The Journal

Working notes from the desk. What we built, what broke, and what we would do differently.

What a customer is worth, and why nobody knows it

Almost every account we take over is optimising toward a number nobody has checked. Working backward from contribution margin instead.

GEO: what it is, and what it is not yet

Getting cited inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers is real and measurable. It is also smaller than the people selling it suggest.

Your ROAS does not match your bank account

Platforms undercount, overclaim, and double-count each other. What to do about attribution without buying another dashboard.

The list you already own

Retention gets treated as a nice-to-have while acquisition costs climb. The cheapest revenue available is usually sitting untouched.

Creative fatigue is the real ceiling on paid social

Accounts usually stop scaling because the creative ran out, not because the budget did. Producing at volume without producing filler.

Positioning before the logo

Most rebrands start with a moodboard and end with a mark nobody can explain. The order is the problem.

The page the ad points at

Landing pages are treated as someone else's job and then blamed for the cost per lead. They are part of the campaign.