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Growth marketing is problem solving.
I build growth engines by connecting…
I build growth engines by connecting…
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Ryan Connors shared thisOver a few focused hours this weekend, I rebuilt my personal website with ChatGPT and deployed it through Netlify. The final Google PageSpeed Insights results on mobile: 100 Performance 100 Accessibility 100 Best Practices 100 SEO I had never personally seen a live site earn 100 across all four mobile categories, which made the result especially satisfying. I did not initially plan to code the site from scratch. The previous version was built with a visual editor and had started to feel clunky and overly modular. I began using ChatGPT to work through design and functionality improvements. As more of the recommendations involved custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, I had a realization: If I was already using custom code to work around the editor, it might be simpler to rebuild the entire site that way. So I started over. Within a few hours, the new site was live and fully responsive. The first mobile test showed a 4.2 second Largest Contentful Paint. From there, I worked through image delivery, font loading, render blocking resources, and hero rendering until the site reached four perfect scores. The most valuable part was not simply having AI generate code. It was how quickly I could move from identifying a problem to understanding the cause, implementing a fix, and validating the result. AI did not replace judgment. It accelerated the entire problem solving cycle and dramatically shortened the distance between an idea and a polished, live product. Built with ChatGPT from OpenAI and deployed through Netlify.
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted thisCan you have a 6.0 MER & be failing? Yes. And it's more common than you think... Look at these two metrics: - aMER = new customer revenue / total marketing spend - nCAC = total marketing spend / new customers Four brand types I see again and again: 1. Retention coasters Metrics - $120M revenue, $20M spend - MER 6.0, aMER 1.3, nCAC $182 - 78% of revenue is repeat → Diagnose: big gap between MER and aMER, repeat revenue above 70%, new customer count flat or falling. → What's happening: returning customers are carrying revenue. → Fix: rebuild prospecting. New hooks for cold traffic, an aMER floor you don't drop below, and a lower blended MER for a quarter. 2. Leaky bucket Metrics - $14M revenue, $6M spend - MER 2.3, aMER 2.1, nCAC $41 - 10% of revenue is repeat → Diagnose: MER barely above aMER, 90-day repeat rate near zero, email and SMS revenue share near zero. → What's happening: customers buy once and never come back. → Fix: retention before scale. Post-purchase flows, a subscription offer, a second-order bundle. Email should be doing 25-40% of revenue. 3. Too efficient to grow Metrics - $38M revenue, $4.5M spend - MER 8.4, aMER 4.6, nCAC $32 - Marketing is 12% of revenue → Diagnose: flat revenue with rising MER, spend only 12% of revenue, marginal CAC far below breakeven. → What's happening: the brand can afford far more customers than it's buying. → Fix: spend into it. Raise budgets until marginal aMER hits breakeven, and judge the account on new customer volume and total profit not just profit margin. 4. Scaling past breakeven Metrics - $150M revenue, $95M spend - MER 1.6, aMER 0.9, nCAC $238 - 45% of revenue is repeat → Diagnose: MER below 2, aMER below 1, first-order contribution negative, payback past 12 months. → What's happening: the brand is buying customers it can't afford. → Fix: cut the worst 20-30% of spend, reset to the efficient core, then rebuild scale through creative testing. MER measures efficiency. aMER and nCAC measure whether you're acquiring anyone. - MER high, aMER low = living off the existing customer base - MER and aMER almost identical = no repeat business to live off - Both high with flat revenue = underspending - aMER under 1 = buying customers at a loss
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted thisSpoiler alert: Everything in marketing works. I've done over 300 hours of interviews with CMOs and VPs in B2B marketing. I spent a decade as a marketing leader myself (before officially become a thought leader) and I can tell you this one thing: Everything in marketing works. YouTube works. LinkedIn works. Direct mail works. Webinars work. TikTok works. Email works. Events work. PR works. Partnerships work. Heck, even spending $75k with Gartner can work. But the challenge is figuring out which channels can work for you with the ingredients you have. You don't always have the product, the features, the timing, the wind at your back, the talent on the team, the budget. But that is the fun part about the job in marketing - you get be the chef, but sometimes there's only two eggs, a slice of bread and an onion left in the fridge. Can you work with that? The other thing that matters is the strategy. Why are you doing this. What are the goals, what is your POV on it, and how can you pull it off? Too often we try to do everything - all those channels above - because we think we have to. And the result is another B2B YouTube channel with 30 videos that all have between 17 and 62 views. You'd be better off picking one channel and doing DEEP there and then finding ways to stack those wins into other channels. This type of thinking has always been a guardrail on the teams I've been on: - What's in it for me? - Why should someone open this email? - Why would someone actually take an hour out of their day and attend your webinar? Would *you* actually go to this webinar? - Would you respond to that message? - Would you see that ad and click on it? And last thing - this is the hardest one. Often times GOOD MARKETING is not good for the company. That's right. It's harder to measure, takes time, not obvious, doesn't have UTM parameters in link; there might not be a direct response call to action. And that's what makes it good and makes it work, but you need to have the patience to trust it - and the ability to stand up in front of the CEO/CFO and articulate the marketing strategy and why you do things the way you do. What did miss? PS. If you are reading this and work in marketing, your job is to embrace this. Treat your job like a craft. Have conviction. Don't follow best practices. Use your brain. Be creative. Disrupt things inside of your company and push for a new way of doing things. More important now than ever when everyone has access to the Slop Machine ™️ We write about this stuff weekly at: exitfive.com/newsletter
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted this"New Self-Serving Study" - Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute has long been on the frontlines of debunking marketing myths, starting with "How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know" in 2010. Byron recently introduced me to the term SONK -- "the Scientific-cation Of Non-Knowledge." In an interview last year, Byron credits SONK to his mentor Andrew Ehrenberg. As Byron describes SONK: "You take trivial findings and dress them up with tortured statistics and jargon. And spread it over many pages. It's style over substance." There's an epidemic of SONK in marketing. Social media feeds and marketing news sites carry an endless stream of whitepapers, studies, and reports that have nothing more than the sheen of being evidence-based. Many of these are clearly biased by the agencies or brands that commissioned the research. Some of the takeaways are then cited in marketing decks and thought leadership as if they were carved on stone tablets. It's possible to justify just about any marketing approach by pointing at research somewhere, no matter how shallow. SONK spreads when marketers can't tell the difference between evidence and the appearance of evidence. >>>>> To sign up for my weekly marketoon email newsletter (24 years running), click here: https://lnkd.in/g9DBM6tD For related cartoons and all the links in this post, click here: https://lnkd.in/gnynygvs #marketing #cartoon #marketoon
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Ryan Connors shared thisA message of recovery I shared about 7 years clean reached over 1.5M views across Reddit and LinkedIn. Hard to wrap my head around that many people seeing it, but I’m grateful to God for the opportunity to share my experience. And if it gave even one person hope, that makes it all worth it. We do recover.
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Ryan Connors shared this7 years clean today. The man on the left was stuck. The man on the right is free. Not perfect. Not finished. But free. I’m grateful to God for the grace to change, the discipline to keep going, and the people who helped me get here. I didn’t do this alone. If you’re fighting addiction, depression, or a battle nobody sees, please don’t carry it alone. Tell the truth. Reach out. Ask for help. Your life can change. Mine did.
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted thisIf you thought ChatGPT and Claude were going to kill consulting, you'd be surprised to hear that OpenAI and Anthropic both just announced that they are creating their own consulting firms. Earlier this morning OpenAI announced the creation of a new company, called "The Deployment Company", which raised $4.1 billion at an estimated $10 billion valuation. A few minutes after the big news, Anthropic announced that they were building an AI services company too, with $1.5 billion in committed capital. Neither of these are tiny initiatives either. OpenAI raised from heavyweights such as TPG, Brookfield, Advent, and Bain Capital, meanwhile Anthropic secured funding from Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and Sequoia. In Anthropic's own words, the new firm will "work with mid-sized companies across sectors to bring Claude into their most important operations. Applied AI engineers from Anthropic will work alongside the firm's engineering team to identify where Claude can have the most impact, build custom solutions, and support customers over the long term." Both labs have arrived at a conclusion that hundreds of enterprise software vendors reached before them: conventional B2B sales cycles are too slow to capture the pace of AI adoption. But there's a deeper shift underneath this move. With the rise of agents, OpenAI and Anthropic aren't selling chatbots anymore. They're selling the operational layer that sits underneath a company and runs it. It's software that takes actions, makes decisions, and does work that used to require people. This, fundamentally, requires expertise. It can only be deployed the way Palantir embeds engineers in the Pentagon, or the way Accenture spends eighteen months wiring SAP into a Fortune 500 supply chain. Someone has to sit next to the customer, understand the workflow, and engineer the product into the bones of the business. This is an exciting shift. The model isn't the product anymore. The deployment is. Two of the most valuable companies in the world just raised $5.5 billion to confirm what every system integrator already knew: software doesn't transform a business on its own. Instead, people do, sitting next to the work, building deeply within it.
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted thisHow to find winning ads Using calculus: → Each hill is a creative concept that works → Climbing uphill = iterating toward the local maximum → Jumping across = testing new concepts to find taller hills When I ran marketing at Carpe, this is exactly how I thought about creative testing. Your ad account sits on an invisible landscape. Your job is finding the tallest peaks. → Find a concept that works? → Iterate to climb the hill (different hooks, creators, offers, etc) → Each test helps you map the landscape → Hopefully, your iterations bring you closer to the best version of that concept. But what if the hill you're on is capped at a low ROAS? → Take a big swing → Try a totally new concept, format and angle → Jump from the hill you're on to a completely different point → Sometimes you land in a valley - that's a dead creative → Sometimes you find a winning ad. This is your 10-25% hit rate. Then I heard Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad Cookware) describe creative testing almost identically on the Operators podcast. He called it "finding a local max on some imaginary gradient." → Concept testing = exploring different areas of the map. → Iteration testing = climbing toward the peak. Couple important points → Creative fatigue shifts the whole landscape underneath you → Andromeda rewards you for sitting on multiple hills. More winners = more surface area How do you think about creative testing?
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Ryan Connors reposted thisRyan Connors reposted thisIntroducing ChatGPT Images 2.0 A state-of-the-art image model that can take on complex visual tasks and produce precise, immediately usable visuals, with sharper editing, richer layouts, and thinking-level intelligence. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is a step change in detailed instruction following, placing and relating objects accurately, and rendering dense text, with the ability to generate across aspect ratios. It’s also accurate across languages and uses its expanded visual and world knowledge to fill in the gaps for you, so you get smarter images with less prompting. ChatGPT Images 2.0 is available starting today to all ChatGPT and Codex users. Images with thinking are available to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Business. The underlying model, gpt-image-2, is available in the API. https://lnkd.in/g9Q79-7R
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Congrats!
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Commenting for reach. Hope you find a great opportunity soon Brandon Burkman.
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Ryan Connors liked thisRyan Connors liked thisReally proud to see this one officially back out in the world.🐾 Today, Invisible Fence® Brand officially relaunched Project Breathe™, a program dedicated to helping first responders save pets from the dangers of smoke inhalation by providing pet oxygen masks to fire departments in communities across the country. This year marks 20 years of Project Breathe, making this relaunch especially meaningful. I’m incredibly proud of our marketing team for the work that went into bringing this initiative back to life, and an especially big shoutout to Christina Landwehr, who truly helped champion Project Breathe and played such an important role in getting it to where we are today. Erin Lynch, Anna White Kolke, & Christina - endlessly proud of what this small but mighty team continues to accomplish together! There’s something special about getting to work for a brand that can use its reach to make a difference well beyond the solutions we sell. I’m excited to see Project Breathe get the renewed attention it deserves, and even more excited about where we can take it from here. Press release: https://lnkd.in/eNgse5me Learn more about the program here: https://lnkd.in/exmSbJfCInvisible Fence® Brand Celebrates 20 Years of Project Breathe™ with Nationwide Pet Oxygen Mask DonationsInvisible Fence® Brand Celebrates 20 Years of Project Breathe™ with Nationwide Pet Oxygen Mask Donations
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Ryan Connors liked thisRyan Connors liked thisLet’s grow! Time flies when you're heads down operating and building. I'm excited to share that I've joined Storyraise as Fractional CMO and GTM leader. Nonprofits are being asked to do more with less, and donors want to see the real impact of their giving, not another generic thank-you email. Storyraise already helps organizations show that impact through personalized stewardship and impact reporting. Really exciting expansion and innovation happening which is fueling the energy! What drew me in was the team. Every conversation confirmed they care deeply about the people behind every gift, and they're open to building growth in a new way. That's also where TMarketers has been heading. Over the past year, we've expanded from helping companies run marketing organizations with Fractional leadership services to building and operating AI-native go-to-market systems for them. Storyraise is a great example of what that makes possible: a lean, mission-driven team growing like a much bigger one. Grateful to be part of it. More to share soon.
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Ryan Connors liked thisRyan Connors liked thisBREAKING NEWS: OpenAI just announced "Dots" their always-on AI agent/assistant. "Dots is the way we always wanted to work with AI." ~ Sam Altman at Dev Day 2026 * Mix of typical consumer/prosumer use cases including some business ones. * Provide high level goals and it goes and works on them. This is both for agentic coding use cases and other knowledge work. * You start with one dot today, in the future you'll be able to work with a whole team of dots. It's basically agents, but they're branding them dots. I love the idea of "dots" and "connecting dots" (that's what I call my newsletter). There was also brief mention of "Specialist Dots" -- dots that are built for a specific role/task, primarily focused on larger enterprises. More to come once I've had a chance to play with it. DISCLOSURE: I'm a small investor in OpenAI and a big fan.
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Ryan Connors liked thisRyan Connors liked thisHere's how to do great marketing for any company in any industry. I've recorded nearly 400 conversations with VPs CMOs and subject matter experts all around B2B marketing the last 4 years working on Exit Five. That's something like 24,000 minutes spent talking with people who earn their living and have made careers in this industry. Want to know the number one lesson I've learned? This is not hyperbole. The number one thing I have learned is that there is no playbook. There is no recipe. Despite what you read online about how this person took this one company from $0 to $100M in revenue, or how Canva did this or Figma did that or Loom did this without a sales team or HubSpot had this thing with churn early on. There is no playbook because (gulp) everything works. LinkedIn works. TikTok works. Direct mail works. Events work. Outbound works. But also everything doesn't work - for the same company that thought Dreamforce was great and worth the $50k for a booth, another company said it was a huge waste of money. For one company that said going up market and shifting to enterprise was the right move, another one didn't get the formula right and couldn't make it work. There is so much nuance in marketing because you're relying on so many factors you don't control: the market, competition, budget, who you can hire (ex: everyone says "hire A players" but what if you can't? what if no one knows who you are, you don't have a big budget to pay top dollars for the former Salesforce exec. How can you compete with the talent Anthropic is paying for right now?) Each industry has a different core buyer and that changes what might "work" in marketing to them. Some industries have different rules/laws/regulations/. You get the point... So the best thing you can do (based on my 400+ conversations is this): Realize this is the job in marketing. And this is what makes it fun. As Jay-Z said: put me anywhere on God's green earth, I could triple my worth. Take that approach to marketing. Whatever the ingredients you're giving me - I will make it work. And I know that it will be different at each company and industry. But the game is finding some of the overlap, being able to pattern match. Understand people and how they make decisions. And being able to think outside of the box and not rely on a playbook. Take each company, product, industry on it's own and figure out how to reach and influence people there. That is how you can do good marketing for any company, in and industry.
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