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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 copy though.

Last week, I wrote that AI can build the thing before you understand the market. Production is getting cheaper and faster. What’s scary is how easy it becomes to ship a polished answer to the wrong question.

I didn’t want to do that with my own business. So before rebuilding the site, I went back through the same questions I ask clients:

What has changed in the market?

What are buyers struggling to understand now?

What part of my offer creates the most value?

And what should Conversion Alchemy become better known for?

Those questions map to a useful test April Dunford recently shared: revisit your positioning when your product changes, your competitors change, or the market changes.

For me, the clearest shift was the alternative now available to a buyer.

A few years ago, a team with an unclear homepage might have hired a copywriter to produce a better version. Now that same team can ask AI for ten rewrites before lunch. But if sales, product, and marketing still disagree about what the offer is, or why a buyer should care, all ten versions will scale the same fluff.

AI-generated copy has become the cheap alternative. So the value of my work had to move upstream – from producing more copy to diagnosing what the copy needs to say first.

That exposed a positioning problem in my own business.

The old Conversion Alchemy story led with what I delivered: messaging strategy and conversion copywriting. The new one starts with the problem I help teams solve: finding where message-market fit is breaking, then turning that diagnosis into GTM copy buyers can understand, believe, and act on.

And that isn’t just new homepage copy. It changes what I sell first.

Instead of assuming every client needs a large research and copy project, the new Conversion Alchemy process starts with the smallest useful diagnosis: a focused five-day Roadmap to find where the message is actually breaking.

Is it the positioning? The messaging strategy? The proof? The offer? The copy? The buying flow?

Only then do we decide whether a Message-Market Fit Sprint makes sense and what kind.

I truly think this sequence is important because the wrong brief spreads into the homepage, sales deck, nurture emails, and prompts, which then creates more assets the team later has to fix.

This is also me eating my own dog food. I’m asking clients not to jump straight into production, so I couldn’t rebuild my own site by opening a blank page and telling an agent to “make it convert.”

Yes, I rebuilt my website entirely with my AI agent Travis, but once I changed the offer, the website had different jobs to do. It needed to explain where buyers stop understanding, believing, or acting on the value, show why diagnosis comes before execution, and help a team choose the right first step.

Once our message was clear, we went into building mode.

We inventoried the old site, decided what we could launch now and what could wait, rebuilt the core pages as reusable sections and created a new design system that future agents could use without slowly turning the brand into slop.

Then we even built a quick review tool to help us! For the curious nerds, it works like this: when I leave feedback, the system captures the page, context, and requested change. The agent patches the source, then has to verify the result with builds, browser checks, mobile screenshots, route tests, and redirect tests. Open. Patched. Verified. Resolved.

I didn’t want to remove myself completely from the process, because I think taste, judgment, and making the right decisions are important, especially now with AI. But I did want to be able to make decisions and iterate faster on it all.

Here’s the kicker: building the site this way exposed a broader vision for what I could build. It isn’t enough for the final copy to be traceable. The strategy behind it has to remain traceable too. Behind the scenes, I’m using one of my recently completed client engagements as use case for a kind of “operating room” tool for my messaging work. The goal is to keep the reasoning attached as the work moves from research to strategy to copy.

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Imagine a sales call where someone says, “Prospects only understand us after we give them a demo.”

That line shouldn’t disappear into a research summary and be completely forgotten.

It should stay visible as evidence. It might support a finding that the category or value is unclear. That finding can lead to an approved positioning decision. And that decision should become a constraint the homepage, sales deck, emails, and AI prompts all have to follow.

If someone challenges the final copy three months later, the team should be able to trace the decision back through that chain instead of arguing from memory.

But it’s hard to keep track of all of these tiny little notes, and you can’t always act on them right away. Which is why we use different specialist agents that help with bounded parts of the work (while positioning choices, public claims, and final copy still stop at human approval gates).

It’s early. Some parts work. Other parts have already exposed gaps in my own review process.

But my bet is that messaging can become faster without becoming less accountable and/or accurate: every recommendation should carry its evidence, and the team should be able to see not just what changed, but why.

The question I’m still working through is how strong a new market signal needs to be before the system should reopen a decision. WIP.

The new website is the public result of all this thinking and now that I can, you bet that I’ll keep iterating fast on it, so expect changes.

DISCOVERY

Positioning in the Age of AI – April Dunford

April gives a clean test for knowing when your positioning needs another look: the product changed, the competition changed, or the market changed.

What I found useful wasn’t “add AI to the message.” It was the opposite. Separate what creates value today from what you’re building toward, then give buyers a credible path between the two.

That was the prompt for my own rebuild: what is this shift actually changing about my own work?

Read: Positioning in the Age of AI.

From strategy to email sequence – new guest post for Stripo

April’s piece can help you decide when your positioning needs to change. This one I wrote for the amazing team at Stripo shows whether you can carry that new positioning into an example of execution.

I break a messaging framework into the specific job each email in a sequence has to do inside the buyer’s decision: establish the frame, make the problem urgent, prove the claim, answer the objection, or move the reader forward.

How you can test it: if you can’t describe an email’s job in one sentence, it’s probably trying to carry too much or the strategy still isn’t clear enough to use.

Read: From strategy to email sequence: How to turn your positioning into content that converts.