One product story can hide two buying jobs Ok, picture this: your product has outgrown the neat little category that first got it traction. What started as one useful tool now handles a much bigger workflow. Then you add a higher-ticket offer for teams with more data, more people involved, and more at stake. The business has expanded. The homepage, however, still tells the old story. That was the situation with a recent client, Findymail. It had grown beyond an email-finding tool into a full...
5 days ago • 4 min read
“That's a lot of work, Chris” I was describing how I run research to someone running an established positioning consultancy. Depending on the decision, I may interview customers and stakeholders, review sales calls, run website polls, and study competitors and category conventions before I write the positioning, messaging, and copy. “That’s a lot of work, Chris.” Fair, I thought. Their old research-heavy process had become expensive and slow, so they now move faster by extracting what the...
11 days ago • 4 min read
Hey friend! Welcome to the new Unpacking Meaning look. Let me know what you think, but I wanted to create a cohesive style with me new website I just launched (this email design was made by my AI agent Travis too btw). Anyay, on to today's topic... A synthetic customer will never (for now) cancel your interview, misunderstand your questions, or tell you your new positioning makes no sense. That is exactly the problem. Over the past year, I’ve watched synthetic research move from an...
18 days ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. I took my own positioning advice The new Conversion Alchemy website is live. Check it out! Over the past few weeks, I rebuilt the infrastructure, moved away from WordPress and Elementor, created a new visual system, migrated the important content, and worked through the mess of redirects, analytics, email, hosting, and DNS. The more important work happened before I touched any of the...
26 days ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Your AI workflow is only as good as its signal Henry Ford was almost impossibly good at production. With his moving assembly line, he changed industrial manufacturing by dropping Model T chassis assembly times from 12 hours to 93 minutes. He broke construction into 84 discrete steps and using conveyor belts, the system produced more and cheaper, from $850 to less than $300 per car. Ford...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Borrow the category. Name the difference. Yesterday, in a B2B community I’m part of, someone asked a question I think more founders are going to run into: How do you sell something when buyers don’t have a name for the problem yet? That’s a much harder problem than “people don’t understand our product.” When buyers don’t have language for the problem, they still need somewhere to put...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Borrow the category. Name the difference. Yesterday, in a B2B community I’m part of, someone asked a question I think more founders are going to run into: How do you sell something when buyers don’t have a name for the problem yet? That’s a much harder problem than “people don’t understand our product.” When buyers don’t have language for the problem, they still need somewhere to put...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Zero-click did not kill the website I’m seeing this question pop up in B2B communities often lately. Is the website useless now with zero-click? Zero-click is what happens when a search result, social feed, or AI tool gives someone enough of an answer that they don’t need to click through. They might read the AI Overview, skim a snippet, get the vendor shortlist from ChatGPT or...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Your buyer should not have to connect the dots A homepage can use real voice of customer and still be wrong. I was reminded of this on a call this week. A potential client had a homepage headline built from something a customer had said. Which is already better than most B2B homepages, to be fair. No committee fluff. No “unlock seamless growth.” No category soup. Actual customer...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Read online Welcome to Unpacking Meaning. If you received this from a friend and enjoy it, subscribe here. Can you describe your email in one sentence? If you cannot describe an email in one sentence, the person reading it will not know what to do with it either. That is the one-sentence test, and it is the cleanest diagnostic I know for email sequence architecture. You just need to ask: can I articulate what this is for? If the answer is no, the email is not ready to send. The stakes of...
2 months ago • 3 min read