahead of it."

This tracks with what I'm seeing across product teams.
You've got analytics. You've got dashboards. You've got behavior data.

But you're still playing detective, manually hunting for what changed, why it matters, and where to fix it.

So, when I saw FlowAI Insights by Userflow, it caught my attention.

It flips the monitoring model. Instead of you watching dashboards, it watches your flows and flags what needs attention.

Drops in completion rates. The exact step causing friction. Only the high-impact stuff.

Then it links directly to where you fix it.

The part I keep thinking about: teams are catching issues before users complain. Spikes in errors, step drop-offs—the silent killers that usually take weeks to surface.

Less time analyzing. More time improving.

Honestly, this feels like where product ops is headed. Proactive instead of reactive.

Are you spending more time monitoring than actually fixing things?

If you want to check it out: https://lnkd.in/g7msgNFg

ChatGPT isn't just a tool anymore; it's a growth channel. It's how Adobe got 100K+ new users in 30 days. They're sharing exactly how they did it...


Most product leaders are asking: "How do we add AI to our product?"

Adobe asked a different question: "How do we get our product INTO AI platforms?"

That reframe led to one of their boldest growth bets.

They launched Photoshop inside ChatGPT. Six weeks. Ungated. No login required.

Here's the shift that matters:

Instead of treating AI as a feature to bolt on, Adobe treated AI platforms as the new top of funnel.

Think about it:

→ Millions of people already inside ChatGPT daily
→ Zero friction to try Photoshop (no login, no paywall)
→ Users discover Adobe where they already are

This isn't about adding AI to your product anymore.

It's about getting your product in front of AI users.

Want to hear the full story?

Deepti Pradeep (Sr. Director of Product Management, Growth at Adobe) is sharing the decision, the trade-offs, and what they learned—along with her team members Anthony Lewis (Principal PM) and Shalini Ahuja (Senior PM, Photoshop).

They're speaking at the AI Product Leaders Summit I'm hosting.

📅 Tuesday, March 24 | 10 AM - 3 PM ET
💻 Virtual. Free.

Register here: https://lnkd.in/gWfqMNZN

What AI platform could be YOUR distribution channel?

🚀 Only 3 days to go! The first episode of Product Leaders Lab drops this Thursday! 🎙️ Don’t miss it, follow us and turn on notifications so you’re ready!

#ProductLeadersLab #Countdown #ProductManagement #LeadershipJourney #TuneInThursday

AI isn't optional anymore. It's the future of your business. But forcing it with memos and hoping it'll stick? That’s a recipe for failure. 

Building an AI-ready culture starts with genuine support, not just mandates. What’s your biggest challenge with AI adoption? Drop your thoughts below.

🎥🎧 Stream the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts! 

#AITransformation #LeadershipTips #FutureOfWork #BusinessGrowth

Your biggest product launch just flopped. Do you protect your team or fix the product first? What do you do? Here's what Christine and Matt did...

Christine Itwaru (VP Product and Design at Userflow) knew two hours in. She immediately went into "mama bear" mode—told her PM to shut out Slack, took the heat herself, and shielded her team while they fixed it.

Matt LeMay (Product Advisor and Author) watched their Bitly relaunch get publicly destroyed. Roger Ebert posted about how terrible it was. People threatened to burn down their office! It took months before they could pivot.

One moved in hours. One struggled for months. Both eventually recovered.

This episode breaks down:
→ How to protect your team when everything's on fire
→ Why setting success criteria BEFORE launch saves you from rationalizing failure
→ When to fix fast vs. when a full pivot is the only path forward

🎧 Stream the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
Search "Product Leaders Lab by Delight Path."

💬 What's the most common reason you've seen product launches fail? 
Drop it in the comments.

🔁 Share this with a product leader who's been through launch hell.

—

Thank you to our partners for supporting the show:

🏆 Userflow: Guide users, answer questions in the moment, and continuously improve product adoption—all without writing code.
🙋‍♀️ Lyssna: Create research studies, recruit the right participants, and gather feedback to shape products users truly love
🤖 Foldspace AI: The AI Operator that turns your SaaS AI-first in days. Their embedded agent understands your users' intent and executes it on their behalf. 

—

My favorite quote from this episode: "Someone's threatening to come to our office and burn it down. Should we delete that or keep it?" — Matt

People rush to add ChatGPT features or AI tools, expecting instant wins. But without a clear strategy, those features often flop after months of effort.

What's your biggest concern with AI adoption right now?

🎥🎧 Stream the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts!

#AIstrategy #ProductGrowth #BusinessInnovation #TechTips

Two years ago, we thought AI would take our jobs. Turns out, standing still is what actually will.

I talked to Joseph King, Sr. Director of Product at Crucial Learning, about how his team went from fear to treating AI as a collaborator.

But here's the part that stuck with me:

His company had an AI strategy. It just sat in a Slack channel nobody checked.

Teams didn't know the company's actual stance on AI. So they guessed. Or did nothing.

The fix wasn't complicated. Document it. Share it. Make it visible.

Most companies aren't failing because they lack an AI vision.

They're failing because nobody knows it exists.

Does your team actually know your company's AI stance? Or is it buried somewhere?

🎥🎧 Stream the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Search "Product Leaders Lab."

Meet Ramli John, the host shaping Product Leaders Lab and bringing product leadership to life! 🚀 Watch, engage, and leave a comment with your questions!

#ProductLeadersLab #MeetTheHost #DelightPath #LeadershipStories #ProductInsights

Elias Rubel

I used to think I didn’t have any specific skill, and sometimes I still feel like a total impostor. 

$10M+ in profit is a crazy number but the path has been all but smooth. 

Imagine losing $200k/mo (coming straight out of your bank account) for 6 months while you try to give your team stable pay in the face of a collapsing market. 

Imagine stumbling around in the dark, pretending to know what you’re doing while others rely on your direction. 

Building small businesses isn’t easy, which is why I’m building mine in the open. 

For all of you to see. 

The ups, the downs, the hardships and the wins. 

I hope you’ll join me for the journey.

I hope sharing this publicly sparks further inspiration and sheds light on what can be for many (myself included) one of the most wild rides of your life.  

Let’s build together. 

---------------------

Investor / LP:
- A16Z
- Accel Ventures
- Tribe Capital
- GTMFund
- Offline Ventures

Angel Investor:
- Endgame
- Northbeam
- Grain
- Folk

Marketing Advisor:
- Jasper.ai
- Dropbox
- Loom
- Productboard
- Grain
- TestBox
- G2

Note: I’m no longer actively advising or investing in startups.

Companies like Dropbox, Hopin, G2, Calm for Business, Loom, Productboard and many others rely on Matter Made to smash their yearly growth targets through best in class Go-To-Market programs.

Our work ranges from championing high velocity digital campaigns, to driving Account Based Marketing programs, to diving deep into persona driven messaging & positioning, to launching Product Led Growth Initiatives, to full funnel conversion rate optimization.

Our clients range from post-IPO enterprises, to fast growing scale-ups backed by Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, NEA, Redpoint, and just about every other big name in the valley.

www.mattermade.co

Eli Rubel

I only have 2 non-negotiables for my work life, 1 one of them sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud:

1. I live by my calendar, and only my calendar.
2. I must consistently push myself physically away from work.

The calendar one seems obvious, but the fitness one does not.

In the past 5 years, I’ve:

1. Trained for a pretty well known mountain biking race (Leadville 100 MTB).
2. Ran an ultra marathon (after picking up trail running for the first time 3 months prior)
3. Maintained a minimum 4x/week gym cadence (after being a gym-hater most of my life)

I didn't do these things because I wanted to every day. I did them because I know that putting my body through the wringer outside of work reminds me that it's possible to push through and do hard things; that I can do almost anything with a bit of patience and consistency.

I'm convinced I've been conditioned to effectively brush off otherwise-serious issues at work because I put myself through physically gruelling things outside of it.

I'm not a fitness coach, but if you're not challenging yourself physically on a week-to-week basis, I strongly recommend you start. The benefits will surely bleed into your work life.

Here’s me after rowing for the USA at the World Championships of Coastal Rowing in 2018, way back before I discovered my love for oreos and beer.

Fractional Finance Team for Agencies | Never Worry about Cashflow, Forecasting, or Messy Books Again.

Can I be honest? I don't care about leaving a legacy with my companies.

We run cool internet businesses, but we're not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.

We're agency owners helping other businesses with marketing, design, and operations.

The business world won't remember 99.99% of us.

Yet we spend energy chasing industry recognition, trying to be thought leaders, worrying about how we'll be remembered professionally.

Once this clicked for me in my late twenties, I realized all I want is:
1. Be a great dad
2. Be a great friend
3. Show up for people in my life

This mindset takes pressure off trying to be something you're not.

It focuses your energy on what you can actually control and builds real fulfillment instead of external validation.

To me, that's what real "legacy" is.

A joke I frequently tell friends: the best day of my career will be the day I permanently delete my LinkedIn and the rest of my digital business footprint.

Most agency owners pricing strategy is "charge what feels right and hope for the best."

Here's the thing: I used to do the same.

Matter Made started at $3,500/month retainers.

We peaked at $45,000/month.

The service barely changed. The price did.

But the framework I used to get there isn't complicated:

1.Wait until you're at full capacity (this is critical - you need leverage)
2.For your next 5 prospects, quote 25-50% higher than normal
3.Watch what happens

If 3 say yes → your prices are way too low, go again

If 2 say yes → you're in the sweet spot, hold there

If 1 or 0 say yes → you pushed too far, dial back 15%

The best part? You lose nothing by testing when you're at capacity. Worst case, you keep your existing clients at current rates.

Best case, you realize you've been leaving $200K+ in profit on the table annually.

Every agency owner goes through the same predictable cycle:

Year 1: "Holy shit, I can't believe people will pay me this much" 
Year 2: "Wait, I'm not making as much as I thought I would" 
Year 3: "Why does this feel harder than it should?"

Then they split into two groups.

Group 1 keeps doing the same thing and complaining about it. Blaming the market, the clients, the competition. Five years later they're still stuck at the same revenue with the same problems.

Group 2 gets obsessed with understanding why it's hard. They start tracking the right metrics. They build systems. They stop guessing and start knowing.

The difference isn't talent or luck or timing.

It's whether you treat your agency like a science experiment or like a job.

The ones who treat it like an experiment test everything. Pricing. Processes. Team structure. 
They measure what matters and iterate based on data.
The ones who treat it like a job just keep showing up and hoping things get better.
I've been in both groups at different points.
Being in Group 2 is what got me from $300K to $4M in profit.
Being in Group 1 is what cost me everything in 2022.
The choice is pretty obvious once you see it clearly.

Most agency owners celebrate when they land a big logo.

I used to do the same thing. Until I realized some of our "best" clients were quietly destroying our margins.

Here's what typically happens:

Leadership meeting. Someone says "Client X keeps asking for out-of-scope work, but they're an important logo. Let's just say yes to keep them happy."

Everyone nods. You kick the can down the road thinking maybe this is their last request.

It never is.

Without knowing gross margin by client, you're flying blind. That "important logo" might be operating at breakeven or even a loss once you factor in all the extra hours.

I've seen this play out dozens of times:

•Client seems happy
•Team is busy working on their stuff
•Revenue looks good on paper
•But profitability is bleeding out

The fix isn't complicated. Track time by client. Calculate actual cost to serve. Look at gross margin, not just revenue.

Then make the hard call: raise prices, set boundaries, or let them go.

The clients who push back on boundaries are usually the ones you can't afford to keep anyway.

Your most profitable clients? They respect scope. They value your expertise. They don't nickel and dime you.

Stop optimizing for logos. Start optimizing for profit per client.

Dec 2018: “If I can get this to $40,000 per month of profit, I'm happy”

May 2019: “Damn, that was quick…should we double the goal?”

January 2020: “We’re here…I guess we shoot for $100k/mo now?”

…

January 2022: “Holy sh*t, we did $4M of EBITDA last year”.

This was my actual thought process from when we started Matter Made to our best year.

Everyone tells you to stop and smell the roses when building a business, and I’m sure there’s some truth to that.

But really, there hasn't been a day in the company's history where we weren't chasing the next profit milestone, from $40k/mo → $400k/mo.

I'm not saying it's the healthiest thing in the world. I am saying it helped us grow.

Remember that next time people tell you not to get caught up in milestones.

I made the worst mistake an agency owner can make in 2022. 
The market crashed. Our client base essentially disappeared overnight.
And instead of reacting decisively, I hoped.
Hoped the market would bounce back quickly. Hoped clients would return to normal spending. 
Hoped tech would stabilize. 
Hope is not a strategy. 
But I used it like one for months. 
The real killer wasn't the market crash - that was out of my control. The killer was how I responded to it. 
I made three separate rounds of layoffs over several months. Each one extremely painful. Each one not quite deep enough. 
What I should have done: Made one deep cut immediately. Sized the team to match reality, not my optimistic projections. 
Instead, I kept thinking "maybe this is enough" and "things will turn around soon." 
Those incremental cuts were devastating for morale. The team that remained never knew if another round was coming. Everyone was looking over their shoulder. 
And financially? We burned through cash for months that we didn't need to burn through. 
One decisive cut would have been brutal in the moment but would have put us in a healthy position. 
Instead, I dragged out the pain for everyone involved. 
The lesson that haunts me: When market conditions change dramatically, you can't afford to wait and see. You have to act fast and cut deep enough the first time. 
Hoping things will get better is the most expensive mistake you can make.

You can't call yourself a seasoned agency owner if you haven't been through the Agency Cycle of Sadness at least once.

Revenue grows → agency looks profitable → sales drop → realize you're overstaffed → layoffs → sales pick back up → now you're understaffed → manic recruiting → team burns out → clients churn.

Then it repeats.

I've been through this cycle 6+ times building agencies past $1M in profit.

The cycle happens because most agency owners operate with three massive blind spots:

Blind spot 1: Limited clarity on what actually drives profit 

They know last month's revenue and have a rough sense of expenses. But they can't tell you if they should be hiring, firing, or holding steady right now.

Blind spot 2: Limited foresight into cash flow 

They're making decisions based on hope instead of forward-looking models. By the time they see the problem, it's too late to fix it.

Blind spot 3: No time to actually plan 
They're buried in operational tasks - chasing invoices, reconciling books, fighting fires. All their energy goes to reacting instead of planning ahead.

Breaking this cycle requires fixing all three blind spots.

That's exactly why we built Profit Labs the way we did.

If you're stuck in this cycle and want out, DM me.

I spent 4 years building an ecommerce business that barely broke even. 

KTM Twins. Invested $750K of my own money. Worked my ass off. Made about $100K per year in profit.

When I finally sold it, I walked away with basically what I put in. 

Most people would call that a failure. 

But here's what that "failure" taught me: 

Not every business model fits your strengths. I'm not a logistics guy. I'm not a supply chain guy. And trying to force it just burned years of my life. 

The lesson wasn't "don't try new things." It was "pay attention to what energizes you vs. what drains you." 

After Twins, I launched Matter Made. B2B services. No inventory. No shipping. Just people, value, and their time. 

That business has done over $9M in lifetime profit. 

Sometimes your biggest wins come right after you finally admit what doesn't work for you.

I sold my first business for $3M.

It was a complete failure.

It was a VC-backed SaaS company, which meant only a massive outcome was “acceptable”.

And the fact of the matter is, the business just didn’t work the way we thought it would.

In fact, just as we were getting ready to shut the business down, a strategic acquirer came knocking, and we made a deal that changed the course of my career.

A VC-backed SaaS company selling for $3M to a strategic acquirer doesn’t exactly make the front page of Tech Crunch (look mom, I’m a business guy now) or land you on TBPN these days.

But, it put $1.2M in my pocket after taxes in my early 20s, allowing me to try other businesses, eventually land on a love for the agency hustle, and positioned me to generate $10M more of profit in the years to come.

All that to say:

Success is relative. Don’t let someone else’s big year or big exit negate what you’ve achieved, after all, showing up to play the game in the first place is more than half the battle.

I track four key metrics every single week in my agencies.

1. Team utilization rate

What percentage of my team's available hours are actually billable? If this drops below 75% for three consecutive months, I know we need to cut. If it's above 95% for three consecutive months, we're headed for burnout and churn issues.

2. Bottom 25% of clients by gross margin

I don't care about my most profitable clients - they're fine. I need to know which clients are quietly bleeding my margins. These are the ones that need repricing, scope boundaries, or to be let go entirely.

3. Are we adhering to the 15/35 rule?

This is the golden ratio for healthy agency finances:
15% growth investments (sales, marketing, biz dev)
35% cost of sale (delivery team)
15% expenses (ops, overhead)
35% EBITDA (what you actually keep)

Obviously this adjusts based on whether you're prioritizing growth vs profitability. But if you're way off these benchmarks, something's broken.

4. Detailed client satisfaction ratings

I built SurveyGate.co specifically to solve this problem. It lets us see at a glance exactly how happy each stakeholder is at any given time, plus how we're doing at key milestones like onboarding and quarterly reviews. No more guessing if a client is about to churn.

Most agency owners can't answer these four questions without digging through spreadsheets for an hour.

At Profit Labs, every client gets a real-time agency scorecard that shows them exactly these metrics at any given moment. No digging. No guessing. Just clarity.

If you're flying blind on these numbers and want to see what's possible, DM me and I'll show you exactly what this looks like.

19 things I wish I did 10 years earlier as an agency owner trying to put more money in my pocket:

1. Stop positioning myself as the hero and instead pitch all of our work as a distinct team effort.

2. Work backwards from a net profit goal to design an agency that serves my needs instead of designing a more stressful job.

3. Build a financial model before making any hiring decisions instead of using back-of-the-napkin math and hoping for the best.

4. Start tracking time religiously from day one - I can't help anyone who won't take their business seriously enough to track time.

5. Take client churn less personally and treat it like a math problem instead of spending 5-7 days in a negative spiral every time.

6. Write down everything I did in a week, hour-by-hour, then delegate lowest priority tasks first and work my way up to higher priority ones.

7. Understand the difference between gross margin and net margin instead of fooling myself about profitability.

8. Set lofty goals that would force me to work harder rather than sleepwalking through 20% growth targets.

9. Focus on increasing prices and improving operations instead of wasting leadership time cutting $150/month expenses.

10. Build systems to get myself out of all client delivery so I could focus purely on strategic, high-leverage activities.

11. Put breakup clauses in all my contracts to prevent clients from treating us like disposable vendors.

12. Create a written customer journey map with internal milestones to keep service quality from degrading over time.

13. Require clients to fill out NPS and CSAT surveys at key milestones instead of waiting for problems to surface.

14. Price test methodically instead of pulling numbers out of thin air based on what clients said they were spending.

15. Build tiered pricing packages to capture clients before they need sophisticated services and grow them over time.

16. Focus on being really good at recruiting high-quality talent instead of settling for whoever was available.

17. Set up proper qualification questions on my booking forms to filter out red flag prospects before wasting time.

18. Build a dashboard I could log into daily to see exactly where my business stands instead of flying blind.

19. Apply pressure to managers to optimize operations rather than just throwing more bodies at capacity problems.

I'd love for you to add to this. What is one thing you wish you did on Day 1 of building your agency?

How are you, as an agency owner, wanting to get out of day-to-day operations but still talking to clients as if YOU are the heart and soul of the business?

Your actions aren’t matching what you say you want out of running an agency.

If you want to:

1. Always be on call for clients.
2. Have no time to work on growth.
3. Constantly be trapped in the day-to-day

Then continue talking about your service in the first person:

• “I can do that for you”
• “I’ve seen XYZ work best”
• “I think we should…”

If you want to:

1. Have your team work seamlessly with clients.
2. Spend your time on growth-related tasks.
3. Be able to take time off without the business faltering.

Then talk about your agency as if it’s a proper agency:

• “Sure, the team can do that for you”
• “We’ve seen XYZ work best”
• “The team thinks we should…”

Yes, the switch from “I” to “we” is a subtle one, but they’re massive for what you’re trying to achieve. In essence, you're simultaneously devaluing yourself to the client and increasing the value of your team in their eyes.

This makes it so that when you do want to take a step back or focus on growth-related tasks, the client doesn't feel like you've bait-and-switched them.

If you have questions on how to execute this properly, let me know.

Your agency's P&L is the last document you should use to make decisions.

I know that sounds crazy. But hear me out.

P&Ls tell you what happened last month. By the time you get them, you've already burned through the current month making decisions blind.

Here's what actually happened to me in 2022:

Got our May P&L in mid-June. Half a million in revenue, but only $35K in profit.

Not only did I not know how bad May was until halfway through June, but whatever decisions I made wouldn't impact the business until July.

That's two months of flying blind.

Three questions that'll make you way more money than staring at last month's P&L:

1. What's our team utilization right now vs. 30 days from now?

You're selling someone else's time. If you don't know how much time they have available, you can't sell effectively or staff properly.

2. Which clients are least profitable vs. most profitable?

Without knowing gross margin by client, you might be saying yes to out-of-scope requests that put you at breakeven or a loss. You're just guessing about which logos are actually worth keeping.

3. Are we on track to hit our targets based on current performance?

Forward forecasting gives you time to course correct - hire a rep, pump more pipeline, improve conversion rates.

These three questions have saved me from disaster more times than I can count.

The agencies that survive aren't the ones with the prettiest P&Ls. They're the ones who see problems coming before they hit.

If you don't know your accounts receivable or cash flow for next month down to the dollar, read this post, and I'll help you change that.

I built a previous agency to $6.2M per year of annual revenue, and thought things were going well.

In reality, I was making hiring decisions, pricing decisions, and client decisions based on gut feel instead of data.

Profitability was dying (died for a bit) in the shadows.

Now older and a tiny bit wiser, I realize almost every agency owner faces the same three problems:

1. Limited visibility into which clients actually drive profit
2. Limited ability to plan ahead and avoid cash flow disasters
3. Limited time because they're working in the business

So I built Profit Labs to solve exactly these problems.

The video below gives you a real look (with mock data) as to how it works.

We put all your critical key metrics in one dashboard so you can instantly see which ones where you’re veering off track.

We help you orient the business around an actual financial strategy, like the 15/35 rule.

Then we show you exactly how you're doing compared to other agencies in your space - if you're a recruiting firm, you see how you stack up against other recruiting firms of the same size. Same for content agencies, marketing agencies, whatever.

For every key metric you should be tracking - profitability breakdown, margin of safety, cash flow - you know exactly where you stand compared to your peers.

No more guessing if that 27% margin is good or terrible.

There's a lot more we do around modeling specific scenarios (big client churns or key team member quitting, for example).

The video shows you exactly what this looks like in practice.

If you're tired of flying blind with your agency finances, or answering the same expense categorization questions from your bookkeeper every month… let’s change that.

Comment or DM me if you want this for your agency.

Churn doesn’t always come from bad service.

Sometimes, it starts before the contract is signed.

Really, churn is caused by a mismatch between what the client is sold on and what they’re delivered.

If a client thought they paid for 25 pieces of creative per month but only were delivered 15, they’re more likely to bounce.

The fix is:

1. Have whoever is selling and whoever is delivering on your team 100% aligned on what can be sold and delivered.

2. Re-work your pitch with that language specifically.

3. Explicitly put that language in your contracts.

This way, you make sure prospects:

• Hear it in the sales process
• Sign on it in the contract process
• Have it reinforced in the delivery process

this isn't super complicated, but a lot of teams get it wrong.

A 30-minute phone call with a 30-year industry vet made me realize my agency’s onboarding was totally broken.

WHAT I USED TO DO

We'd do our kickoff call, get them excited about working with @Profit Labs, and then they wouldn't hear from us for 6 weeks until we presented their first month-end close and financial strategy meeting.

I thought this was normal, but I was wrong.

WHAT CHANGED

Two months ago I met with an industry veteran who runs a similar, but much bigger business than Profit Labs.

She told me that customer acquisition doesn't end when someone signs your contract.

It ends when they complete onboarding and feel great about their decision.

Then she said something that hit home so hard, I wrote it down: "It's really hard to unseat a good first impression and really hard to come back from a bad first impression."

I realized we were nailing the sales process and then going quiet while we did a bunch of heavy lifting behind the scenes to get them onboarded.

WHAT I DID

Immediately, I walked out of that meeting and green-lit a role I'd been thinking about for months.

A "customer evangelist" - someone whose only job is to be every new client's best friend during onboarding and beyond.

They hold their hand through the process, check in regularly, and stay their advocate inside our company.

Plus, I told our recruiter to hire like Starbucks hires baristas - naturally friendly, engaged, and curious.

My whole vision for Profit Labs this year is making it such a delightful partnership that clients start referring agency and firm owners without us asking.

Treating onboarding like customer acquisition instead of just an operational step is a huge part of that, and I’m excited to get our next cohort of customers up to speed with our new operation.

P.S. - If you’re an agency owner sick of choosing between financial clarity and sanity, I invite you to check out Profit Labs - it gives you both. DM if interested.

There are two types of agency owners:
• Ones who are too scared to time track
•Ones who do it anyway

People say it hurts morale or shows lack of trust.
But whether you like it or not, if you're selling someone else's time, you need to know how that time is spent.

Path 1: You don't time track
1. You lose visibility into what your team actually does
2. You can't calculate how much time each client requires
3. You have no idea which clients are profitable vs. bleeding money
4. You can't identify which team members are efficient vs. struggling
5. Projects go over budget and you don't know why
6. Your agency falters as costs spiral

Path 2: You do time track
1. You see exactly where every hour goes
2. You calculate true profit per client with precision
3. You spot inefficiencies before they become expensive
4. You know which team members need training vs. which are rockstars
5. You scale confidently because you have the data
6. You consistently hit your margin goals

 At 15+ people, you're either tracking time or you're guessing.
And it’s highly unlikely you’re going to guess your way to 7 figures in annual profit.

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