Price Testing

Price testing is probably some of the most impactful work you can do to grow your business. Price testing is some of the hardest to design a proper test for. Because Split testing will inevitably show different prices to the same person causing immense customer frustration when encountering higher prices, and causing hasty conversions when the customer “discovers” a lower price. Your results will be skewed, your customers will be pissed, and the legality of a price split test is dubious....

August 6, 2025 · 3 min · 455 words · bear

Winning at LLMs

Thoughts on how to win AEO / AIO (the new SEO). LLMs, for all the amazing things they can do are still at their core a prediction model for “what word comes next”. Sure, it’s tokens, not full words, but the point stands. As more models approach full ingestion of all available text data from humanity, all the flavour and nuance between models comes from weighting and fine-tuning. Exactly how training data is weighted is proprietary in most models....

July 26, 2025 · 2 min · 388 words · bear

Pricing Is a Story

Price isn’t (shouldn’t be) related to cost. Price is a reflection of value. We can price where the customer is willing to purchase. The optimal price is an optimisation function against the elasticity curve which expresses profit-per-unit vs units moved at a specific price point. A price that’s higher than the competition implies quality. A price that’s lower than the competition implies you’re paying less AND getting less. A strong brand can command a higher price....

July 14, 2025 · 1 min · 154 words · bear

Good Teams Overcome

Sitting and preparing a strategy seminar makes it so clear. If I can get the team to gel and own the strategy, they’ll deliver it. And if it’s a good team, they’ll absolutely do this. And if it’s an even semi-coherent strategy, with a good team behind it on a mission to deliver.. They’re on track to dominate. Equipped with clarity and a reasonable strategy, good teams overcome whatever the universe throws at them....

February 17, 2025 · 1 min · 94 words · bear

Expansion-Contraction Cycles in Startup Spend Scaling

To evaluate the performance of a growing startup, embrace spend-cycling. If every month is increased in spend, you don’t get a chance to evaluate potential profitability. So insert steady or scale-back months to see how much you can put in the bank. You win: Confidence in a baseline you can default back to if you need to pause and regroup. Proof that you can actually bank any results. Doesn’t matter if you’re looking for a lifestyle business or an exit, demonstrating profitability is important....

October 10, 2024 · 1 min · 101 words · bear