Why this keeps happening

Meta doesn’t show your ad once. It shows it across multiple placements, each with different dimensions, UI overlays, and visual constraints.

When advertisers design for a single format and assume Meta will handle the rest, the platform does exactly that. It handles it. Not carefully or contextually. Just mechanically.

I'm sure that Meta will eventually be able to auto resize any creative to fit the ad placement, but as of today, it isn't reliable enough to just let it do it's thing.

Auto-cropping doesn’t know where your value proposition lives.
It doesn’t know which line of text matters most.
It doesn’t care if a CTA ends up half-hidden.

The tricky part is if your creative gets cropped strangely, nothing necessarily breaks. There are no red flags and the ad still runs fine. You may not even know about it until you get that late night Slack. But performance (and your brand image) degrades in ways that are hard to diagnose after the fact.

What “safe space” actually means

Every placement has zones where important content should not live.

Instagram Feed crops square images differently than Facebook Feed.
Reels push content upward because of interface elements at the bottom.
Stories reserve space for controls and CTAs.

Meta will happily run the same asset everywhere. That does not mean it will look good everywhere.

Meta adds interface elements on top of your creative.
Buttons.
Usernames.
CTAs.
Modals that slide up from the bottom.

If your core message lives too low on the canvas, it gets covered.

There's an easy step to make sure your ads always look sharp. When you edit placements in Ads Manager, Meta shows you a yellow “safe zone.” That’s the area you actually control.

Anything outside it is at risk.

The most common mistake we see

Easily the most common mistake advertisers make is using a single 1:1 asset for all feed placements.

Square creatives technically work in Instagram Feed, but they are far more likely to be cropped in ways that feel sloppy or unintended. Headlines get squeezed. Visual balance gets lost. Brand cues drift.

Reels introduce a different problem. The interface pushes content upward, which means anything designed without that in mind can end up competing with Meta’s own UI.

Stories look similar to Reels, but the safe space is different. Treating them as interchangeable usually leads to subtle but real issues.

None of this requires advanced strategy to fix, just an extra step or two.

Table stakes for a smooth campaign

Before launching anything for our clients at Demand Curve, we check three things.

First, we never rely on a single asset.
At minimum, we have:

• A square (1:1) version
• A 4:5 portrait version for feed
• A 9:16 version for Stories
• A slightly adjusted 9:16 version for Reels

Second, we design with safe space in mind.
Not centered “roughly,” but actually inside the guardrails.

Third, we preview every major placement manually. Anything labeled “feed” gets a 4:5 version. Reels and Stories each get their own version, even if the differences are minor. Every ad is previewed across placements before it goes live.

This is not about obsessing over design (which is another post altogether.) It’s about removing avoidable friction between the ad and the person seeing it.

Why this matters more than it seems

Safe space issues rarely tank performance outright. What they do instead is erode trust.

Ads that feel careless or awkward create hesitation. Hesitation lowers engagement. Lower engagement pushes delivery in the wrong direction.

Fixing this doesn’t create upside on its own. It removes unnecessary downside. That’s usually the better trade. :)

If you want help running Meta ads that actually impact your bottom line, we run paid acquisition for a small number of high-growth companies. If you're spending $50K+/month on Meta and you want someone who obsesses over these details, we should talk.​

— The Demand Curve Team

Let me paint two different checkout experiences.

Your internal view: A logical sequence of necessary steps. Collect shipping address (we need to know where to send it). Verify payment method (we need to get paid). Confirm order details (reduce support tickets). Each step has a reason.

Your customer's experience: A gauntlet of “should I keep going?” decisions. Every new page is another chance to reconsider. Every form field is mental effort their brain wants to avoid. Every unexpected element triggers doubt. You think you’ve built a logical flow, but they’re just feeling the drag of another screen, another field, another decision.

This is why your checkout “makes sense” to your team but has a 60% abandonment rate. You’re designing for logical progression when you should be designing for psychological momentum.

When someone clicks “checkout,” their brain runs three assessments that determine whether they complete the purchase:

1. Should I even start this?
2. Should I keep going?
3. How do I feel about this?

Most founders optimize none of these. They just replicate what they’ve seen on other sites, not understanding why those patterns work (or don’t).

Let’s break down what’s really happening at each stage, and the specific tactics that increase completion.

They're deciding whether to start in a few split seconds

Someone clicks “checkout” from your cart page. Before they enter a single piece of information, their brain is scanning for reasons to abandon.

This happens almost entirely subconsciously. They’re not thinking, “let me carefully evaluate whether this checkout is trustworthy.” They’re getting a gut feeling about whether this is going to be annoying.

Two questions firing rapidly: “Does this look safe?” and “Is this going to be a pain?”

If either answer is wrong, they bounce before starting.

Make trust instantly obvious

Your checkout needs to look boringly conventional in all the right places. Standard layout. Familiar payment logos. Orthodox security badges.

This isn’t the place to get creative with design. Every unconventional choice forces their brain to evaluate “is this legitimate?” instead of just proceeding.

Put SSL indicators and security badges above the fold. Not because customers consciously check them, but because their absence triggers suspicion.

Show accepted payment methods immediately—Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, Apple Pay. If they see their preferred method isn’t available, they’re gone.

Display testimonials or trust signals on the checkout page itself. “2,847 orders completed this week” or a specific customer quote about delivery speed removes the “am I the first person taking this risk?” concern.

Show them the whole journey upfront

Nobody wants to start a journey without knowing how long it’ll take.

Display progress indicators at the top: “Shipping → Payment → Confirmation” or “Step 1 of 3.” This reduces anxiety about unknown length and creates commitment through progress tracking.

Make it look shorter than it feels. Three clear steps feels easier than seven micro-steps, even if the total fields are identical.

Summarize what’s in their cart with images and prices. They need to quickly confirm “yes, this is what I wanted” without recalculating whether it’s worth it.

What kills momentum immediately:

Surprise costs. If shipping wasn’t shown on the product page and suddenly appears at checkout, you’ve violated their mental budget. They’ll abandon to “think about it” (translation: find it cheaper elsewhere). Always show shipping costs before checkout, or make it free.

Forced account creation. “Create an account to continue” is a brick wall for anyone who just wants to buy once and leave. Offer guest checkout prominently. You can ask them to create an account after they’ve paid—when they’re relaxed and their card isn’t on the line.

The first screen of checkout isn’t about collecting information efficiently. It’s about passing a gut-check that determines whether they’ll start at all. You can have the most optimized multi-step flow in the world, but if the first screen triggers doubt, nobody sees step two.

Make continuing easier than reconsidering

They’ve started to enter their information. Every new field, every new screen, every unexpected element is a fresh opportunity for their brain to ask: “Should I stop?”

Water flows downhill. Mental effort flows toward the easiest path. Your job: make completing checkout easier than abandoning.

Most checkout abandonment doesn’t happen because people don’t want the product. It happens because continuing requires more mental energy than their brain wants to spend.

Reduce decision points aggressively

Every choice is friction. Every dropdown is a chance to second-guess.

If you’re asking for “company size” or “industry” during checkout, you’re creating unnecessary decision points. Default to the most common option and move forward. Collect better data later through email or in-app.

Don’t ask “Residential or business address?” unless it actually changes something. Just ask for the address.

Consider whether you need phone numbers for every order. If it’s not critical for delivery, don’t ask.

Each removed field is compound improvement—less typing, less decisions, less mental effort.

Make forms feel effortless

Use address autocomplete. As they type “123 Bak…” suggest “123 Baker Street, London” with city and postal code filled automatically.

Pre-populate country based on their IP address. If 90% of your customers are in the US, default to that.

Show sample formats in form fields: “email@example.com” in the email field, “123 Baker Street” in the address field. This stops them from thinking, “wait, what format do they want?”

Enable social sign-in if you absolutely must collect account information. “Continue with Google” is one click versus typing name, email, creating password, and confirming password.

Handle errors without killing momentum

When they enter information incorrectly, don’t wait until they click “continue” to tell them. Show inline validation: “Email address needs an @ symbol” appears immediately, while they’re still in the mental context of that field.

Make error messages helpful, not punishing. Not “Invalid format” but “Phone number should be 10 digits.”

Never clear the form when someone makes a mistake. Nothing kills momentum faster than having to re-enter six fields because one was wrong.

Offer the path of least friction for payment

Provide multiple payment options. Credit card, PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay. Each missing option is a percentage of customers who’ll leave to “think about it.”

Consider “Buy Now, Pay Later” options like Affirm or Klarna, especially for purchases over $100. Breaking $400 into four $100 payments changes the mental math from “can I afford this?” to “can I afford this monthly?”

Don’t force them to leave your site to complete payment. Embedded payment forms (using Stripe or similar) keep them in your environment. Every redirect is an opportunity to reconsider.

Be careful with discount code boxes

Prominent promo code fields can hurt conversion. When someone sees “Enter promo code,” their brain immediately thinks “wait, am I paying more than I should?” If they don’t have a code, they’ll often abandon to go search for one and possibly get distracted by competitors.

If you must include it, make it subtle. Small “Have a code?” link that expands, rather than an empty field demanding attention.

You’re not trying to extract maximum information per transaction; you’re trying to minimize reasons to quit. Every field you remove, every decision you eliminate, every piece of friction you reduce increases the odds they reach the end.

The ending determines whether they complete and return

The last 30 seconds of checkout determine not just whether they complete this purchase, but how they feel about your brand going forward.

People don’t remember experiences as averages. They remember peaks and endings.

Mediocre checkout + strong ending = remembered positively.
Smooth checkout + weak ending = remembered negatively.

Your confirmation page isn’t an afterthought. It’s either depositing positive psychology or withdrawing it.

Before they click “Complete Order”

Show a complete order summary before final confirmation. Product, shipping address, total cost, everything in one place. This removes the “wait, did I enter everything correctly?” anxiety.

Make the final CTA unmistakably clear: “Place Order” or “Complete Purchase”—not “Submit” or “Continue.” They need absolute clarity about what happens when they click.

Never surprise them on the confirmation page. If the total shown at review is $147, the confirmation page better say $147. Any discrepancy triggers “did I just get charged more?”

The confirmation experience matters more than you think

Don’t just say “Order confirmed!” and dump them to a blank page.

Tell them exactly what happens next: “Your order is confirmed. You’ll receive a shipping notification within 24 hours. Your package will arrive by Thursday.”

Include order number prominently. This is their psychological proof the transaction completed.

Provide immediate access to order tracking. “Track your order” link right on the confirmation page. They don’t have to dig through email.

Avoid the immediate upsell trap

Your growth instinct says “they just bought, ask them to refer friends!”

You should resist this.

They just completed a mentally taxing process. Their brain needs resolution, not another ask. Let them breathe for a minute.

Save the “refer a friend” ask for the follow-up email, after they’ve received the product and are happy. The confirmation page should feel like relief, not the start of another conversion funnel.

The first follow-up matters

Send order confirmation email immediately.

Include everything: what they bought, when it ships, how to track it, how to contact support.

Make it feel personal. Not “Order #47382 has been confirmed” but “Your [product name] is on the way.”

Consider a day two or day three check-in: “Your order should arrive tomorrow. Reply to this email if you have any questions.” This demonstrates you’re thinking about their experience, not just the transaction.

Build the return path early

Most retention efforts start after the first purchase. I think this isn’t the right way to think about it. Instead, retention starts in the first interaction, or the first impression.

Every checkout experience deposits or withdraws psychological goodwill. If the process is smooth, trustworthy, and clear, they’ll buy again and forgive minor issues. Frustrating, confusing, sketchy-feeling = they’ll churn at first friction.

Make your confirmation page and follow-up emails feel like the start of a relationship, not the end of a transaction.

“Welcome to [brand]” instead of “Order confirmed.”

“Here’s what to expect” instead of “Track your package.”

Small language shifts that reframe purchase as a beginning, not a conclusion.

Where to start

Pull up your checkout analytics. Find the biggest drop-off point. That's your starting point.

Run this three-part audit:

1. Put your checkout URL in an incognito window. Before entering any information, does it instantly feel safe and straightforward? Would you trust it with your credit card if you'd never heard of the company?
2. Count every form field, every dropdown, every choice. Can any be removed or defaulted? Time yourself completing the flow. Every extra 10 seconds is meaningful abandonment.
3. Read your confirmation page and email out loud. Does it feel like resolution or abandonment? Does it clarify what happens next or leave them wondering?

Fix the biggest friction point first. Test. Then move to the next.

These improvements compound.

Better initial trust → more start.
Less friction → more continue.
Better endings → more complete and return.

Small changes have outsized impact because you're working with human psychology, not just interface design. Remove one unnecessary field and you might see 5-10% lift in completion. Remove three and you could see 20%+.

The founders who win aren't the ones with the most features or the slickest design. They're the ones who make buying feel effortless.

Your customers aren't carefully evaluating your checkout. They're making rapid gut calls about whether to continue. Design for their reality, not your ideal, and watch completion rates climb.

​Joey Noble​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

First, a quick reset: what we mean by a flywheel

A flywheel isn’t just “a thing that helps growth.”

A real flywheel has three properties:

• Each new user makes the product more valuable for the next user
• The system reinforces itself without proportional effort
• The advantage gets harder to copy as it scales

If growth requires the same input every cycle, you don’t have a flywheel. You have momentum. (Momentum is great of course, but flywheels are better.) ;)

Flywheel #1: Network effects (the gold standard)

What it is​
This is the cleanest flywheel to understand, and the hardest to fake.

A real network effect means that when someone new joins, existing users get more value without you having to do anything extra.

Think about a marketplace. More buyers attract more sellers. More sellers improve selection. Better selection attracts more buyers. Each loop makes the product more useful than it was before.

Common examples

• Social networks
• Marketplaces
• Collaboration tools with cross-user interaction

How it actually works

• More users → more value for everyone
• Leaving means giving something up
• Growth improves retention, not just acquisition

This is why companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and Slack compound so powerfully.

The most common mistake​
Founders think they have network effects because:

• They collect a lot of data
• They have multiple user types
• Users can technically interact

None of those guarantee a network effect.

For it to be real, each additional user must directly increase the core value for other users.

If growth just gives you more data, but doesn’t change the user experience in a meaningful way, it’s not a flywheel.

Flywheel #2: Scale flywheels

What it is​
Scale flywheels show up when growth lowers your costs or improves your economics in a way that reinforces your core promise.

The obvious version is pricing. As volume increases, unit costs drop. That lets you lower prices, invest more, or spend more to acquire customers than anyone else.

Classic example​
Amazon

More buyers → lower costs → lower prices → more buyers
And every cycle reinforces their promise.

Where this shows up

• Price leadership
• Margin advantages that can be reinvested
• The ability to outspend competitors on acquisition

Ask yourself:

“Does getting bigger make us meaningfully better for customers, or just cheaper for us to operate?”

If the cost savings don’t translate into a stronger customer-facing advantage, the flywheel is weak.

Important reality check​
Scale flywheels only matter if you have the biggest one.
If your main competitor scales at the same rate, the advantage cancels out.

Flywheel #3: Embedded flywheels (the most overestimated)

What it is​
Embedded flywheels show up when a product "embeds" itself into someone’s workflow, habits, or daily life. The more they use it, the more work, data, or muscle memory gets wrapped around it.

This can show up as:

• Workflow dependency
• Data accumulation
• Integrations
• Habit

A common example​
Salesforce
Every workflow, report, and integration makes it harder to leave.

Why founders love this one​
It feels very real when you’re close to the product.

Why it’s often weaker than people think

• Switching costs in software keep dropping
• Migration tools keep improving
• Habits are fragile without real value reinforcement

Embedded flywheels usually help retention, not acquisition or monetization. That makes them supportive, but rarely decisive on their own.

So this one only counts as a true flywheel if the embedding deepens with use and actually changes behavior over time. If it just creates mild inconvenience, it’s not much of a moat.

They’re strongest in complex B2B environments where multiple teams and systems are involved.

Flywheel #4: Brand flywheels (the most underrated)

What it is​
This is the most misunderstood flywheel, and the one founders tend to wave away too quickly.

A brand flywheel doesn’t mean “we’re well-known.” It means that usage itself changes perception in a way that lowers friction for future customers.

There are a few distinct patterns here.

1. Breaking taboos or norms

Some companies grow by making something feel normal that once felt awkward or risky.

Hims is a good example. Early on, men weren't talking openly about hair loss or ED. They were avoiding the problem altogether. Every successful customer made the idea feel less embarrassing and more acceptable. Over time, the social friction dropped.

More users → more openness → less friction → more users.

Airbnb followed a similar pattern.

In the beginning, staying in a stranger’s home felt risky and weird.
Each good experience made the next person more comfortable. Growth itself softened the barrier.

More bookings → more trust → more hosts → more guests → more bookings.

2. Reinforcing a clear association

Some brands compound by owning one idea so consistently that decision-making friction disappears.

The obvious example here is Amazon. They didn't get known for convenience, it got known for defaultness. (Is that a word?)

When people repeatedly experience:

• Fast shipping
• Easy returns
• Massive selection

The brain stops evaluating alternatives.

The flywheel becomes:
More customers → stronger association (“this plain works”) → less deliberation → more customers.

3. Community as the product

In some businesses, the community is the value. The product just organizes it.

There's a classic joke that illustrates this well.

How do you know if somebody does CrossFit?

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

The workouts aren’t proprietary. You could find any of them online for free and do them on your own. That's not why people join.
​
The flywheel lives in:

• Shared identity
• Local gyms
• Group suffering and progress

Every new member strengthens the culture, which makes the next member more likely to join (and more likely to stay.)

Other examples:

• Peloton using live classes and leaderboards
• Duolingo reinforcing streaks, norms, and shared rituals
• Notion where templates, sharing, and public workflows turn users into evangelists

Ask this question:

“If you removed the community, would the product feel materially weaker?”

If yes, you may have a brand flywheel.
If no, you probably just have a user base.

Does every company need a flywheel?

The short answer is "No."

Plenty of strong businesses grow with:

• Good fundamentals
• Clear positioning
• Solid execution

They just grow linearly, not exponentially.

If you don’t have one, you have three real options:

1. Accept it​
   Build a durable, efficient business. Optimize fundamentals. Don’t chase mythical compounding.
2. Support it​
   Use boosters (pricing, channels, partnerships) to accelerate growth, knowing they won’t last forever.
3. Engineer toward one​
   This is slower and harder, but possible:
   • Redesign product loops
   • Shift brand strategy toward behavior change
   • Introduce community or interaction where it actually adds value

The mistake is pretending a flywheel exists when it doesn’t. That’s how teams over-invest, misread signals, and burn time and money.

(If you want to learn more about how to engineer flywheels in your own business, we go much deeper in the Growth Program 2.0.)

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Think about the last product you adopted and stuck with.

You likely didn’t buy because of “Facebook Ads” or “SEO.”

You bought because the product’s story snapped into place in your head:

• “Oh, this finally fixes the annoying thing I’ve been dealing with.”
• “This is built for people like me.”
• “This is better than what I’m using now.”

Yes, channels delivered that story to you, but the story did the work.

When teams jump straight to tactics, they skip the layer that actually creates demand:

A clear, consistent narrative about who you help, what problem you solve, and why you’re the obvious choice.

The “leaky pipes” problem

This is so common that it's tempting for teams to look for more complicated fixes:

• Paid team writes one version of the story.
• Founders pitch a different one on calls.
• Website tells a third version.
• Onboarding and lifecycle emails tell a fourth.

Everything is “on brand,” but nothing is aligned.

So growth looks like:

• Ads that win attention but don’t convert.
• Landing pages that convert trials but not paid.
• Trials that sign up the wrong people.
• Churn that feels random.

The pipes look fine, but the water just leaks out at every joint.

What changes this is not “more tests.”

It’s a single, coherent story that runs through every asset.

A simple exercise: Find your narrative kernel

Let’s pull one practical exercise we use with our clients. (You can also find it in the Growth Program)

Ask yourself:

“If we disappeared tomorrow, what would our best customers miss most?”

We're not talking about features or your category, but the thing they would feel the absence of. The benefits of your product that make life easier.

For example:

• Dropbox → not “cloud storage,” but “my stuff available anywhere.”
• Calendly → not “scheduling links,” but “no more back-and-forth.”
• Shopify → not “e-commerce platform,” but “my business can exist online.”

(If you don't have one, or nothing comes to mind, then you may want to revisit the Foundational Five framework.)

Now do this:

1. Pull 10–20 real customer quotes
   • Sales calls
   • Support tickets
   • Reviews (yours + competitors)
   • Community posts
2. Highlight phrases that repeat
   • Complaints they say in their own vocabulary
   • Outcomes they brag about
   • Enemies they rant about
3. Write a one-line kernel in their words
   • “We exist so X can finally Y without Z.”

If your current homepage, ad copy, and sales deck don’t line up with that kernel, you may have an inconsistent story.

Let's look at a couple examples:

Example 1: B2B SaaS (expense management)

Product category: Expense management software for mid-size companies

The surface story (what most teams lead with):​
“Automated expense reporting with real-time controls.”

Run the exercise

You pull language from sales calls, support tickets, and reviews. The same themes keep showing up:

• “I hate being the bad guy chasing receipts.”
• “I never know there’s a problem until finance is mad.”
• “We’re always cleaning things up after the fact.”
• “Expenses aren’t the issue, surprises are.”
• “I just want to trust the numbers without policing people.”

What they’d actually miss if you disappeared

Not the features (automation, dashboards, etc)

But specifically:

• Not getting blindsided
• Not playing expense cop
• Not finding problems after the month closes

Narrative kernel (in their words):

“We exist so finance teams can trust spending without chasing people or getting surprised at month-end.”

Story gap check

If your homepage says:

“Smart expense software for modern finance teams”

But your customers care about:

“Not being surprised and not playing hall monitor”

You might have found your story gap.

Example 2: Consumer (fitness app)

Product category: At-home fitness app

The surface story:​
“Personalized workouts you can do anywhere.”

Run the exercise

You scan reviews, community posts, and cancellation surveys:

• “I never stick with programs after the first two weeks.”
• “I feel guilty paying for apps I don’t use.”
• “I don’t need harder workouts. I need to actually show up.”
• “Gyms aren’t the problem. Motivation is.”

What they’d miss if you disappeared

Not the workout library.
Not the calorie tracking.

They’d miss:

• The nudge to start
• The feeling of momentum
• The removal of decision-making

Narrative kernel:

“We exist so people can actually stick with working out without overthinking it.”

Story gap check

If your marketing leads with:

“Hundreds of workouts for every fitness level”

But users rave about:

“This is the only thing that keeps me consistent”

Your story might be underselling the real value.

Why this matters more as you scale

In the early days, you can get away with story drift.

• Friends refer friends.
• Early adopters fill in the gaps for you.
• People are forgiving because they want the product to exist.

As you move into real growth:

• You market to colder, lower-context audiences.
• You add more people to the team.
• New features stretch your messaging.

The cost of story drift compounds:

• CAC rises because hooks and pages don’t match.
• Sales cycles lengthen because buyers can’t quickly place you.
• Churn rises because people joined for the wrong reasons.

Sharpening your story is one of the few projects that improves every stage of the funnel at once.

How we formalize this inside the Growth Program

Inside the Growth Program, we treat “story” as a system, not a general "vibe."

Members build a living Story System doc that includes:

• Core Story → one clear narrative about why you exist, who you help, and what changes for them.
• Personas → jobs, pains, and language in your customer’s own words.
• Core Problems → the deeper issues all those pains ladder up to.
• Value Props → your “why us” that competitors can’t credibly copy.
• Hooks and Funnel Map → how that story shows up at the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel.

Once it’s in place, you stop writing from scratch.

Every new campaign, landing page, and email pulls from the same source of truth.

Your channels stop fighting each other and start compounding.

Want to build your Story System with us?

If this one piece was helpful, the full program goes much deeper:

• You work through the Story System step by step.
• You plug your work into templates that feed straight into ads, landing pages, and lifecycle flows.
• And you’ll also get access to over 50 tactical playbooks covering every corner of growing your startup.

If you want to see how a tighter story can move the needle on your growth, this is one of the fastest ways to find out.

👉 Check out Growth Program 2.0​

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

There are two primary ways humans navigate the world.

The Architect spends hours planning the perfect route. They consult multiple maps, compare traffic patterns, consider weather conditions. They build a detailed mental model of the journey. This is slow, deliberate, logical thinking.

The Driver just… goes. They follow familiar patterns. They make instant decisions at intersections. They operate mostly on recognition and gut feel. This is fast, automatic, instinctual thinking.

When it comes to most businesses, you’re the Architect. Your customers are the Driver.

You’ve spent months (or years) fine tuning your product, your positioning, your go-to-market strategy. But when someone hits your landing page or opens your app for the first time, they’re not pulling out the blueprints. They’re driving. Making quick judgments based on patterns they’ve seen before.

Most founder decisions optimize for the Architect’s world. Comprehensive feature sets. Detailed documentation. Nuanced positioning. But they should be optimizing for the Driver’s reality.

And here’s what makes this tricky: the more you understand your own startup, the harder it becomes to see what your customers actually see.

You know why each feature exists. You understand the technical constraints. You’ve internalized the positioning rationale. This expertise makes you uniquely unqualified to judge whether your startup is easy to navigate for someone seeing it for the first time.

This is why your landing page makes perfect sense to you but confuses prospects. Why your onboarding feels logical internally but causes drop-off externally. Why your positioning seems clear to your team but fuzzy to the market.

You’re designing for Architects when you need to design for Drivers.

How people actually navigate your startup

When someone encounters your startup for the first time, they’re not carefully evaluating you. They’re quickly assessing whether you’re worth their limited attention and cognitive energy.

They’re making three rapid assessments:

1. Filter: What can I ignore vs. what demands my attention?
2. Commit: Is this worth my effort right now?
3. Return: Will I come back to this place?

Most founders get all three wrong. Not because they’re bad at product or strategy. But because they’re thinking like Architects (comprehensive, logical, detailed) when they should be thinking like traffic engineers designing for Drivers (fast, pattern-based, energy-conserving).

Let’s break down what’s actually happening at each stage.

Filter: They're sorting signal from noise in 3 seconds

Your prospect opens your landing page. Their brain is asking: “What here deserves my attention?”

This happens in two rapid steps: elimination (what can I ignore?) and categorization (what is this thing?).

Here’s what most founders miss: the goal isn’t to show less. It’s to create a hierarchy of ignorability that makes the important stuff obvious.

When you land on a page, your brain processes three layers simultaneously:

Layer 1: Peripheral context - Navigation, footers, logos. Your brain pattern-matches these against thousands of sites you’ve seen. If they’re familiar, they get instantly filed as “background” and ignored.

Layer 2: Focal candidates - Elements that break the pattern. Your brain flags these as “needs evaluation.”

Layer 3: Commitment zone - After filtering, your brain decides what deserves conscious attention and whether this fits a problem you have.

The mistake: treating all three layers the same. Making everything “minimal” removes the contextual scaffolding your brain needs to quickly filter and focus.

What this means for your landing page

Layer 1 must be boringly familiar.

Standard nav (logo left, links right). Conventional footer. Orthodox buttons. When these match expected patterns, they’re filed as “safe background”.

Get creative here, and you’re forcing navigation into Layer 2, where it competes with your value prop.

Layer 2 must be worth the pattern interrupt.

You want 2-3 elements max that demand evaluation:

A headline that violates web copy conventions:

• Don’t: “The modern project management platform for design teams”
• Do: “Your design team just missed another deadline because feedback lived in 6 different Slack threads”

One visual that doesn’t match templates:

• Not generic “clean UI” shots
• Show the specific problem (those 6 Slack threads)

Social proof that breaks the pattern:

• Don’t: Carousel with headshots and 5-star ratings
• Do: “We cut design review time from 3 days to 4 hours. I showed the CEO and he asked why we didn’t have this six months ago. — Sarah Chen, Design Lead at Shipment”

Layer 3 closes both loops: what is this + is it relevant to me?

If your headline flagged Slack chaos, you need to both categorize yourself AND resolve the problem quickly:

“Project management for design teams. Like Asana, but built for Figma files and design feedback. All your design reviews, version history, and decisions in one thread. No more ‘which version did they mean?’ confusion.”

This does two jobs:

1. Categorization: “Project management… like Asana” - they instantly know what you are
2. Relevance: “design feedback… version history… which version” - specific problems they recognize

Three tactics that help Filter work

1. Reuse structural patterns, break content patterns

Standard nav placement, conventional footer, orthodox buttons (filterable context). But unexpected problem-focused headlines, specific visuals, concrete social proof (demands attention).

Be creative with your message, conventional with your structure.

2. Lead with the familiar category, then differentiate

“Email marketing for DTC brands” (I know what this is) “focused entirely on post-purchase sequences” (I know if I need this).

Don’t say “We’re creating a new category.” Their brain doesn’t have a file folder for you yet.

3. Use anchoring comparisons

“Like Figma, but for data teams” immediately answers both “what is this?” and “is this for me?” (The movie Alien was famously pitched as "Jaws in space.")

The non-obvious implication

Ultra-minimal landing pages with unconventional layouts often create more friction. Nothing can be quickly categorized. Every element demands evaluation.

Some high-converting pages look “busy” to founders but perform well. The busyness creates successful Layer 1 filtering. This makes Layer 2 elements stand out by contrast.

So to test yourself, ask: Can someone answer these in 3 seconds?

1. What category is this?
2. Is this relevant to a problem I have?
3. What would I learn if I kept reading?

If not, you’re designing for people already committed to evaluating you (which is almost nobody on first visit.)

Commit: They’re choosing the easiest path, not the best path

They’ve filtered. They know what you are and whether you’re relevant. Now: “Is this worth my effort right now?”

Not “is this the best option?” The question is: “Is the path to value easy enough that I’ll bother?”

Water flows downhill. Prospects take the path of least resistance. Engineer the terrain to make commitment the easiest direction.

A common trap: Adding friction for qualification. “Fill out this 8-field form so we can route you correctly.” You’ve created an uphill climb when they’re looking for downhill.

Four ways to reduce commitment friction

1. Reduce decision points

Every choice is friction. Signup dropdown with 6 “company size” options creates 6 chances to second-guess and bounce.

Default to “1-50 employees” and move on. Collect better data later.

2. Split overwhelming actions

Nobody wants to “complete your profile” (sounds like work).

But they’ll “add your company name” (3 seconds). Then logo, then bio, then team size. Each a tiny win instead of one daunting task.

3. Use valid defaults

Pre-select the most common option. If 80% choose “Standard” plan, select it by default.

4. Reveal features gradually

Don’t show everything at once. Like a video game, you unlock capabilities as you progress, keeping cognitive load low.

Three nudges that actually work

Social proof: “2,847 founders used this template last week” - removes the “is this worth my time?” question.

Curiosity gaps: “See how [competitor] increased retention by 40%” - creates an open loop they need to close.

Scarcity: “Only 3 spots left in this cohort” - but use sparingly or it becomes suspicious.

People don’t fail to commit because they’re lazy. They fail because every action requires mental energy their brain is trying to conserve. Make commitment the most energy-efficient option.

Return: Every interaction deposits or withdraws

Retention doesn’t start when someone becomes a customer. It starts in the first interaction.

After each touchpoint—landing page, onboarding, first email—their brain files away an impression. That impression shapes whether they’ll return and how they’ll interpret future interactions.

Positive impression → More likely to come back, open emails, explore features, forgive bugs.

Negative impression → Primed to ignore you, interpret ambiguity negatively, churn at first friction.

So don’t focus all your retention energy on post-purchase while ignoring the psychological ledger maintained from first contact.

Four things that deposit positive psychology

1. Clear feedback

Not “Success!” (vague).

But “Your workspace is ready. Here’s what you can do first:” (specific, forward-looking).

2. Reassurance

“Most teams start here” removes “am I doing this right?”

“You can change this anytime” removes “what if I pick wrong?”

3. Demonstrate care

After signup, don’t immediately push them to invite teammates (your growth goal). First ensure they complete one valuable action (their success goal).

4. Strategic delighters

• Personalized welcome video from your founder
• Checklist adapted to their use case
• Day 3 email asking “what’s confusing?” before they churn

The goal: create a memory pattern that says “this company understands me.”

The peak-end rule

People don’t remember experiences as averages. They remember peaks and endings.

Mediocre experience + strong ending = remembered positively.

Great experience + weak ending = remembered negatively.

Your confirmation page, first-day email, welcome experience—these aren’t afterthoughts. They’re determining whether they return.

Don’t end with “Welcome! Here are 47 features to explore.”

End with “You just took the first step. Here’s exactly what happens next, and here’s how we’ll help you succeed.”

Where to start

Pick your highest-stakes first impression (usually your landing page). Audit each phase: Filter, Commit, Return. Fix the biggest friction point first. Test with people who’ve never heard of you and watch where they hesitate, misinterpret, or give up.

This is painful. You’ll see them miss “obvious” things and misunderstand careful positioning. Good. That’s the gap between your map and their territory.

Small improvements compound aggressively.

• Better Filter → more reach Commit.
• Better Commit → more complete actions.
• Better Return → more come back.

These aren’t additive, they’re multiplicative.

You don’t need to be perfect. Just easier to navigate than your competitors.

The more you understand your startup, the harder it becomes to see it through fresh eyes. The Territory Framework forces you to map from the customer’s perspective, not the founder’s.

Most founders optimize for how they want customers to think. Better founders optimize for how customers actually think.

The map is not the territory. Fix the navigation, and watch everything else start moving in the right direction.

​Joey Noble​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

One of the most frustrating things about growth is that the symptom and the cause are usually far apart.

CAC goes up, so it must be the ads.

Conversion drops, so it must be the landing page.

Pipeline slows, so it must be the channel.

Those are reasonable conclusions, they’re just usually late ones.

By the time a problem shows up in metrics, the real issue has often been baked into the system much earlier (in how different parts of the business were designed to work together).

That’s why teams can work incredibly hard and still feel like nothing compounds.

The mistake most founders make

When something isn’t working, founders usually ask:

“What should we change?”

A better question is:

“Where is this system breaking?”

Because different breaks require very different fixes.

If you misdiagnose the break, you end up fixing the wrong thing, and no amount of testing makes that better.

A simpler way to diagnose growth issues

Instead of starting with channels or metrics, start with where alignment tends to fail.

Most growth problems show up in a small number of predictable places. If you understand what each break looks like and why it happens, you can narrow the problem quickly.

Here are three of the most common ones.

1. Market ↔ Product breaks

(You built something, but it’s not tightly matched to a real job.)

What this break actually means

Your product exists, people can use it, but it doesn’t map cleanly to a problem the market feels urgently enough.

This isn’t about product quality.

It’s about relevance and intensity.

How it shows up

People sign up, but don’t stick around.

Feedback is positive but vague.

Retention never really flattens.

You hear things like:

• “It’s interesting, but…”
• “I can see who this is for, just not us.”
• “We’d use it occasionally.”

Example

A SaaS tool for async team updates.

The idea is solid. People like the concept. But the market already has workarounds (Slack, Notion, docs). The pain isn’t sharp enough to change behavior.

The product works, but the job isn’t urgent.

That’s a Market–Product break.

2. Model ↔ Market breaks

(People like the product, but the way you charge doesn’t match how they buy.)

What this break actually means

The value might be real, but the pricing, packaging, or payment structure doesn’t fit the buyer’s expectations or constraints.

This is often mistaken for a “sales problem.”

How it shows up

Deals stall late.

Discounts keep creeping in.

People ask for pilots, smaller plans, or exceptions.

You hear:

• “Can we start cheaper?”
• “We need approval for this.”
• “Can we pay annually instead?”

Example

A $20/month per-seat tool sold to finance teams at large companies.

The price is low. The friction is high.

Procurement doesn’t want to deal with per-seat SaaS for a small line item. Buyers would rather pay a larger annual contract or bundle it.

The problem isn’t price sensitivity. It’s a mismatch between the model and how the market buys.

3. Product ↔ Channel breaks

(You’re reaching people in the wrong context for what your product requires.)

What this break actually means

Channels come with built-in assumptions about attention, intent, and patience.

If your product experience doesn’t match that context, the channel will look broken (even if it’s delivering the “right” people).

How it shows up

Traffic comes in, but activation is weak.

Funnels leak early.

Channels work at small scale and fall apart when pushed.

Teams usually respond by rewriting copy or changing creatives.

But the deeper issue is often friction.

Example

A complex B2B analytics product advertised on Meta.

The ads drive clicks. People are curious. But once they land, they’re asked to connect data sources, configure dashboards, and wait for insights.

Meta delivers low-intent, low-patience users.

The product requires time and focus.

That mismatch always kills performance.

A pattern we see all the time

Founders often tell us:

“We’ve tested every channel. Nothing scales.”

When we slow things down, we usually find they’ve been rotating channels while keeping the same underlying misalignment intact.

Same assumptions.

Same pricing logic.

Same product friction.

So naturally, when they try a different channel, they get the same result.

Once the alignment is fixed, a channel they already wrote off often starts working.

Why we approach growth this way

This alignment-first mindset is core to how we think about growth at Demand Curve.

Inside the Growth Program, we use it to help teams stop chasing tactics and start engineering systems that compound.

But you don’t need a framework to start benefiting from it.

The next time growth feels stuck, don’t ask what to try next.

Ask where the system is breaking.

You might already have all the right pieces in play, you just need to shuffle them around on the board.

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Here’s how most people think about funnels:

• Top of funnel (TOFU): People who are problem-aware but don’t know about specific solutions or brands yet.
• Middle of funnel (MOFU): People who are solution-aware and comparing different approaches.
• Bottom of funnel (BOFU): People who are ready to buy, comparing specific brands or platforms.

This makes perfect sense in a search context because search has explicit intent baked into every query.

Someone searching “how to improve my marketing performance” is top of funnel: they know something’s wrong, but they don’t know what the fix is yet.

Someone searching “how to hire a marketing freelancer” is middle of funnel: they’ve identified a solution (hire someone), they’re just figuring out how to do it.

Someone searching “best places to hire freelancers” is bottom of funnel: they’re comparing specific platforms.

For example, someone searching “Demand Curve matchmaking” is as bottom-of-funnel as it gets: they know exactly what they want and who they want it from.

You can segment these people cleanly because their search query tells you their intent.

But social ads don’t work this way.

Social ads have no reliable intent signal

When you run ads on Meta, LinkedIn, or TikTok, you’re not targeting intent. You’re targeting demographics and psychographics.

You can target “founders of SaaS companies with 10-50 employees.” You can target “people interested in marketing and growth.” You can even build lookalike audiences based on your best customers.

But none of that tells you intent.

A founder scrolling LinkedIn might be actively looking to hire a marketer right now. Or they might have hired someone last week. Or they might be three months away from even thinking about it.

You have no idea. The platform has no idea. The founder might not even know yet.

So when we talk about “top of funnel” and “bottom of funnel” in social ads, we’re really just making educated guesses based on weak proxies:

“Top of funnel” on social = broad cold audiences. People who’ve never heard of you. Could be millions of people. Some have high intent right now. Most don’t.

“Middle of funnel” on social = lookalikes or engaged audiences. People who share characteristics with your customers, or people who’ve engaged with your content. Still no real intent signal—they just look like people who might care.

“Bottom of funnel” on social = retargeting. People who’ve visited your site, watched a video, or engaged with your brand in some way. They’re brand-aware, but that doesn’t mean they’re ready to buy. They might have clicked out of curiosity. They might be researching for six months from now.

The funnel stages we use in social ads are mostly a labeling convention, not a reflection of actual buyer readiness.

Why this breaks traditional funnel thinking

Most founders build funnels like this:

1. Run top-of-funnel ads to build awareness
2. Capture emails or leads
3. Nurture them through a sequence
4. Push them to convert with retargeting

This works great when you have intent signals (like search). You know someone searching “best CRM for startups” is actively evaluating, so you can build a nurture flow that matches that timeline.

But in social ads, you’re spraying a broad audience where:

• 1% might have high intent right now and will convert immediately
• 10-20% might have moderate intent and will convert after a few touches
• The remaining 80-90% are anywhere from “vaguely interested” to “won’t need this for a year”

If you try to nurture all of them the same way, you’re either:

• Over-nurturing the 1% who were ready to buy anyway (annoying them)
• Under-nurturing the 80% who need way more time (losing them before they’re ready)

Traditional funnel logic assumes people move linearly through stages. Social ads assume people are scattered randomly across a timeline you can’t see.

What actually happens when someone sees your social ad

Let’s say you run a cold ad to a broad audience of 100,000 founders.

Scenario 1: High intent right now (1-2%)

They see your ad. They already have the problem, they’re already looking for a solution, and your ad happens to show up at the right time. They click, they sign up or buy. Done. Ads worked.

Scenario 2: Moderate intent, needs a few touches (10-20%)

They see your ad. They’re interested, but they want to make sure you’re legit. They visit your site, maybe read a case study, see a retargeting ad a few days later, then convert. Ads worked, but it took multiple touches.

Scenario 3: Low or future intent (80-90%)

They see your ad. Maybe they click, maybe they don’t. They’re not ready to buy right now. Maybe they’ll need this in three months, maybe never. If you retarget them aggressively, you’re wasting money. If you don’t stay in front of them at all, they’ll forget you exist by the time they are ready.

The key insight: You can’t predict which scenario someone falls into when they first see your ad.

All you can do is:

1. Put a strong ad in front of a broad audience
2. Let the high-intent people self-select and convert
3. Retarget everyone else and let time sort it out

Why “just get the ad out there” is often the best strategy

Here’s what a lot of founders get wrong: they try to build elaborate nurture sequences before they even know if the core offer resonates.

They spend weeks building a 7-email drip campaign, a lead magnet funnel, and a retargeting strategy for three different audience segments.

But it's all wasted energy if your top-of-funnel ad isn’t good enough to convert the 1-2% of people with high intent right now. No amount of nurturing will fix it.

The highest-leverage move is to nail the top-of-funnel ad first.

If the ad is strong:

• High-intent people will convert immediately
• Moderate-intent people will engage, visit your site, and convert after a few touches
• Low-intent people will ignore it or file it away for later

If the ad is weak:

• High-intent people won’t convert because the message didn’t land
• You’ll attract the wrong audience
• Your retargeting pool will be full of people who were never going to buy anyway

So the play is: Get a really good ad out there. Let the market tell you who has intent. Then retarget everyone else until their intent grows.

You’re not nurturing people through a funnel. You’re staying visible while their timeline catches up to your offer.

How to think about “funnel stages” in social ads

If we accept that social ads don’t have reliable intent signals, here’s a better mental model:

Top of funnel = Broad testing ground

Goal: Find out if your message resonates with anyone, and see who raises their hand.

Audience: Cold, broad, or interest-based. Could be millions of people.

What success looks like: A small percentage converts immediately. A larger percentage engages (clicks, visits, watches). You’re gathering signal, not driving mass conversions.

Common mistake: Expecting high conversion rates. You’re fishing in the ocean here—most people aren’t ready.

Middle of funnel = Engaged but not ready

Goal: Stay in front of people who showed interest but didn’t convert.

Audience: Lookalikes based on your best customers, or people who engaged with your content but didn’t take action.

What success looks like: Slightly better conversion rates than cold traffic, but still mostly gathering future buyers.

Common mistake: Treating this like “warm leads.” They’re not warm—they’re just statistically similar to people who bought. Most still have no intent.

Bottom of funnel = Brand-aware, waiting for the right moment

Goal: Convert people who already know you exist and are waiting for the right time.

Audience: Website visitors, video viewers, people who clicked an ad but didn’t convert.

What success looks like: Higher conversion rates, but on a longer timeline. Some convert fast, others take months.

Common mistake: Assuming everyone in retargeting is “ready to buy.” They’re not. They’re just brand-aware. You’re playing a waiting game.

What this means for how you build your funnel

Here’s how to structure your social ads strategy when you accept that intent is invisible:

1. Test multiple top-of-funnel concepts, but keep the funnel simple

Don’t build a complex funnel yet. Instead, test 5-10 different ad concepts with different hooks, angles, and value props. Run them to broad audiences.

Your goal isn’t to find “the one perfect ad.” It’s to see which messages resonate enough that high-intent people convert immediately. You’re looking for signal.

If one or two ads start converting 1-2% of cold traffic and the unit economics work, you have something. If nothing converts, you need to keep testing different angles. No amount of funnel complexity will outwork bad messaging.

The key insight: Don’t build elaborate nurture sequences before you know what messaging actually works. Test at the top first.

2. Install a simple retargeting layer

Once you have traffic from your top-of-funnel tests, set up basic retargeting for people who visited your site but didn’t convert.

Don’t overcomplicate it. Just show them your best-performing ads again, maybe with social proof or a slightly different angle. You’re reminding them you exist, not trying to “nurture” them through some elaborate sequence.

3. Let time do the work

Some people will convert in 24 hours. Others will take three months. You can’t control the timeline, you can only stay visible.

Keep testing and running cold ads to feed the top of the funnel. Keep retargeting people who showed interest. Let the high-intent people convert when they’re ready.

4. Add complexity only when you have signal

Once you know which messages resonate (based on which ads actually drive conversions), then you can build:

• A lead magnet to capture emails from people who aren’t ready to buy yet
• A short email sequence (3-5 emails) that reinforces the value prop
• Segmented retargeting based on which pages people visited or which content they engaged with

But don’t spend too much time and resources on this stuff upfront. Wait until you have proof that people actually care about your messaging.

A quick diagnostic: Is your funnel too complex for social ads?

Answer these questions:

1. Do you have a lead magnet or email sequence before someone can see your core offer? If yes, you might be over-gating. High-intent people don’t want to jump through hoops, they just want to buy.
2. Are you running multiple campaigns targeting “different funnel stages” but seeing similar performance across all of them? That’s a sign that your audience segmentation isn’t actually correlated with intent. Simplify.
3. Are you nurturing people for weeks or months before asking for a conversion? That works on search. On social, most people either convert fast or need way more time than your sequence allows for. You’re better off staying visible with retargeting than trying to “nurture” them through an artificial timeline.
4. Are you frustrated that your “bottom of funnel” retargeting audience isn’t converting at the rates you expected? That’s because they’re not actually bottom of funnel, they’re just brand-aware. Lower your expectations and lengthen your timeline.

Want help building a funnel that actually matches how social ads work?

Inside the Growth Program, we walk through frameworks like this one and help you build a funnel that fits your channel, not some generic template.

You’ll learn:

• How to structure your ad strategy based on the channel you’re using (search vs social vs cold email)
• When to add complexity (lead magnets, nurture sequences) and when to keep it simple
• How to measure success when intent is invisible and timelines are unpredictable

You can try the full program free for 7 days.

If you’re tired of building complex funnels that don’t match how people actually buy, this is worth a look.

👉 Check out the Growth Program here​

​Joey Noble​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Some quick context before we dive in.

Over the last few issues, we’ve been writing about something we call the Story System. It’s one of our most popular frameworks inside the Growth Program, and after the last newsletter, a bunch of you replied asking for more practical ways to apply it.

So we’ll stay on the topic for an issue or two to help dial in your messaging.

Today’s focus is a simple way to figure out where your messaging is breaking before you go rewrite anything.

The Four Failure Buckets

Most messaging problems fall into one of four buckets:

1. Audience — You’re talking to the wrong person.
2. Problem — You’re focusing on the wrong pain.
3. Value prop — You’re not giving a sharp enough “why us.”
4. Sequence — You’re telling the right story in the wrong order.

Let’s walk through each one with quick checks you can run this week.

1) Audience: “This sounds great, but not for me.”

This is what it looks like when your message is technically clear, but not personal enough to pull the right people in.

What to look for

• You see impressions, but engagement is low.
• People land, skim, and bounce.
• Or you get signups, but not the customers you actually want more of.

How to diagnose it

The job test

Look at your homepage or a core ad and ask:

Could three very different roles all reasonably think this is for them?

Example:

“The all-in-one platform to help teams move faster.”

A founder could read this and think it’s for them. A product manager could too. So could an ops lead.

That’s the problem. When everyone can see themselves in the message, no one feels specifically addressed.

Compare it to:

“Keep product launches moving without chasing approvals across Slack and email.”

Now the audience narrows naturally. The wrong people self-select out. The right ones lean in.

The “they” test

Scan your copy for vague language like “teams,” “businesses,” or “users.”

Then ask:

Could the person I actually want read this and immediately think, ‘That’s me’?

Example:

“We help teams stay aligned and move faster.”

Versus:

“Built for RevOps leaders who are tired of babysitting handoffs between sales and finance.”

In the second version, the reader doesn’t have to translate. They either see themselves or they don’t.

How to fix it

Start small. Rewrite one headline or one email as if you’re speaking to a single, specific person in a specific situation. Name their role. Name what they’re responsible for. Anything written for “everyone” should be the first thing to go.

2) Problem: “That’s true, but not what hurts most.”

This is what happens when your story is accurate, but doesn’t create urgency.

What to look for

• Prospects say you’re interesting, but don’t move forward.
• Sales calls feel friendly, then stall.
• You hear, “This isn’t a priority right now.”

How to diagnose it

Ask yourself whether your message names a surface pain or the real consequence behind it.

Example:

Surface-level pain:

“Approvals get lost in email.”

Most teams will agree with this. It’s true. But it sounds more like an annoyance.

The deeper problem:

“When approvals get lost, deadlines slip, launches get delayed, and I’m the one who looks bad.”

That’s what people actually rearrange their week to fix.

If your messaging never names the downstream consequence, it rarely earns urgency or budget.

How to fix it

Anchor your story to the risk and responsibility your customer carries, not just the inconvenience they complain about.

3) Value prop: “You sound like everyone else.”

This is where a lot of messaging falls apart under real comparison.

What to look for

• Your pitch works until competitors enter the conversation.
• Buyers say they’re comparing you to X and Y, and you don’t have a clear angle.
• Your site reads like a features list.

How to diagnose it

Write your main value prop in a doc. Then replace your logo with your top competitor’s.

Example:

“The fastest way to manage projects.”

Could Asana say this? Yes.

Could Monday.com say this? Yes.

Could ClickUp say this? Also yes.

That means it’s not a value prop. It’s table stakes.

Compare it to:

“The only project tool that shows where work is stuck before leadership asks.”

Most competitors would struggle to say this without lying or changing their product. That’s the difference.

How to fix it

Force clarity by writing three things side by side:

• What customers are doing instead today.
• Why you’re better, in one clean sentence.
• Which persona actually cares about that difference, and why.

Pick three to five value props that hit real problems and aren’t easy to copy. Those should show up everywhere.

4) Sequence: “Good story, wrong moment.”

Sometimes the story itself is fine. It’s just showing up too early. (We discussed this concept last week in a bit more detail.)

What to look for

• People bounce on strong offers.
• Mid-funnel content performs better than top-of-funnel.
• Things only work when a founder is there to explain.

How to diagnose it

Map one core path end to end:

Ad → landing page → CTA → first product or onboarding touch.

For each step, ask:

What single belief is this step trying to create?

Example:

Top-of-funnel ad:

“Book a demo to see how our AI-powered workflow engine integrates with your tech stack.”

Versus:

“Still chasing approvals across five tools?”

Same product. Same story. Different moment.

The first message belongs later, once interest exists.

The second earns the first belief: this is my problem.

How to fix it

• Top of funnel earns interest.
• Middle builds understanding and contrast.
• Bottom removes risk.
• Post-purchase pays off the promise.

Each step does one job, then hands off.

Want this system set up for your own startup?

The diagnostic you just read is one slice of the Story System, our proprietary framework inside the Growth Program.

It’s what we use to help teams define one clear narrative, then map how that story should show up at different moments in the buyer journey.

When teams go through it, messaging stops drifting. Funnels get simpler. Tests start compounding instead of resetting.

Because everything lives in a single system, the diagnosis is faster and less emotional. You’re not guessing. You’re checking failure points against a framework you already trust.

If you want a repeatable way to debug your messaging instead of guessing every time performance dips, this is worth a look.

👉 Learn the Story System inside the Growth Program​

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Look at your earliest touchpoints:

Top-of-funnel ads. Social posts. Your homepage hero. The first welcome email.

If you’re like most teams, those assets try to do everything at once.

They explain what you are, who you’re for, the problem, the solution, how you work, why you’re different, and why someone should act now.

That’s not a message.

That’s a pitch deck.

Your buyers don’t move from “never heard of you” to “I fully understand your product, market, model, and brand and want to give you money” in one go.

They move in micro-beliefs:

• “This sounds like my problem.”
• “This looks built for people like me.”
• “They seem credible.”
• “This is different from what I’ve already tried.”
• “This feels safe to test.”

Your funnel has to earn those in order.

If you try to win all of them in the first sentence, you'll win none.

The Rule of One

There’s an old copywriting principle called “The Rule of One.” Every asset should have one goal in mind and encourage the buyer to take one action. It sounds simple, but is surprisingly difficult in practice.

Do a quick check on your own funnel to see what I mean.

Pick one ad.

One landing page.

One core email.

Then ask yourself:

“What is the one belief this asset is trying to create?”

If you can’t answer that in one line, you're asking the message to do too much.

A cleaner sequence usually looks like this:

• Top-of-funnel ad → “This is your problem.”
• Landing hero → “We solve this, for people like you.”
• Mid-page section → “Here’s why we’re different.”
• CTA → “Here’s the lowest-friction next step.”

Each asset earns one belief and hands the lead to the next stage. (That’s the backbone of the funnel-based messaging map we teach inside our Growth Program.)

The three most common “too much, too soon” patterns

From reviewing a lot of funnels, we see three patterns:

1. “Deck on the homepage”
   • Hero tries to explain vision, product, roadmap, and philosophy.
   • Result: people bounce before they ever feel “this is about me.”
2. “Feature dump in the ad”
   • Ads list 5–7 features to “show depth.”
   • Result: nobody remembers any of them.
3. “Hard sell at awareness”
   • First touch pushes “book a demo” or “talk to sales.”
   • Result: most of your buyers never gets far enough to understand why it’s worth their time.

None of these are bad tools. They’re just out of sequence.

How to fix it with a simple funnel map

Grab a doc and map this for one product:

1. Top of funnel — Hook

• Customer mindset: “I have this pain, but I don’t know you yet.”
• Job of the message: Name the pain or tease the outcome.
• Example: “Always chasing approvals? Flowline keeps projects moving without babysitting.”

2. Mid funnel — Story

• Customer mindset: “I’m curious, but I’m comparing.”
• Job of the message: Explain how you solve it and why you’re different.
• Example: “One place for requests, approvals, and updates. Integrates with Slack and email so work stops getting lost in threads.”

3. Bottom funnel — Risk removal

• Customer mindset: “I’m close, I just don’t want to regret this.”
• Job of the message: Remove risk and make the next step obvious.
• Example: “Try Flowline free for 14 days. No credit card. Import your current projects in two clicks.”

4. Post-purchase — Payoff

• Customer mindset: “Did this live up to the promise?”
• Job of the message: Pay off the story you started with.
• Example: “This week Flowline moved 14 approvals without you sending a single reminder.”

If any stage tries to do the job of three stages at once, you’re trying too hard too early.

Want help pressure-testing your own funnel?

Inside the Growth Program, we teach a framework called the Story System.

It’s what we use to help teams get clear on one core story (and then figure out how that story should show up at different moments in the buyer journey.)

The goal isn’t to say more.

It’s to know what to say now and what to save for later.

As you work through it, you’ll:

• Clarify the one story you want your market to remember
• Map that story to real personas, problems, and value props
• Translate it into hooks, funnel copy, and CTAs that each have a clear job

That’s how you stop overloading every touchpoint and start building a clean, compounding narrative instead.

If you want your next round of tests to be story-led instead of “throw everything in and see,” this is built for that.

👉 Learn the Story System inside the Growth Program​

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Every crowded category comes with a default narrative:

• CRMs → manage contacts
• Project tools → assign and track tasks
• Email tools → write and send faster
• AI tools → automate repetitive work
• Fitness apps → track workouts
• Protein bars → high protein, low sugar

The category defines the problem for you before you ever show up.

So most founders position themselves as a variation of the familiar:

• “Faster than…”
• “Cheaper than…”
• “All-in-one alternative to…”
• “AI-powered version of…”

It sounds logical, but it's also the reason your positioning feels interchangeable.

Because if your story reinforces the existing frame, customers don’t assign you a new mental slot. They simply file you under “another one of those.”

In a cluttered market, that’s the fastest way to disappear.

Salience decides who wins crowded markets

Growth can feel complex, but our brains are simple:

We pick whatever comes to mind first. (That first thought is called "salience".)

If the category owns the story, the incumbent wins by default because they’re already associated with that story.

Which is why:

• Better features don’t automatically convert
• Lower pricing doesn’t create loyalty
• A nicer homepage doesn’t fix a weak narrative

You can improve the product.

You can add features.

You can polish your copy.

But if your messaging stays inside the category’s frame, your salience never rises.

You remain a version of something else, not a category of one.

So what’s the alternative?

You have to reframe the problem.

Great positioning doesn’t come from describing what you do.

It comes from redefining the problem so your category stops being the best answer.

Breakout companies don’t fight incumbents head-on.

They make incumbents look misaligned with the real problem.

For example:

• Notion​
  Didn’t say “better project management.”
  👉Reframed: “Your work is scattered. You need an all-in-one workspace.”
• Figma​
  Didn’t say “cloud-based Sketch.”
  👉Reframed: “Design is collaborative. Tools should be multiplayer.”
• Superhuman​
  Didn’t say “a faster Gmail.”
  👉Reframed: “Email is leverage… here’s the premium performance layer.”
• Liquid Death​
  Didn’t say “better water.”
  🤘Reframed: “Water is boring. Let’s make it punk.”

None of these companies invented new categories.

They reframed the problem so that the incumbent’s story no longer fit.

That’s how you create salience when the category is crowded.

A simple tool you can use today: The Reframe Ladder

Here’s a quick, four-step exercise inspired by the deeper work we do inside the Growth Program.

Use it to shift your message out of the category’s frame and into your own.

​We’ve included a worksheet you can work directly in here.

Pick your category and walk through these four steps:

1. Start with the obvious problem the category solves

What the category assumes everyone cares about.

e.g., “Teams need better communication.”

2. Surface the deeper problem your persona actually feels

The emotional or operational tension the category is ignoring.

e.g., “The issue isn’t communication. It’s scattered context and switching.”

3. Show why the category fails to solve that deeper problem

Expose the misalignment.

e.g., “Communication tools help you talk more, not work better.”

4. Define the new problem only your product is built to solve

This becomes the foundation of your narrative.

e.g., “Your real bottleneck is fragmented information. You need one workspace.”

Once you articulate this, you immediately stop sounding like everyone else because you’re no longer solving the same problem they are.

Want help finding your own reframe?

If you’re in a saturated category and your messaging feels like it blends in, you don’t need a new slogan.

You need a new problem story.

Inside the Growth Program, we walk you through the full process we use with founders to build a story that actually performs across channels.

It’s called the Story System, our proprietary framework we’ve used with some of the fastest-growing brands out there. And it fixes the two problems that make growth a lot harder than it needs to be:

1. People don’t understand why they should choose you.
2. Your team is telling slightly different versions of the story.

When those two things aren’t clear, everything downstream gets harder. Ads fall flat, landing pages get rewritten every month, and creative tests don’t compound.

Inside the Story System, you’ll build:

• Core Problems → the deeper tension your narrative should anchor to
• Personas → the motivations and pressures that shape what actually resonates
• Value Props → the “why us” your competitors can’t copy
• Hooks → angles that stop the scroll and lift conversions
• Narrative Map → how your message shows up across ads, pages, product, sales, and onboarding

Founders tell us this is the point where everything clicks and where growth finally feels like it’s moving in one direction instead of five.

(And if this newsletter resonated, you’re already doing the first step.)

​👉 Build your own Story System inside Growth Program 2.0 ​

​Devon Reynolds​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

Part 1: Diagnose Your Problem First

Creative strategy is not just about making ads. It’s about solving business problems through creativity. Every ad should be designed to test a hypothesis that directly impacts your growth and generates learnings that fuel the next testing cycle.

Before creating any ad, we always diagnose the biggest bottleneck preventing growth. These fall into five categories that map to specific creative types.

Funnel Problems

You might have an awareness issue where not enough of the right people are seeing the brand. You might have an audience alignment issue where ads attract the wrong users, leading to high churn or low LTV.

Or you might have a conversion issue where people see ads but don't take action, which points to a messaging, offer, or UX problem (or another audience alignment problem).

Product Problems

Perhaps you have a retention issue where users sign up but don't stay, or an activation problem where users don't engage after signing up. You could also be facing a product-market fit issue, targeting the wrong market and seeing poor adoption as a result.

Unit Economics Problems

Your pricing might not align with perceived value or your market's willingness to pay. Your LTV and CAC might be misaligned, with the cost to acquire a customer too high relative to lifetime value. Or maybe margin is healthy, but cash velocity (how quickly you're recovering your marketing spend) is too slow, causing your paid engine to stall out.

Targeting Problems

You might have an unclear target market. You could be exploring new markets and testing untested audience segments. Or you might be stuck in the competitor-copying trap, just copying competitors without understanding the deeper reasons for their success. What we refer to in the Growth Program as "Growth DNA Profiles."

Messaging & Story Problems

You might have a messaging mismatch where ads communicate the wrong thing, like features instead of benefits. Or, and this is a common one, you could be suffering from the "too-cute problem." When creatives try to make the most clever ad of all time instead of the one that actually converts.

Now Map Your Problem to the Right Creative Job

Once you've identified your bottleneck, here's which type of creative you actually need:

If you have an awareness issue (not enough of the right people seeing you), your ads need to stop the scroll and grab cold attention. Jump to Part 2, Step 2A.

If you have a conversion issue (people see your ads but don't act), your ads need to overcome objections or build trust. Jump to Part 2, Step 2C or 2E depending on whether it's hesitation or paranoia.

If you have an audience alignment issue (attracting the wrong people), you need tighter persona targeting and clearer positioning. Use Persona Callout hooks from Part 2, Step 2A, or revisit your targeting entirely.

If you have a retention or activation problem, you probably don't have a creative problem—you have a product problem. Fix that first. Creative can't save a product people don't want to use. Same applies to PMF issues.

If you have a unit economics issue, creative won't solve it entirely, but it can help. Focus on ads that drive higher-intent users (Part 2, Step 2C) or test hooks that attract higher-LTV segments using Persona Callout.

If you have an unclear target market, use creative as a discovery tool. Build narrow Persona Callout tests across different segments and see what actually converts. Part 2, Step 2A will help.

If you're exploring new markets, same approach—test different persona angles and let the data tell you who responds.

If you have a messaging mismatch (communicating the wrong value), your ads need to educate and persuade. Jump to Part 2, Step 2B.

Now that you know what job your creative needs to do, let's get into how to build it.

Part 2: The "Choose the Right Hook" Decision Tree

This sits on top of your hook table that we covered last week. You should never pick a hook purely because someone else did it or it "sounds clever." You need to realize that each one is good at doing a specific job, and you should decide which job that is.

Step 1: Decide the main job of the ad

One ad, one job.

When you’ve decided the job of your ad, scroll to Step 2 (A-E).

• A. Stop the scroll / cold attention
• B. Educate or persuade people who already know you exist
• C. Overcome objections for high-intent buyers
• D. Retarget and push people to convert
• E. Build trust in a high-consideration category

Once that’s clear, the hook choice is mostly a branching exercise.

Step 2A: If the goal is to stop the scroll (TOF awareness)

Top of funnel isn’t about explaining everything. It’s about getting a thumb to pause.

If your category is crowded, consider using a Pattern Interrupt. Lo-fi, “wrong” looking visuals. Unusual framing, ugly on purpose, odd compositions. The bar here is basically: “Did this look out of place enough to steal a glance?”

If your product is novel or misunderstood, leverage the Curiosity Gap. “Nobody talks about this part of [X]…” or blur, censor, or partially hide the key detail. Show the “after” first, then rewind.

If your persona is narrow and very clear, use a Persona Callout. “If you’re a [specific identity], this is for you.” You lose broad reach and gain people who actually feel seen.

If your audience is driven by identity or emotion, use POV. “POV: you finally sleep through the night.” “POV: your team ships without you slacking them at 11pm.”

If you’re not sure where to start, cold traffic defaults that usually lift CTR are Pattern Interrupt and Curiosity Gap.

Step 2B: If the goal is to educate or persuade (MOF consideration)

Here you’re moving from “What is this?” to “Why this instead of something else?”

If you’re fighting a known alternative—existing tools, DIY solutions, the incumbent brand—use Us vs. Them. Side-by-side comparison, “Old way vs new way,” or “10 tools vs 1 platform.”

If your audience is stuck on the wrong mental model, use Contrarian. “Everyone tells you to do X. That’s why you’re stuck.” Then present the new method.

If your buyer needs structure to be convinced, use Listicle. “3 reasons your sleep is wrecked.” “5 things sabotaging your CAC.”

If they need to picture the future state, use POV. A short story of “life after this works” or a day-in-the-life format with the product baked in.

If you’re stuck, Listicle is a safe place to start.

Step 2C: If the goal is to overcome objections (High-Intent)

People here already care. They’re just hesitating.

“I don’t fully trust this brand” maps to Social Proof. Reviews, screenshots, before/afters, “10,000+ customers,” or case snippets with specific outcomes.

“I don’t think it actually works” maps to Authority. Credentials, data, experiments, or “We’ve done X 1,000 times” type framing.

“I’m not sure it’s worth the money” maps to Us vs. Them. Costs today vs costs with you, or hidden costs of the old method.

“This looks complicated or overwhelming” maps to Listicle. “3 reasons this is actually simpler than what you’re doing now.”

Step 2D: If the goal is to retarget and convert

Retargeting isn’t “show them the same ad but now with 10% off.” They’ve already met you. Now you’re closing gaps.

If they need proof they’re making the right call, use Social Proof. Customer stories or “People like you who already switched.”

If they need reassurance, use Authority. Experience, track record, expertise, or a clean, calm explainer from someone credible.

If they need to picture using it, use POV. “POV: your Monday standup is actually short.” “POV: you wake up rested.”

If they need a reason to act now, not later, use Problem-Agitate or Contrarian. Reframe the cost of doing nothing or show what staying in the status quo actually costs.

Step 2E: If the goal is to build trust (High-Consideration)

SaaS, health, money, coaching—any category where choosing wrong hurts. Your job is to reduce paranoia.

If the main hurdle is “Are you legit?” use Authority.

If the main hurdle is “Do people like me use this?” use Social Proof, specifically category-specific proof like “200+ clinics” or “500+ agencies.”

If the main hurdle is complexity, use Listicle to break the offer or product into 3–5 simple chunks.

If the main hurdle is “I can’t picture this in my life,” use POV. Day-in-the-life, real scenarios, outcomes.

Step 3: Jaded Market Rule (Market Sophistication Override)

If you're in a brutally over-advertised category (think skincare, weight loss, etc), assume they've seen the "save time and money" line a hundred times. They've seen generic testimonials. They're numb to basic value props.

In those markets, lean harder on Contrarian (new lens on the problem), Authority (but at a higher, data-driven level), Us vs. Them (specific differences, not vague "better"), Listicles with actual insight (not fluff), and POV that's weirdly specific, not stock-lifestyle.

You're not just selling a solution. You're selling "this is actually different from the things you already tried." You’re selling a new movement.

Step 4: Category Fit Shortcut

You can get most of the way there just by matching hook families to the type of business.

B2B SaaS: Problem-Agitate, Authority, Us vs Them

B2B buyers are skeptical and comparison-shop.

Problem-Agitate works because it articulates their pain better than they can (builds trust through understanding).

Authority works because they need to believe you actually know what you’re doing before they’ll book a demo.

Us vs. Them works because they’re literally comparing you to competitors or their current setup.

POV and Listicle are backups because they can work but aren’t as directly tied to the buying motion.

DTC/Ecom — Pattern Interrupt, POV, Social Proof

Ecom is impulse-driven and scroll-based.

Pattern Interrupt because you’re competing with entertainment, not just other products—you need to stop the thumb.

POV because people need to see themselves using it (the lifestyle integration moment).

Social Proof because consumer buying is heavily influenced by “other people like this.”

Curiosity Gap and Persona Callout are backups—they can work but aren’t as universally strong across ecom categories.

Health/Wellness/Supplements — Contrarian, Authority, Problem-Agitate

This category is absolutely saturated with identical claims. Everyone says they’ll help you sleep better or lose weight.

Contrarian cuts through because you need to reframe the problem entirely (“your melatonin is actually making it worse”).

Authority because health claims require credibility (doctors, studies, formulation).

Problem-Agitate because people in this category are usually in pain and need you to really understand it before they’ll trust a solution.

Education/Courses/Coaching — Contrarian, Authority, POV

People buying education are investing in transformation, not a product.

Contrarian works because they’ve probably already tried the “obvious” advice and failed—you need to show them why their current mental model is wrong.

Authority because they’re literally paying you to know more than them.

POV because they need to imagine the future version of themselves on the other side of the transformation.

Persona Callout and Social Proof are secondary—helpful but not the primary driver.

Step 5: Pick the Main Emotion

Don’t try to hit everything at once. One primary emotion per ad is more than enough.

Surprise maps to Pattern Interrupt and Contrarian. Curiosity maps to Curiosity Gap and Listicle. Identity (“That’s me”) maps to Persona Callout and POV. Trust maps to Authority and Social Proof. Urgency maps to Problem-Agitate and Contrarian.

If you’re mixing all five, you’re probably diluting all of them.

Part 3: Static vs. UGC vs Video

You're basically answering two questions: What's the cheapest way to find out if this angle is good? And once something works, which format will make it land harder?

Format Step 1: Can someone understand the offer in one frame?

If you can show what it is, who it’s for, and why it matters in a single image with a clear line of copy, statics are usually the starting point. They’re fast to produce, cheap to test, and ruthless about messaging clarity. If the idea dies in static form, a fancy edit won’t fix the underlying angle.

If the product needs sequence to make sense—workflows, interfaces, step-by-step transformation—then you bias toward video or UGC earlier. Screen recordings, walk-through demos, or a creator explaining “here’s how this actually works.”

Format Step 2: Is the real issue clarity or belief?

This split does most of the work. If people don’t understand what you do, start with statics. They force you to make the value prop sharp. If people understand it but don’t believe it, bring UGC or video in earlier. Faces, tone, and narrative do a lot of that heavy lifting.

SaaS and B2B often start as clarity problems. Health, supplements, and coaching are usually belief problems.

Format Step 3: Be honest about production reality

If you don’t have a reliable editor, don’t have people comfortable on camera, or can’t shoot and iterate video weekly, then don’t build a plan that depends on video doing all the work. Use statics to cycle through hooks and angles, see what actually resonates, then upgrade winners into UGC or video.

If you do have video capability, run a hybrid. Statics as fast probes, UGC or video as the “deeper” version of what already works.

Format Step 4: Match the format to the channel

You’ll naturally lean different ways depending on where you’re buying attention.

TikTok, Reels, and Shorts treat motion and faces as the default language. UGC, POV, short stories. Statics can work as slides, but you’re swimming upstream.

Meta Feed and Stories let statics work when the angle is good. UGC and video are a strong layer on top, especially for trust.

LinkedIn responds to clean statics and carousels with clear copy, plus simple talking-head video. Over-edited TikTok-style clips usually feel out of place.

YouTube In-Stream is obviously video, and with higher expectations. If you can’t script tightly, maybe don’t start here.

Quick Format Guide by Business Type

If you’re still not sure where to start after all that, here’s the shortcut:

B2B and SaaS typically start with statics because you’re solving a clarity problem. Your buyers need to understand what you do before they believe it works. Start with clean value prop statics, then layer in UGC expert explainers once the angle is proven.

Ecom and consumer brands can lean into UGC and video earlier because you’re usually solving a belief problem. People get what a pillow or a supplement is; they just don’t believe yours is different. Before/afters, statistics, and day-in-the-life content do the heavy lifting here.

Subscriptions, apps, and info products sit in the middle. Start with statics to nail the value prop, then upgrade winners to UGC storytelling that shows the transformation.

Part 4: Combining Hook + Format So You Know What to Build

Putting it all together so this becomes practical.

First, pick the job of the ad: attention, education, objections, retarget, or trust. Second, use the decision tree to pick one or two hook types. Third, decide the starting format by asking if it can be understood in one frame, whether the main issue is clarity or belief, and whether you actually have video capacity. Fourth, build meaningfully different combos.

Here's what that looks like for a simple B2B SaaS:

• For cold traffic, you might run a static with Pattern Interrupt and Problem-Agitate, plus a static with Us vs Them.
• For warm traffic, try a static Listicle like "3 reasons your reporting is lying to you" and a UGC Authority piece where the founder or an expert explains the shift.
• For hot traffic, test a static Social Proof ad with case-study tiles and a UGC POV like "POV: your weekly metrics meeting takes 10 minutes now."

For a sleep supplement:

• Cold traffic might be UGC Contrarian: "Why your nightly melatonin is keeping you up."
• Warm traffic gets a static Social Proof piece with reviews, before/after, and "10,000+ sleepers," plus a UGC Problem-Agitate like "Still waking up at 3am? Here's why."
• Hot traffic could be a static Authority ad saying "Formulated with sleep doctors, used by X patients" and a UGC testimonial POV.

Each of those is a conscious choice, not "we made some random stuff and hope Meta likes it."

The Point of All This

Most founders treat creative like a lottery. Make a bunch of stuff, throw it at Meta, see what sticks. The ones who win treat it like an engineering problem.

This isn't about making "better" ads in some vague aesthetic sense. It's about making ads that do a specific job for a specific person at a specific stage. When you open Figma next time, you shouldn't be guessing. You should know exactly which problem you're solving, which hook solves it, and which format proves it fastest.

So go forth, build your operating system and stop staring at the evil blank screen.
​
​Joey Noble​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

In the old world of Meta, you fought for advantages with hyper-granular audiences, lookalikes stacked in interests stacks, and constant tweaking of manual bid caps (and a lot more). The creative you were using just needed to not be terrible.

In 2025 (and beyond), things have changed. The algorithm is so good that you can just slap together a broad Advantage+ campaign and get better results than you’d get with the hyper-targeted strategy that used to work.

Now, creative is the only lever you still have full control over. Andromeda doesn’t “reward” you for testing more ads because Meta likes artists.

It rewards you because it’s a pattern-matching engine. It sees hundreds of signals: who engages with which creative, on which placement, at what time, with what downstream behavior. The wider and more varied your creative set, the more “surface area” you give it to find pockets of performance.

But here’s the thing: Meta doesn’t care how many files you upload. It cares how many distinct ideas you’re letting it test.

Cropping the same image slightly differently is not a new idea.

Changing a few words while keeping the same angle is not a new idea. (Take bigger swings first, test small word changes later)

And changing colors definitely won’t move the needle (most of the time).

From the system’s point of view, those are clones of the same ad. If you want Meta to actually help you, you need to feed it:

• Different hooks
• Different angles
• Different visual stories
• Different emotional triggers

If you test 30 creatives that all say “10% off, limited time” with the same product shot, you’re not leveraging Andromeda properly, and frankly won’t get any interesting learnings.

I’ve seen this play out so many times working as a creative strategist for Demand Curve’s ad agency. The ideas and strategies you’re about to learn come from that work — ads that have helped our clients generate millions in revenue, including YC’s VideoGen, which we 10x’d in under 90 days.

One of our top performers:

In this newsletter, we’ll tackle what makes up a high-performing ad and in my next one, we’ll tackle how to put this information to use.

With all that said, let’s dive into how to actually make high-performing ads.

What High-Performing Ads Have in Common

​Consumer neuroscience studies keep finding the same pattern:

The ads that move markets score high on three dimensions:

1. Attention
2. Conversion to long-term memory
3. Emotional engagement

Your job is to design creatives that hit all three.

Attention: Familiarity + Peculiarity

In a feed, your ad has ~0.3 seconds to answer, “Is this worth not scrolling to the next dopamine hit?”

What captures attention best is familiar-but-unexpected:

Familiar:

• Interfaces people know (texts, Notes app, tweets, Slack threads)
• Everyday settings (bathroom mirror, kitchen counter, Zoom call)
• Faces, hands, physical objects

Peculiar:

• Something off-pattern inside that familiarity
• A weird angle, a handwritten scribble, a jarring statement, an ugly Post-it, a meme

That’s why a quick iPhone video in a messy kitchen often outperforms the polished studio shot or a fake “Notes app” screenshot with a contrarian statement hooks harder than a glossy brand graphic.

Long-Term Memory: Peculiarity + Structure (and Often Humor)

The ads that keep paying you are the ones that are easiest for people to remember.

Memory is biased toward distinctiveness (this ad doesn’t blur into every other ad), coherent structure (the brain can retell the “story” in a sentence), and often humor (emotionally charged and shareable).

That’s why a single, sharp analogy (“It’s like Duolingo for addiction”) sticks, or a vivid testimonial line like, “My friends thought I’d had a facelift” outperforms a paragraph of benefits. Your ad creative can technically be designed beautifully, but if it doesn’t visually and narratively hook you, it’s still forgettable.

Emotional Engagement: Humor, Relief, Desire, Fear

People don’t convert because they processed your features spreadsheet.

They convert because your ad made them feel relief (finally, someone gets my problem), hope (this might actually work for someone like me), desire (I want that before/after state), FOMO (other people like me are already getting the benefit), or amusement (this brand “gets” my world).

Humor shows up repeatedly in the research because it lowers defenses, increases sharing, and it makes your brand feel human, not corporate.

And Meta’s job is to optimize delivery. Your job is to feed it creatives that trigger actual human responses along these three axes.

Hooks & Angles: The First Battle You Have to Win

At our agency, I always try to put myself in the shoes of my prospect. What are they doing in the moment they come across my ad?

They’re probably on the couch, half-watching Netflix, half-scrolling Instagram. Or they’re between calls, flicking through LinkedIn. Or in bed, doomscrolling TikTok while their partner yaps about the argument they overheard at the local grocery store.

Your ad is an interruption.

The hook has two jobs:

1. Make them stop.
2. Make them curious enough to keep watching/reading.

And the angle has one job: frame your product as the most compelling way to solve a specific problem or desire.

Great ads pair a sticky hook with a sharp angle.

Heres a sample of hook types that we’ve found reliably work, plus the kind of angle they pair best with. If you want to see the full table you can view here for free.​

Concrete examples:

• Curiosity gap: “Nobody’s talking about this, but it’s quietly saving people $1,200/mo.”
• Problem-agitate: “Still waking up at 3 a.m. panicking about money? There’s a smarter way to plan your cash flow.”
• Us vs. Them: “Old way: 10 tools and 17 tabs. New way: one dashboard that actually makes sense.”
• Persona callout: “If you grew up in the 90s and your back hurts every morning, read this.”

When you’re feeding Meta, don’t test 50 copy variants of the same hook, test 5–10 radically different hooks on the same core outcome.

Visuals: What Can Make or Break Your Ads

You can have a world-class hook and still tank performance if your visuals fight against it.

Here’s the short list of visual rules that matter.

Make It Instantly Understandable

If someone can’t tell what this is about in 1 second, it’s too complex. You want one core idea per creative, one main visual subject, and one headline that actually says something.

Bad: showing a bottle of acne cream and talking about all of the scientific benefits

Better: showing the before and after of a pimply face to a clear face

Show, Don’t Tell

If your product solves a problem, show that problem being solved.

• Skincare: before/after faces, not jars on a white background.
• B2B SaaS: dashboard with an actual “Oh wow” number highlighted, not abstract graphs.
• Fitness: side-by-side “day 1 vs day 30,” not just a photo of a protein tub.

Mimic Native Content

Your ad shouldn’t scream “ad” at first glance.

• On TikTok: vertical, full-screen, people talking to the camera, native text overlays.
• On Instagram: static carousels, Notes app screenshots, tweet screenshots, selfie + text.
• On LinkedIn: simple stat graphics, quote tiles, clean carousels.

The more it blends with what your prospect is already consuming, the cheaper the cost of attention becomes.

Keep It Clean & Uncluttered

Too many elements create visual noise. Your prospects will scroll on by. That means remove decorative fluff that doesn’t help the message, use whitespace, and make one element clearly dominant.

Use Contrast to Stand Out

You’re not just fighting other brands. You’re fighting brain rot, babies, cats, memes, and friends’ selfies. Stand out with bold colors, strong shapes, and clear focal points. Avoid low contrast at all costs.

Common Interface Hijacking

Hijacking familiar interfaces is one of the easiest wins:

• Text message screenshots
• Notes app entries
• Slack threads / email threads
• Tweet screenshots
• Notification pop-ups

It works because the brain is already trained to stop and read these.

Visual Hierarchy

Decide exactly where you want the eyes to go:

1. Main headline / core promise
2. Supporting visual / proof
3. CTA or next action

Make that order visually obvious:

• Biggest, boldest element = headline
• Secondary brightness/size = product visual or proof
• Tertiary = logo or CTA

If everything is shouting, nothing is heard.

CTAs: Don’t Overthink Them

CTAs aren’t the star of the show, but they do nudge action.

Principles:

• One ad = one CTA. Don’t offer five different actions.
• Use direct verbs: “Book a demo,” “Start a free trial,” “See how it works,” “Get the guide.”
• Where possible, bake the benefit in:
  • “Start a free trial” → “Start your 7-day free trial”
  • “Download” → “Download the 3-step playbook”

And remember: sometimes the “CTA” lives in the creative itself (big “See inside the app” overlay) more than the button.

Tension: The Final Piece

So far, we’ve talked about hooks, angles, and visuals.

There’s one more layer that’s often overlooked and decides whether any of the above pays off:

How long can you hold tension without ruining it?

Think of your ad like a horror or mystery movie:

• The hook is the cold open.
• The angle is the underlying story.
• Tension is you not explaining everything in the first 30 seconds.

Most ads die because they over-explain way too early. As my boss likes to say, they pop the balloon.

Outcome vs. Mechanism – Where People Mess Up the Most

The core rule: In your ads, you dangle the outcome, not the mechanism.

I’ll never forget when I was first writing ads for our Growth Program, I wanted to be as direct and outcome-focused as possible.

I wrote: “Learn to profitably acquire customers by figuring out which 1–2 channels to focus on.”

But when our CEO was reviewing them, he told me that I popped the balloon. I gave away all the sauce: profitably acquire customers and the mechanism: we help you narrow in on 1–2 channels.

There’s no mystery left. The reader goes, “Oh, okay, yeah, I’ve heard that before. I could probably ask ChatGPT about that.”

Here’s a better pattern that keeps the balloon inflated:

Headline: “Learn to profitably acquire customers.”

Subheadline: “Most startups waste months chasing the wrong channels. We’ll show you what to do differently”

Now I promised the outcome (profitable customer acquisition), hinted at the problem (wrong channels, wasted months), and didn’t reveal how the system actually solves that.

The curiosity is still intact. The “reveal” is pushed downstream to the LP, the VSL, the email. Where it belongs.

Your Audience Should Be Asking Questions, Not Nodding

Good storytelling makes the reader ask questions they don’t know the answer to.

Bad storytelling fills the ad with statements they already understand:

• “You need to pick the right channels.”
• “You should align your channel with your business model.”

No shit. Everyone knows that. There’s no tension there.

Instead, you want lines that create new questions:

• “There’s a reason some startups scale fast and others just spin their wheels.”
  • Okay, what reason? Which bucket am I in?
• “Most founders follow a growth playbook that almost guarantees they stall out around 100 customers.”
  • Wait, is that me? What’s wrong with the playbook?

You’re not dumping your framework into the ad. You’re naming the existence of a different way, and then stopping.

Don’t Shrink Your Value to One Boring Tip

Another subtle way I subtly killed tension when working on the ads: I summarized a complex system into one generic line in the ad.

For example:

“We built a system that shows you exactly which channels fit your business model.”

Two problems:

1. I popped the balloon again. The “secret” is now “fit channel to model.” Now our prospect might think that’s something they can figure out easily (pro tip: it’s way more nuanced than what ChatGPT will tell you).
2. I accidentally shrunk the perceived value of your system. It now sounds like one trick, not an in-depth process. Figuring out which channels fit your model is one of MANY jobs-to-be-done we solve.

Afterwards, I workshopped some stronger versions:

“We built a system that finds the fastest path to your first 100 customers.”

“Most founders keep swapping channels. The best ones engineer their growth stack on purpose.”

Still true. Way more tension. No mechanism revealed.

Where to Stop the Sentence

Learning the micro-skill of where to stop your copy is what really helped me upgrade my skills.

Take this basic ecom story:

“You’ve probably tried three different ‘miracle’ moisturizers this year.

For most people, week 2 is where everything falls apart…”

Stop there.

If you keep going:

“…because the real problem is your skin barrier, so you need to use our 3-step routine with X, Y, and Z ingredients…”

You’ve just explained the trick. You made it sound like something they can go copy with whatever’s already in their cabinet. This kills the urge to click through and see what’s actually different about your product.

Same thing for B2B:

“Most teams think they have a traffic problem.

The ones who grow fast usually have a completely different bottleneck…”

Stop there. If you add:

“…because their real issue is lead-to-opportunity conversion, so we help them redesign their entire pipeline with our 7-step framework…”

You turned a sharp, tense statement into a LinkedIn carousel bullet. The mystery’s gone.

The ad’s job is not to teach your entire framework.

The ad’s job is to make “I need to see the rest of this” feel inevitable.

Let’s revisit my top performing ad from before:

This ad doesn’t pop the balloon because it only reveals the outcome (your grandma can be an influencer), not the mechanism (how VideoGen makes that possible).

The reader is left asking:

• Wait, how does my grandma become an influencer?
• What does VideoGen actually do?
• Is this real or just a provocative claim?

If it popped the balloon, it would say something like:

“Even your grandma can be an influencer with VideoGen’s AI video generator that turns text into professional videos in minutes.”

Now the mystery is gone. The reader goes “Oh, it’s an AI video tool. Got it.” No curiosity left.

How This Looks in Other Categories

Skincare / beauty (ecom)

A weak example might look like, “Clear your acne in 30 days with our 2-step salicylic acid system.”

You just told them the “system” is some ingredients they’ve seen in 50 other products.

A higher-tension version could be, “Why your skin always looks worse right after you ‘fix’ it.” or “Most routines make you feel better for a week, then nuke your progress. Here’s how people avoid that.”

Outcome = better skin.

Intrigue = “worse after you fix it”, “avoid that”.

No ingredients, no routine breakdown. That comes after the click.

Local service / gym / studio

Weak:

“Lose weight with our 6-week bootcamp.”

Mechanism is right there: bootcamp, 6 weeks. Generic.

Stronger:

“Most people quit in week 3. We built our entire program around that wall.”

“If you’ve fallen off every time you’ve tried, this is built for that moment.”

Now the story is about why week 3 is the danger zone and what you do differently there. That’s the reveal later.

Courses / coaching

Weak:

“Learn to scale your agency using our 5-step client acquisition framework.”

Sounds like every other “5-step” thing.

Stronger:

“Two ways agency owners try to grow: buy growth or wing it alone. There’s a third option nobody talks about.”

The third option is the tension. You don’t explain it in the ad. The click “buys” that explanation.

The “Don’t Pop the Balloon” Checklist

When you look at your ad copy, ask:

• Am I promising the outcome… or explaining the mechanism?
• Did I name frameworks or concepts… and then immediately define them to death?
• Does the subheadline add intrigue or quietly solve the puzzle?
• Could a smart reader walk away thinking, “Cool, I got the gist, I’ll just try that myself”?

If yes, you popped the balloon.

Quick fixes:

• Replace “how” lines with “why this matters” lines.
• Swap explanations for contrasts:
  • “Two ways founders try to grow…” → “There’s a third way that combines the upside of both.”
• Cut any sentence that feels like it belongs in a lesson or module. Save that for the landing page or email.

Your best-performing ads will usually feel, when you read them back, like they’re holding something back on purpose.

Demand Curve Ads Agency

If you’re reading this thinking, ‘I understand the theory but have no idea how to apply this to my business,’ that’s exactly what we do at Demand Curve’s Ads Agency. We diagnose your specific bottleneck, figure out which hooks and formats will actually move the needle, and run the whole testing system for you. We’re opening a few spots for 2026—book a free strategy call with our senior ads team to see if we’re a good fit.

Conclusion

If you treat Meta like a lottery, Andromeda will happily set your budget on fire.

If you treat it like a creative lab—where your job is to ship more genuinely different ideas every month and learn from each—you’ll get compounding gains that most competitors will never see.

Next step for you:

• How many ideas are you really testing… and how many are just superficial tweaks?
• Pick 3–5 truly different hooks from the list above.
• Pair each with a strong, simple visual and a clean CTA.
• Don’t pop the balloon too early.
• Launch them side by side and let Andromeda do what it does best.

You handle the creativity. Let the machine handle the rest.
​
​Joey Noble​
Demand Curve Creative Strategist

A founder spots an opportunity. They go heads-down building. They launch to see if they have product-market fit.

Most never pass go. They deem “no PMF” and move on.
​
(Whether that’s actually true is a topic for another day. Plenty of startups declare no PMF when they never got the right people into the product to begin with. Talk about a false negative.)

But let’s say you’re one of the lucky few who sees signs of traction. Users are sticking around. Retention looks promising. "Jackpot!" Time to scale this puppy.
​
So you jump into channel experimentation. That’s what we’re told to do, right?

You try Meta ads. Doesn’t work.

You try cold outreach. Doesn’t work either.

You start posting on social. No one’s paying attention.
​
You keep testing channels, waiting for something to click. This cycle continues until you run out of cash or, by some miracle, you do find at least some semblance of channel traction.

The Hidden Problem

Here’s what’s actually happening.

In the traction phase, your early users found you through your network, through niche communities, through word of mouth (WoM). They’re the savvy, risk-tolerant part of the market. They like the product despite its rough edges.

And critically: they’re telling your story for you.

That's the beauty of WoM. Your early users "get it." Their friends are people that get it, too.

And this masks your foundational weaknesses.

You can get away with a mediocre brand, an unclear story, and a clunky value prop because your early users are papering over it with their own credibility and context.

Then you enter “growth mode.”

You start running Meta ads to cold audiences. People who’ve never heard of you. Who have no reason to trust you. Who don’t know what you do.

And suddenly, nothing works.

The False-Negative Trap

When those first campaigns flop, founders almost always blame the channel.

“Meta ads don’t work for us.”

But Meta may not have been the problem. More likely, the problem was that your story, which your early users had been telling for you, now had to stand on its own.

"Our story isn't the problem."
​
Ok. Well, did you engineer your product specifically for Meta Ads? Meta is what we call a 'low-context channel.' Low-context channels must be paired with low-friction product experiences. Did you tailor the product to align with the mindset and context-state people are in when browsing Facebook or IG?

Did you reverse engineer your pricing strategy to account for the inherent costs baked into Meta Ads for your product category? Or did you just roll with the pricing you threw together a few days before launch day?

No matter how you slice it, these aren’t channel failures. They’re system failures that were hidden during traction and exposed during growth.

We see this constantly. Founders come to us after months—sometimes years—of running in place. Blind experimentation. Channel after channel declared dead.

And more often than not, when we do eventually unlock growth, it’s through a channel they already tested and dismissed.

The Five Foundations of Growth

Growth isn’t built on product. It’s not built on distribution. It’s built on a system of five foundations, and the alignment between them.

1. Market — Who you’re serving
2. Product — What you’re offering them
3. Model — How you monetize
4. Brand — Your story and message
5. Channel — How you reach your market

Product-market fit is the alignment between #1 and #2. That’s one pairing.

One pairing out of the ten pairings that make up a full growth system.

The traction phase pressure tests almost none of these. Growth mode exposes all of them at once.

Which is exactly why we developed our Foundational Five Framework to represent that full growth system and help founders and growth teams master theirs.

How to Apply This

Before you give up on a channel, ask:

- Is this a Product-Channel problem? Has my product been designed to match the context, intent, and culture of this channel?
- Is this a Model-Channel problem? Can my unit economics actually survive this channel’s CAC?
- Is this a Brand-Channel problem? Does this channel give me the room I need to convey our story?
- Is this a Market-Channel problem? Is my market even reachable via this channel?

Different diagnosis, different solution.

The channel you abandoned might be your best channel. You just haven’t aligned the foundations around it yet.

Your Growth Foundation Is Never "Done"

Markets shift. Products evolve. What aligned last quarter might misalign tomorrow.

This isn’t a one-time exercise. It’s a living system for diagnosing where the constraints and opportunities exist within your growth system.

And it's the missing link that separates those who take a reactive, trial-and-error approach to growth vs. those who engineer it.

Last week, we brought Drew in to help provide clarity on a classic question within the world of email marketing: "who should our emails come from — a person or the company?"

We received a ton of positive feedback on that edition, and quite a few requests to hear what other knowledge bombs Drew has to drop. So, we're tapping Drew once more to tackle another email marketing conundrum: opt-in methods.

It’s a common belief that double opt-in is the best way to collect emails, but that deserves a closer look.

Before we get into it, here’s the difference between a single opt-in and double opt-in process.

• With single opt-in, anyone who signs up in your email capture form or popup is immediately added to your list.
• With double opt-in, people need to confirm that they do indeed want to sign up in a confirmation email before they can be added to your list.

Many marketers recommend using a double opt-in by default because it brings in more genuinely interested people.

It’s a fair point: double opt-in processes do prevent fake email addresses and bots from getting added to your email list. But...

Double opt-in also comes with leakage.

That means:

1. You’ll always have a percentage of people, even highly qualified leads, who miss your confirmation email. So you lose them for good. (Maybe they moved on with their day or are too busy using your amazing product to click on that confirmation email.)
2. The confirmation creates a moment for an otherwise would-be subscriber to second-guess your intentions from a marketing perspective. So instead of confirming, they decide to ignore it.

Simply put, there will always be some good leads who ignore a double opt-in confirmation email.

Here’s a chart to help visualize that lost potential.

A single opt-in avoids this. One click and Voilà! That person is on your email list.

Yes, the single opt-in is inherently riskier because you’re inviting everyone to the party, even people who aren’t sure that your product is a good fit for them. But it comes with a higher ceiling of leads, a.k.a. greater potential for more revenue.

Deciding between the two feels like a case of "quality vs. quantity", but there’s actually a little more to it. If you’re not sure whether you’re better off using a single or double opt-in, consider these three variables:

1. Your team bandwidth: Do you have a dedicated email marketer? Or is email juggled alongside other marketing priorities?
2. Your email performance: How are your engagement metrics?
3. Your reputation as a sender: Without diving too deeply into the technical topic of deliverability, have you ever noticed your emails didn’t make it to recipients? Like if someone told you they never received them or only saw them in their spam folder.

Who should use single opt-in?

You’re in a good position to use it if:

• You have a dedicated email marketer who’ll monitor your email performance. Someone who knows how to adjust your email targeting and suppression lists.
• You have a solid track record of strong email performance, like consistently high opens and engagement.
• And you haven’t faced deliverability issues in the past.

Who should stick with double opt-in?

Here are a few signals that you’re better off requiring that extra confirmation step in your signup process:

• No one on your team is focused solely on email. It’s low-priority, or something juggled between several other marketing priorities.
• You’ve seen a prolonged dip in your email engagement before, maybe in the last six months or so.
• You’ve been hit by an email penalty, like a blacklist, in the past. (If you don’t know this for sure, a prolonged dip in your email engagement could be a warning sign.)

Bottom Line

Implementing single opt-in is naturally riskier than using double opt-in. But the payoff is that if you do it well, you’ll actually have a higher amount of quality leads.

The point isn’t that every company must use single opt-in. But rather, we should simply stop romanticizing the double opt-in. Don’t think of it as the default in email collection. Choose based on your team bandwidth and email track record.

— Drew and the Demand Curve Team

I remember seeing a Reddit thread asking for advice on what to use as the “from” name. A lot of people advised using the name of a human—real or fake—rather than their company’s name.

The idea behind this is to make your email more personal. This way, people are more inclined to read it. After all, people generally prefer to interact with other humans, not faceless corporations.

That said, using a person’s name can also backfire.

Imagine signing up for emails from a big-name company like Airbnb or Spotify. Unless you work for them, I doubt you know many people on their team. So when you get one of their emails with the name of a real person attached, you may not recognize it as coming from that big-name company.

As a result, you ignore or delete it. You might even mark it as spam.

In this scenario, using a brand name as the sender name would’ve had the opposite effect. You’d have known the business reaching out—not a stranger—and probably felt more inclined to read the message. The instant brand recognition creates a foundation of trust.

This is especially true for automated emails related to your product, like a bank transfer or service alert. In these cases, you could use your company and a specific department for extra clarity on what a message is about. Something like “Shopify Support Team” or “IKEA Shipping” or what you see below:

That doesn’t mean brand names always win out over human names, though. If your business is your personal brand, it makes perfect sense to use just your full name. For example, any entrepreneurs publishing their own newsletter.

And there’s also the hybrid approach:

• [First Name] at [Company]
• [First Name] from [Company]
• and so on!

These are a nice in-between, and ideal for relationship-based emails like your newsletter or customer support messages. However, since email sender names can be cut off, you need to watch out for long names.

Otherwise, they’ll look like these:

A simple antidote to long names: Drop your last name or leave it at just an initial. And instead of writing out “from”, try using “@” or a comma.

There’s ultimately a time and place for each type of sender name. And it’s important to choose carefully so that your contacts know who’s reaching out.

A quick recap:

• Use brand names for transactional emails like order confirmations, promotional campaigns, and automated alerts. If space allows, include the name of the team/department to give more clarity.
• Use a real person’s name only if you’re an influencer or thought leader, or your business is built around your personal brand.
• Use a hybrid for emails that focus on more building a relationship, even if they’re automated. Like a newsletter, product update, or sales outreach.

That's the sender name breakdown. It's one of those things that seems small but quietly influences whether your emails get opened or ignored. Worth getting right.

— Drew & Demand Curve Team

Don't be logical, be psycho-logical

Insight from Rory Sutherland and Demand Curve Team

We decide with emotions.

Logic is often what we use to convince ourselves that our emotional decision is the right one, or to justify a past emotional decision.

Rory Sutherland shares a prime example in his book Alchemy. One of his clients was sending out physical letters asking for donations. Like all good marketers they A/B tested several different variations to see which brought in the most money:

1. Control. The regular letter asking for donations.
2. Donation matching. They highlighted that the government would match their donations, effectively doubling the impact of their donation.
3. Heavier paper. They put the letters on higher quality, thicker paper.
4. Hand delivered. They highlighted that a volunteer hand-delivered to their door.
5. Horizontal opening. They used a special envelope that opened on the end, not on the typical long side of the envelope.

Variations 3 through 5 seem rather weird and extraneous to the whole point. And logically, the variation that highlighted the donation matching should do the best, right? You tell people that a $10 donation is actually $20, isn't that more motivating?

Wrong.

Variation #2 (donation matching) did worse than control. Variations 3 through 5 all beat the control, and the best was variation #5 (horizontal opening).

But if you asked those people why they donated, they'd probably say "it's a worthy cause, blah blah blah" and not "the weird envelope got my attention."

This is what Rory calls psycho-logical—logical in the context of human psychology.

An ad example

We used this principle 6 years ago for a client of ours that sold powerful computers for machine learning/AI purposes. We made an ad variation that made no sense:

You wouldn't assume sloppily adding dog ears and nose onto a $10,000+ work computer would make it more likely that someone would purchase it.

Yet, this became one of their best-performing ads at the time.

It stopped the scroll and made them look a little closer. And no one else had done it.

So be a little crazy with your ideas.

Sometimes eye contact isn't ideal

Insight from Katelyn Bourgoin.

In a previous newsletter, we shared an AI tool that maintains eye contact in videos.

But eye contact isn't always the best option.

​Studies show that ads using averted gazes lead to more attention toward the product, and more memorable ads.

We're hardwired to notice faces. And when you see eyes looking over at something else, you're naturally drawn to look, too.

See for yourself 👀

This same tactic can be used on landing pages and product photos. Use your models' eyes to make people look where you want them to—your product, your CTA, or where you want them to go next.

This can also apply to social media profile photos. The direction your profile photo faces can make it either feel like you've got your back to your post, or like you're facing it.

Which of these looks better? I bet you it's the first one.

Be like Beyoncé: motivate with mystery

Insight from Neal O'Grady.

Would you rather win a trip to Hawaii? Or a ✨mystery prize✨ of the same value?

Turns out that people are more motivated by a mystery prize than they are when they know what the prize is.

People love to dream.

Beyoncé knew this when she released her album, Renaissance. She gave people the option to buy a $40 "mystery box."

People were generally told what was inside:

• Collectible box
• CD
• 4-Panel Softpak
• T-shirt
• Photo booklet
• Mini poster

They also had the option of choosing between four different "poses." This was Beyoncé's pose on the T-shirt—but there was no way of knowing what that meant!

What could a loyal Beyoncé fan do but to buy all four?

That means loyal fans ended up buying four copies of her album for $160, when her album normally sells for just $18. That's a 9x increase in order value.

She sold out of all of her mystery boxes in under two days. And the album ended up being one of the biggest of the year, and one of her biggest of all time.

Use mystery to motivate your customers.

We did this with our course, Un-Ignorable. During the early bird sale, we promised a "mystery bonus." And we sold out 50+ seats for the course in less than an hour.

If you were job hunting between 1997 and 2001, you probably listed “multitasking” on your resume. It was the era of always-on work culture and the first BlackBerrys. Being "busy" was a status symbol.

Then research started coming out that killed the party. A widely-cited 2001 study from the University of Michigan found that task switching creates measurable "switch costs." Every time you shift between tasks, your brain stumbles and you lose time and mental energy getting back into what you were doing.

Another blow came from Stanford in 2009. A team of researchers studied heavy multitaskers and found they were actually worse at everything. Worse at filtering irrelevant information. Worse at task switching (despite all that practice). Their memorable conclusion was that heavy multitaskers are "suckers for irrelevancy."

By the early 2010s, the conventional wisdom had flipped. Multitasking became shorthand for distracted, ineffective work. And since then, most of us have adapted. Single-task. Deep work. Batch similar activities. Block out distractions.

For 15 years, that advice mostly held up.

When Multitasking Became Productive Again

Last year, OpenAI released ChatGPT o1 with extended "thinking" time (they've since rebranded it as ChatGPT 5 thinking, but same concept). Claude followed with their own extended thinking mode. These models often take 10 to 60 seconds (sometimes several minutes) to process complex requests.

Most people frame this as a limitation. "ChatGPT 5 thinking is slower." "Claude extended thinking takes forever."

In my actual workflow though, I've found a way to make use of the downtime. When I send a prompt to ChatGPT thinking or Claude's extended thinking mode, I'm not the one holding the cognitive load anymore. The AI is doing the heavy lifting on that task. My working memory is free.

So instead of staring at a loading bar, I'll switch to something else. Reply to an email. Edit a doc. Review a piece of copy. Then when the AI finishes, I come back and review the output.

Unlike traditional multitasking, I'm not trying to hold multiple complex problems in my head simultaneously. I'm acting as a router. I have two AI systems handling complex, independent tasks, and I'm structuring what I want them to accomplish. It turns anyone into a manager, orchestrating the work rather than doing it. When I return to review each AI's output, I'm evaluating and refining rather than creating from scratch.

Don't get me wrong, this workflow is susceptible to producing work and analysis for the sake of it. You still have to gut-check yourself, just as you would if you were managing an employee.

Is it worth having your AI work on this task, or are you just creating busy work?

The Parallel AI Workflow

Here’s my current pattern when I have multiple AI-heavy growth/marketing tasks:

1. Fire off the first complex prompt to ChatGPT thinking (ad research, competitor analysis, whatever)
2. While it thinks, open Claude, Gemini, or another LLM reasoning model and start a second task (landing page feedback, email draft, etc.)
3. When ChatGPT finishes, I review and refine its output (this takes maybe two minutes)
4. Send the follow-up to ChatGPT, then return to your second AI tool
5. Repeat with staggered timing across both tools

I’m basically orchestrating parallel AI workflows. The “wait time” between sending a prompt and getting results becomes productive time for other work.

I tried to find examples of other people writing about this pattern. Simon Willison and Gergely Orosz have both written about running multiple coding agents in parallel, but most of the discussion I found focuses on the agents themselves.

What I’m describing feels slightly different. The human is genuinely multitasking during the AI processing time. And because each AI holds the cognitive burden of its own complex task, the context-switch penalty seems way lower than traditional human-only multitasking.

For Discussion

I'm curious whether you're experiencing this too.

When ChatGPT or Claude is processing a complex prompt, do you wait? Or have you started working on something else? Have you noticed the context switch feeling different than it used to?

Hit reply and let me know. Am I genuinely unlocking efficiency through multitasking or am I just another "sucker for irrelevancy?"

​Kevin DePopas​
​Demand Curve Chief Growth Officer

P.S. Any Stanford researchers reading this? Might be time for a follow-up study.

Here’s a little analogy to help explain the difference between unsubscribes and spam complaints: If your email is a party, then an unsubscribe is someone leaving. And a spam complaint is someone calling the cops about it. 😱

Because when someone reports your email as spam, email service providers take that to mean your message was low-quality or unsolicited, maybe even malicious.

Not the case for unsubscribes. People usually unsubscribe because they’re no longer interested in hearing from you, even though they once were.

Yes, this could be a sign of poor content on your end—or it could simply mean that your recipient’s mind has changed. And if that’s happened, there’s no point in continuing to contact them. You’re better off focusing your communication efforts on only those who are highly interested in what you have to say.

With that in mind, it’s in your best interest to make it easy for people to unsubscribe. If you don’t, well, they’re much more likely to click the spam button.

The norm is including your unsubscribe link in your email footer. But we’ve also seen a few other unique spins on unsubscribe links.

​Julian Shapiro, for example, places an unsubscribe link at the top of his emails, and Christopher Penn uses a giant GIF so readers can’t miss it.

Okay, so unsubscribes aren’t all that bad. But certainly, a high unsubscribe rate can’t be good. So is there an unsubscribe rate you should aim for?

Yes—0.5% or less. Anything higher may be a sign that:

• You’re attracting the wrong leads, aka people who aren’t in your target audience. Or, if you are attracting the right leads…
• Your content isn’t resonating. Lots of possibilities here. Maybe you’re not really speaking to your reader’s concerns or you’re not segmenting your audience.

(These issues are a whole ‘nother conversation. Instead of taking this email on a long tangent, I recommend checking out these two blog posts to learn more: this one about growing your email list and this one about segmentation.)

Making it easy to unsubscribe from your emails doesn’t mean readers will drop off in big waves. It’s really more of a kind courtesy. Going back to our email as a party analogy, you’re just letting guests know where the exit is.

You’ll also be doing yourself a big favor in the long run. An email list with a lot of deadweight—inactive people who delete your emails without a second thought—will inevitably have low opens and clicks. Better to let them unsubscribe so they don’t:

1. Make a spam complaint; or
2. Bring down your email engagement metrics.

To recap:

• Compared to spam complaints, unsubscribes aren’t all that bad.
• A healthy unsubscribe rate is 0.5% or less.
• You should make it easy for people to unsubscribe from your emails. Besides a link in the footer, consider adding another link at the top of your message (scroll to the top of this email for an example).

So next time you see an unsubscribe notification, take a breath. It's not a rejection, it's just someone clearing the way for the people who actually want to hear from you. And that's the list you want anyway.

– Drew

When Sales Conversations Matter (Even If Sales Isn't Your Growth Engine)

If you're building a $20/month app with low contract values, you probably can't support the time, energy, and overhead that comes with a traditional sales process. Those economics typically work better for companies with high annual contract values and high lifetime values (think enterprise SaaS, not consumer apps).

But even if sales isn't your primary growth engine, direct sales conversations are often the fastest way to validate your concept.

For example, what's the fastest way to get your first paying users for that $20/mo app idea?

Is it building the entire PLG stack? Spinning up paid ads? Creating a survey to blast out to random people?

In most cases, no. It's finding 50 potential buyers on LinkedIn and striking up conversations with them.

You'll likely learn more in two weeks of direct conversations than you will in two weeks of surveys, landing page tests, or building features in isolation.

Why Founders Avoid Sales (And Why That's Costly)

The resistance to sales conversations isn't just "I don't like selling."

It's usually deeper than that. These are the things founders tell themselves:

• "I need to know more about sales first"
• "I need to build out my CRM"
• "I need automated sequences"
• "I need to understand AI sales agents"
• "I need to finish that sales book on Audible"
• "My product isn't ready yet"
• "I need a slick slide deck first"
• "I need a sweet website"
• "I need to hire a sales person"
• And the list goes on...

I've found that you can start building momentum through sales with virtually nothing. No deck. No website. Just you, a clear understanding of the problem you're solving, and a list of people who might have that problem.

But there's a trap.

If you approach these conversations in a "salesy" way (pitching, pushing, trying to close), you risk getting false negatives. People don't respond. You conclude you're on the wrong path. You assume you need to build more before going to market.

When in reality, the issue wasn't your product or your timing. It was your approach.

When trying to get early traction, your initial goal (counterintuitively) isn't to close deals. It's to start conversations. And the way you start those conversations determines whether you get real validated learnings.

The Mindset Shift

For me, the single most powerful reframe for early-stage sales conversations was this: curiosity beats convincing.

"When you're selling, you're not selling. When you're not selling, you're actually selling." - Me

Sounds like some nonsense Ricky Bobby would say, but let me explain.

The more you push, the more people feel sold to. Your prospect's guard goes up. They start looking for reasons to say no. Your close rate drops.

But when you lead with curiosity (when you're genuinely trying to understand their problem), something changes. Their guard comes down. They open up. They start to trust you. And your close rate typically goes up.

This applies whether you're selling a product to a potential customer or selling your vision to a potential investor or strategic hire. The mechanics are the same. Lead with curiosity.

Here's what that looks like in practice.

Ask for advice, don’t pitch

An investor once told me:

"If you want feedback, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice."

It didn't make sense at first. But here's what he meant. If you tell an investor you're raising and want their money, they'll give you the realest feedback on every reason your idea might not work. They start poking holes. It puts them in a defensive stance from the outset.

But if you ask that same investor for advice on your concept, you've created a low-stress opportunity to just talk.

Next thing you know, you're 45 minutes into a 30-minute conversation, digging into the nitty-gritty details of your business, and they're arriving at the conclusion that your concept is a good one, rather than you convincing them.

This works because you're appealing to a fundamental human desire: people love to help and share what they know. And it works in any “selling” situation.

In sales:

❌ The pitch approach: "Hey Kevin, as a growth leader at Demand Curve, you've probably tried scaling DC's growth agency through outbound sales. My company's new AI SDR booked 6x more meetings than a human for half the cost in a single week. Worth a chat?"

✅ The advice approach: "Hey Kevin, how are things going with Demand Curve's growth agency? I just launched an AI SDR that's pretty damn good at booking meetings. I think agencies could be a fit, but I’m not sure. If you have a sec, do you mind if I ping you a few questions so you can pick this apart? Feel free to be brutally honest."

The second version doesn't feel like a sales pitch. I'm being asked to help. If I was a betting man, I’d bet the response rate on the second version is dramatically higher.

In fundraising:

❌ The pitch approach: "Hi Sarah, I saw you invested in [similar company]. We're building in the same space and are closing out our seed round led by [VC firm]. We're opening up our cap table for a few strategic angels. Would you be interested in hearing our pitch?"

✅ The advice approach: "Hi Sarah, I saw your investment in [similar company]. We're building something in this space and are at a crossroads with our go-to-market strategy. I'd love to get your take on our approach if you have 15 minutes. Mind if I ping you a few questions?"

Same dynamic. You're not asking for money. You're asking for wisdom. If they're interested in what you're building, the conversation naturally evolves. If not, you've still built a relationship and learned something.

When you hit resistance, lean into it

Throughout your entrepreneurial journey, you're going to come across people who disagree with your approach.

Sometimes, the natural inclination is to get defensive (even if it’s done in a professional manner). But this can make each party dig in their heels. And news flash, it's really hard to convince people of things they don't believe.

If you've ever gotten into a fight with your partner and made the mistake of defending your logic before trying to understand how they felt, this might resonate with you.

You might find that when you ask a clarifying question, they actually misunderstood your approach to begin with. You might uncover a simple work-around to what was previously a deal-breaker. Hell, you might even uncover the pivot that becomes your core business through this line of questioning.

Here are some common areas where you might hit resistance and how to handle them:

In sales:

You don't need to have answers for every objection. When someone asks, "Does your product do X?" and it doesn't, just say:

"That's really interesting. Our initial feature set doesn't include that. But tell me more. How do you envision using that feature? Could [this workaround] be a temporary solution?"

You've turned what could be an objection into learning more about the problems your users are trying to solve.

In fundraising:

When an investor says, "I'm not sure about your CAC assumptions," don't get defensive. Get curious:

"That's fair. Walk me through what you're seeing. What CAC would make this compelling to you, and what would need to be true for us to hit that number?"

Now you're in a conversation instead of a confrontation. You're learning what would actually make this investor excited rather than trying to convince them with your existing model.

In both cases, be transparent: "I'm trying to learn if we can help. Where we can help today is X, and what we cannot do is Y."

If a conversation gets contentious, take the stance: "Look, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. I'm just telling you what we have. If it's interesting, great. If not, it sounds like we're not ready for you right now, but we should circle back once these features are in place."

The Takeaway

I think the mindset shift that matters most to be effective at sales is to be infinitely curious.

When you enter into conversations with this lens, it allows you to be authentic and gives you permission to not over-prepare or feel like you need to know everything before starting.

So next time you're nervous going into a sales conversation remember, when you're selling, you're not selling. When you're curious, helpful, and genuine, you're doing your best job selling.

Start today. Send a dozen connection requests on LinkedIn. Ask for their advice, not a sale. See what happens.

​Kevin DePopas​
​Demand Curve Chief Growth Officer

Just to ground us before getting into tactics, remember, garnering great reviews for your business starts with your product.

Without a quality experience there, there’s virtually no way to foster great reviews (at least in an ethical or accurate way).

Only once you have a product that people genuinely enjoy or find useful will any of these tactics truly move the needle.

Now, assuming you’ve got your product down pat, let’s look at the tactics that can turn customer reviews into conversion fuel.

Tactic 1: Encourage Comparisons in Reviews

Strangely enough, whether it’s a positive or negative review, one that compares your product to another tends to be far better than a regular review that doesn’t compare it to anything else.

• Positive reviews that compare your product increase sales by up to 26%. They anchor your product as being better than competitors. For example, “The iPhone 17 has a better camera than my friend’s Google Pixel 10” is more persuasive and effective than “The iPhone 17 camera is really good.”
• Negative reviews that compare are up to 47% LESS harmful. We attribute their dislike to their personal preferences. Example: “The iPhone 17’s battery life isn’t as good as the Pixel 10’s” is actually less harmful than “The iPhone's battery life sucks.”

💡 You can seed reviews like this by pre-populating text fields or prompting people by asking: “How does (our product) compare to a similar product you’ve tried?”

Tactic 2: Know When to Display Expert Recommendations vs. Customer Reviews

Sometimes it’s better to display a few recommendations from experts instead of a boatload of simple customer reviews. This all depends on how easy it is for the average person to judge your product’s quality.

• If it’s easy for anyone to judge the quality of your product, then go with customer reviews. (Examples: T-shirts, food, hotels.)
• If it’s hard to judge and requires expertise, roll with expert recommendations. (Examples: insurance, dentists, educational institutions, software, agencies.)

💡 Think about it like this: Would you trust “Bob Smith” to recommend a heart surgeon? Or would you trust a doctor’s endorsement more?

Tactic 3: Boost Reviews With Incentives

The truth is, most happy customers will never bother to leave a review, even if you ask them to outright.

However, incentivizing them with free products, cash, gift cards, or contest entries makes it much more likely they’ll leave a review, and it’s also more likely to yield a positive review. Let’s take a look at some data via an example:

• A home improvement store's product reviews were 83.4% more positive when incentivized via sweepstakes entries.
• Even a modest $0.25 incentive paid immediately for rating and reviewing a video proved effective, leading to a 20.6% increase in positivity.

💡But remember: don’t explicitly ask for a positive review. That might backfire and come across as disingenuous or deceptive. It’s also against Amazon’s Terms of Service.

Tactic 4: Wait for a Bit to Ask for Reviews

Getting asked to review a product you just got is a bit like a popup modal asking you to subscribe or book a call before you even know what the company does.

💡 Recommendation: Wait at least 10 days before asking for a review to increase the chance they review by 40-60%.

Additional recommendations for software reviews:

• Don’t do it based on time after signing up; do it based on milestones of usage (for example, they just hit their “aha” moment with your product.)
• Don’t ask them for a review when they’re clearly in the middle of something.

Tactic 5: Embrace the Occasional Negative Review

Let’s say you see a 4.9-star-rated espresso machine and start reading the reviews. They’re all resoundingly positive…to the point where you start to get a little suspicious they’re fake.

Then, you check the 1-star reviews and see: “There’s a considerable difference in taste when mineral or filtered water is used rather than tap water.”

You laugh and say, “That has nothing to do with the machine, you bozo! Well, if that’s all people have to complain about, then it must be good.”

Oddly enough, a low, fairly irrelevant review will improve your perception of a highly-rated product by ~15%.

💡 Takeaway: Don’t hide negative reviews if they’re irrelevant or just suggest a difference in taste/opinion with that customer. You might even consider showcasing reviews like this.

Tactic 6: Show “Likes” on the Product Page

Leverage the engagement your business or product has received on social media (the ultimate channel of social proof).

💡 Takeaway: Show a product’s likes and a few profile photos of people who liked it. There are web-builder apps and embeds that can pull these in automatically to your product pages.

Tactic 7: Set the Tone With a Strong First Review

Humans often fall victim to the Primacy Effect, a cognitive bias where people give disproportionate weight to the first information they encounter, which shapes how they interpret everything that follows.

So if the first review is negative, you’ll likely face an uphill battle with fewer sales, fewer reviews, and reviews with a more negative sentiment. And this effect can last for 3 years or more.

But the opposite usually happens if the first review is positive.

Here are some recommendations:

• Launch products to a select group of customers who are most likely to rate it highly.
• Launch on new marketplaces (like Amazon or Walmart) the same way.
• Reach out to early customers you think are happy and incentivize them to write a review.
• If you get a negative review early, do everything you can to make things right with the reviewer, hopefully steering them toward a positive outcome and updated review.

Tactic 8: Be Intentional About the Order of Your Reviews

Sales can be up to 84% higher if the first review is 5 stars versus 1 star, and we rarely read more than 10 reviews before deciding.

💡 Takeaway: Display at least one positive review first before displaying others. Never display a negative review first.

Tactic 9: Aim for a Great Aggregate Rating, Not a Perfect One (If It’s Your Own Website)

Oddly enough, sales peak between 4.0 and 4.5 stars and dip down at 4.5 to 5.0. At really high ratings, we become skeptical and assume the results are manipulated (note: the study referenced here focused on specific retail websites and not a third-party marketplace, like Amazon.)

💡 Takeaway: Don’t delete or hide all reviews lower than 5. Some honest 3’s and 4’s can help you come across as more credible.

Tactic 10: Reply to All Reviews

Replying to reviews can yield a handful of benefits:

• It can make an upset or disaffected customer change their mind and increase their rating (and maybe even stay a customer). For example, if they used the product incorrectly and got bad results, you can educate them on what to try for a better experience.
• It signals to people that you care about customers.
• A study showed it increased the number of reviews by 12% and increased the average rating by 0.12 stars.

The Takeaway: Reviews are the Currency of Trust

The internet has given us nearly unlimited options, along with nearly zero certainty. Reviews can act as a bridge between these two forces.

Good reviews can cut the distance between “This might be a good choice” and “I’m almost certain this will be a great choice” but only if they feel real, and not cherry-picked or forced.

Earning trust in the minds of prospects doesn’t come down to being perfect; you build trust through patterns of truth. The businesses that understand this earn compound interest on their credibility, using reviews as a rising tide that lifts all ships.

Gil Templeton​
Demand Curve Staff Writer