Blogging about growth again
July 2024
If you go to the list of all my blog posts and scroll all the way down you’ll see a ton of entries focused on conversion optimization, A/B testing, UX, analytics—growth marketing stuff.
I started blogging/newslettering in 2019, around the same time I started consulting. Figured I needed to have some spicy takes on my area of expertise, and figured committing myself to write about it every day for 90 days would force me to reach the spiciness. Turns out it worked!
I found work, enough work that I lost interest in blogging about growth. I did start a separate blog about UX and conversion, which later became my first book. But here on my personal site I started writing about weird stuff.
My situation has changed, though, and all of a sudden I’m driven to write about success metrics and customer journeys. It’s 2019 all over again! Not in any of the ways you might hope, but still.
What’s different is: I’m a partner at Useful Books. I’m not “in charge of growth” because we’re not structured like that, but there’s nobody stopping me from “doing growth” and if I do it, I get a share of the upside.
And it’s that whole experience of people—or more often systems—stopping me from doing growth that’s part of why I quit bothering to opine on it. After at least a dozen posts’ worth of shaking my fist at the institutional issues that hamper experimentation programs … what else is there to say? I shut up to avoid becoming too bitter.
There’s none of that happening now, though. All excuses gone. I don’t have a cowardly CMO forbidding me from running a test that “feels risky” and I don’t have a target of “5 A/B tests a month” to keep me busy. I can do pretty much whatever I can plausibly defend to the rest of the team. And conversely, if I focus on the wrong things, it’s just my own time I’m wasting. Time I could be spending with my wife or these ridiculous dogs.
So I’m blogging about growth again, as a way to clarify my thoughts, again. Because I actually give a shit, again. I’ll also be tapping the brains of all the smart conversion-y people I’ve met over the last several years, and sharing some of what I learn from them.
My first post from this grand comeback tour is about success metrics. I’ll be writing on website experience, copy and customer messaging, the platforms we use (like ConvertKit and Circle), customer interviews, all that good stuff. And if you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance I’ll be reaching out soon to beg for a bit of your time so we can do a user test, brainstorm session, something nerdy like that. Talk to you soon!