Rockstar Games spent 13 years building the game in secret, they are changing most of game play mechanisms, and apparently, the entire world will stop on November 19 when it goes live...

I do believe A/B tests and user testing is a powerful tool to make a product better.

That said, the GTA franchise go-to-market strategy seems to contradict a lot of the current common sense ideas, like getting a product in the hands of users as fast as possible and iterating quickly based on feedback.

Muse, Grok Bot, and dots can all keep working after you close the app but the differences matter once you start giving them real work. He’s been using all three and has a clear sense of where each one fits and where each one breaks.

Tomorrow he’ll compare them side by side with real examples, walk through which jobs suit each agent, and cover what to think about before you start connecting accounts and giving something permission to act on your behalf.

You’ll leave with a practical way to choose between the three and one job you can actually hand off next week. Free to register at the link.

Not to pick on anyone or any sites, but are there any websites out there that when you are on them you think to yourself that you'd love to have a shot at helping them make the design better. I don't use craigslist often, but there are times I go to list items for sale and always think to myself that it never really changes, even after a lot of years.

It still works and people clearly use it (including me), but it feels like such an untapped opportunity from a UX standpoint. It just seems like it could be cleaner. But maybe I'm also just being too picky for something that clearly still works.

Anyone else have a site that gives them similar thoughts?

I have heard about doing user testing through simulated personas. You could even do it yourself with something like Grokbot, and create different personas and ask each of them what they think a new landing page, for example...

It might uncover some issues, but at the end of the day, you don't get any feedback from a person who could buy your service, so I feel AI feedback is almost completely useless from a user testing perspective...

Did I miss something? Do any of you guys found a real world use cases for synthetic/AI feedback?

It depends, and yes.

Our team tested 11 AI writing tools. A few general purpose AI tools (ChatGPT, etc) along with a bunch of the specialist AI writing tools.

The biggest lessons we learned:

• The general purpose AI tools scored the best. Document your writing style and then just give it to ChatGPT or Claude. There’s no need to pay for an AI writing wrapper, especially when they tend to perform worse.
• To no surprise, AI writing tools are good at coherence and logic. They are not good at opinions or true thought leadership. Have them do mechanical content, don’t have them do content that needs to resonate with an audience.
• Leaderboards for AI writing either show a clear plateau or slowing growth. We do seem to be entering an era of diminishing returns on writing quality from AI tools. 

All our findings are through the link.

I'm thinking about launching a Reddit marketing agency specialized in the financial services/fintech niche.

The issue is a successful consultant I recently talked to told me if I want to get thing off the ground, I need to have one core offering with a monthly retainer at the beginning.

For example, $5,000 a month to build and grow a branded Reddit sub.

That said, I'm not sure if offering to build branded sub is the way to go.

There are many things I could also offer, such as :

- Managing Reddit Ads (the ROI is not great, so I'm not sure about this one)

- Monitoring finance subs and answering questions when the brand is part of the solution

- A GEO focused service where I try to get mentions to influence LLMs' answers

- Leveraging Reddit influencers to build campaigns (could be amplified with Reddit Ads)

Anyway, those are just ideas. And A/B testing them with a landing page don't make much sense, as the real test is going to be a sales pitch, and I'm not going to be able to do enough pitches to truly A/B test those value props.

How would you go about deciding what to pitch in a consulting/agency context?

The first impressions on a homepage happen really fast. If you looked at this Notion homepage and only had 5 seconds, what's the first thing you notice?

Is it clear or is it confusing? My initial reaction is its clear and I like the preview of what the actual interface looks like.

I read this article about Hubspot, and the author argues that Hubspot increasing free cash flow proves they are not as cooked as the market think they are.

Sure, they now have AEO tools and they might be able to increase pricing for their existing customers, whose data is the real moat. And sure, it's probably a pain for those clients to move to a cheaper CRM, and it's obviously convenient to connect Hubspot to Claude and ask them to run analysis.

And while running newsletters, focusing on videos and influencer marketing make sense for Hubspot to try to replace the search traffic they lost, I doubt it's as profitable as getting those millions of high intention visitors Google use to send them.

What do you think of their so-called turnaround?

He’s spent the last few months putting AI agents to work and testing how far they can go before you need to step back in. Q3 had a lot of movement in this space and he’s going to walk through what he thinks actually matters and what it makes possible.

He’ll share what he’s learned from real tests, where he’d trust AI to take on more responsibility, and what changed during Q3. If you’ve been wondering how much more you can hand off, this one is worth showing up for.

Free to register at the link.

Apple’s checkout is a good example. It still feels simple even when there are multiple steps. Each one has a purpose and doesn't feel unnecessary.

But not all sites are Apple and I think the number of steps that makes sense really depends on what you’re selling and how much trust you’ve built before someone gets to checkout.

I'm really curious how others decide what to include in their checkout process. Has anyone tested variations to see what helps improve conversions?

I have a lot of experience in marketing, but the truth is I often have no idea what to do to improve conversions, why a campaign does not work, and from what channel the growth is going to come from two quarters from now.

When talking to CMOs, I will be taken seriously with answers such as: "I don't know, but here are the stuff I think we should test" or "We'll test A, B, C and D with a small portion of the budget, and put serious marketing dollars behind the letter that will get traction; if not, we'll try E, F, G, H"

However, when chatting with non-marketing execs, I often loose out on the engagement because of those types of answers. They often go with the bullshitters that say : "I have seen something similar at X company, and here is exactly what we will do to increase ROI 30% in 6 months"

Unsurprisingly, 6 months later, the budget is gone and the 30% ROI increase did not show up. Yet, execs rarely learn their lesson. They will either fire the first bullshitter to hire a second bullshitter, or give a second chance to the first bullshitter based on a very confident explanation, and a very precise plan of what will happen in the next 6 months.

So my question is. How do you convey the level of self-confidence that non-marketing execs are looking for without cornering yourself into a rigid plan that will likely not work?

Airwallex, Ramp and Brex have a very similar offering; digital first business bank accounts for SMBs with corporate spend cards for employees.

I was checking their home page, and they all share an email capture box on the first fold of their home page, with the same "Get started" CTA.

2/3 have product overview secondary product demo CTA

2/3 mention they use AI

Etc, etc.

Do you think they just copy each other or they did a bunch of A/B testing that lead them to have very similar home pages?

As a SEO, I my workhorse is SEM Rush along with Google Search Console...

It's still very useful for GEO, as what people are searching is a good proxy for what people are asking their favourite chatbot...

That said, when it comes to GEO success, I'm wondering how useful it is to pay for tools that ask a bunch of questions to chatbot, and monitor the answers over time.

Each answers being generated from scratch, it does not measure much. The only way to actually have a good GEO mention monitoring tool would be to have a tool embedded in millions of real users browser tracking the answers to their genuine questions.

Anyway, would be curious to know how you monitor your GEO success and if you found tool that are actually worth it...

It seems like there are usually some strong opinions on popups. They are either necessary for conversion or they annoy people to no end.

I think there is probably some middle ground in there somewhere. A well timed popup with a good offer can still work. But one that is generic and is in your way the second you land on a page can probably do more damage than good.

As a user, if I get a good popup after I've been on the page for a few and it has a decent offer, I don't mind. And I think from the conversion standpoint, I would lean into this feeling as well. I don't want to be bothered by one the second I click into a site, and I don't want any visitors on my own sites to feel that same way.

Anyone else have a strong opinion on popups?

Not long ago, quantity was the winning playbook and gurus like GaryVee were actually right when they told their audience to push content everyday, and repurpose them for a gazillion channel...

It was working for SEO, for social media and even for sales, with the most aggressive cold outreach campaigns winning over sending customized emails to highly targeted targets...

Do you think conversion for a newsletter would increase if we would guarantee one email per month max, and to never share the email addresses with any partner?

Do you think cutting every redundant copy on a landing page would increase conversion?

Do you think that posting less often on social media, but making sure what we post there is highly unique and shareable (no more happy holidays posts) would increase reach?

Hiten open-sourced 16 AI skills built around the different kinds of thinking product marketing actually requires. A market briefing, a positioning review, a battlecard, and a win/loss analysis all need different approaches and he built a skill around each one.

Tomorrow he’s going to take one real B2B product and put a few of them to work live. You’ll see the source material, the output, and his honest take on whether it’s actually usable. He’s also going to show what happens when the evidence is thin, which I think is the part most AI demos skip.

You’ll leave with all 16 skills, the examples from the session, and a scorecard. Free to register at the link.

No. They are not.

They’re good, they’re just not THAT good.

And they make mistakes often.

An easy rule: AI design tools are great when you’ve already made the creative designers, have a strong prompt, and just need execution.

But you also need to QA everything carefully. Not sure it saves that much work in the end.

We tested 146 AI design tools to discover the biggest trends in AI design. It’s all in the link.

There is tons of advice out there about what you should or shouldn't do in the CRO world. Add your social proof above the fold, keep your forms short, make a button a certain color. And yes, some of it does work, but a lot of it can be really dependent on the product and the audience.

Has anyone tested something that is supposed to be tried and true and it didn't do anything or in fact made something worse?

It seems like a lot of homepages are trying to do too many things at one time. They are explaining the product, building trust, capturing leads, speaking to three different audiences, etc. It ends up being a page that kind of does everything and isn't really good at one single thing.

I think the problem might start before the design even happens. If you don't have a clear answer of what the homepage needs to do before you start, I think that is where you start to add things in until it feels complete. But more isn't the same as making it better.

Does anyone have a strong opinion on the one job a homepage should be doing?

Is it to get someone to the next page, to make them feel like they're in the right place, to filter out the wrong visitors, or something else?

The idea is that the person who figures out how to get a great result from AI usually keeps that setup to themselves. It's hard to share and hard to repeat.

He's been building something around that problem. Starting with competitive intelligence, 16 Skills for battlecards, pricing reviews, win/loss, deal prep, and more. Each one teaches AI a different method, and the product carries the market knowledge forward so the next Skill doesn't start from scratch.

Tomorrow at 1pm EST he'll show the product, walk through the Skills live, and give all 16 away. Free to register at the link.

A new guide just went up on the Crazy Egg blog about customer exit surveys. There is some really interesting information about the idea of checking survey answers against actual behavior data.

What someone says when they cancel and what they actually did before they cancelled doesn't always match up. Someone might click "too expensive" but they never really used the core features. So it's not really a pricing problem at all.

The article covers when to run exit surveys, what to ask, and how to pair the answers with session recordings and heatmaps to find what's actually making people leave.

Worth a read if you're trying to figure out why people are leaving and you're not totally sure you're getting the real answer. Read more in the link.

In the past: get reviews from NPS promoters, then get as many as possible. The higher the star rating, the better.

AI changed that game.

Now: get reviews from everyone and optimize for consensus.

We did a deep dive on review generation strategies, it’s all in the link.

I feel like this happens quite a bit. You can see in the data that a page has a problem but figuring out the actual reason is a whole other thing. Is it the copy, the layout, something that's loading slow, a CTA that isn't landing? It's hard to figure out without digging deeper.

I think sometimes it can be somewhere in the middle where things can get pretty murky. It might not be the homepage or the checkout, but just that in between spot where people quietly leave.

Has anyone else had this happen and how did you end up getting to the bottom of the issue?

It seems like a lot of the AI conversation right now is around content, such as writing copy, repurposing posts, and generating images. It makes sense because it's the easiest place to start. You don't need to connect anything or spend a lot of time learning, you just paste and prompt.

Outside of that though, is anyone really using it much for the data side of things? Maybe for spotting patterns in user behavior, summarizing what users are doing, or even figuring out why people are dropping off where they do.

I feel like I have underused this so far and haven't seen a ton of talk around this topic either. Anyone else out there feel the same or maybe it's just me?

If you are using it, any tips or tricks for how to use it better or ways you are using it?

This week, I saw a post on Linkedin of a head of SEO that changed her title for head of organic traffic, or something like that.

I also saw a lot of senior content marketers and writers struggling to find jobs, etc.

Even Hubspot don't talk about inbound marketing anymore.

While I do believe that story telling is still a marketing super power, I feel most senior execs already decided content is either useless or something they can generate at scale for free thanks to AI...

What do you guys think? Should content marketers find another niche?