Founder of ConvertFlow. 200k+ funnels, 10k+ brands & Fortune 500s powered by ConvertFlow. Techstars Chicago 2016. đ¨đą đđşđ¸
Miami, FL
Joined October 2009
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Introducing...
THE FUNNELS SHOW:
Stop driving traffic only to stores. Start driving traffic to funnels.
Most brands burn ad dollars sending traffic to just their store.
All while the fastest-growing DTC brands use offer funnels to hit target order value, and are designed turn one-time buyers into repeat customers.
On The Funnels Show, we teardown the funnels 9-figure brands are using to scale up.
Weâll even show you how to apply this to your own brand and clients, with funnel templates, swipe files and AI (coming soon đ)
Expect in-depth funnel teardowns, case studies, and proven playbooks for landing pages, quiz funnels, upsells, popup offers, and more.
Subscribe if youâre a founder of a brand, a marketer, agency or growth team ready to scale up đ
Jon Denney retweeted
My biggest takeaways from Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull:
1. Solving a pain point isnât enough to get people to buy your product. Robâs first startup checked all the classic boxes: hair-on-fire problem, a differentiated solution, and design partners using it daily. Yet he still spent two years pivoting aimlessly. Every prospect agreed it solved real problems, but none bought.
2. Robâs "PULL" framework identifies four conditions that drive a buying decision: The buyer has a Project on their to-do list, and a reason itâs Unavoidable right now. They also have a List of options theyâve considered, each with Limitations that leave them stuck. That person is a âcoiled spring,â desperate to find a product to buy.
3. The right cold outreach message needs to be interesting, not persuasive. Its only job is to get someone to take the call. Rob calls this âfounder magicâ outreach. One startupâs entire message was: âHey, Snoop Dogg invested in us, and I thought youâd find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat?â No pain points, no value propositions, no personalization. Just something that gets a conversation. Robâs LinkedIn benchmarks are 20 requests a day, 30% to 40% accepted, 30% to 50% of those replying, and most saying yes.
4. Design partners are a trap. Nearly every time, the partner buys into your vision, hands you a pile of feedback, and never buys. Then you realize âall of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs.â The people who have something important to get done donât want to be design partners. They just want it done. Offering a partnership is âa negative signal to people who actually have pull, and a positive signal to people who donât.â
5. Pull belongs to a specific person, not to a company. A common founder mistake is to say âwe sell to SpaceXâ or âwe sell to mid-market private equity firms.â In practice, youâre selling to the head of legal at SpaceX, who has a particular project on her to-do list she canât solve with her current team. The company doesnât have pull. She does.
6. The signal of real pull in a meeting isnât just enthusiasmâitâs someone leaning in and asking how to move forward. âWow, thatâs amazing, totally the future of our industry, I can see how that would save us a ton of moneyâ is not pull. Thatâs a polite exit. What Rob looks for is a âpull-shaped actionâ: âWait, you can do that? How do we get started? Does the product exist yet?â Before the product even existed, someone in pharma told one founder, âIf you can do that, I will pay you right now.â
7. Run the first sales call like a detective, not a pitcher. Robâs opening question is always some version of âIâm sure you get a lot of people reaching out. Why did you take this call?â The best-case outcome: they fill out the PULL framework for you unprompted. They tell you exactly what theyâre trying to do, why now, and what theyâve already tried.
8. When a call goes lukewarm, throw the Hail Mary. Ask, âIs there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now?â A team selling applicant tracking software to governments got a lukewarm reaction but then learned the buyer would pay for help with job descriptions. That became their first contract. When founders are truly stuck, Rob recommends going into âgoblin mode,â a burst of slightly crazy effort to get in front of customers, like the founder whose parents went door to door to dental offices for him.
9. Rob calls "The Case Study Factory" his most important idea. The job is to find one type of customer who says 'hell yes' before and after buying, then repeat that success through pipeline, sales, and delivery. This customer forms your repeatable case study. A startup finds one repeatable case study and then repeats it a million times. To grow as fast as possible, borrow the theory of constraints from manufacturing: find the bottleneck in the process of repeating that case study and treat it as the only thing that matters until itâs fixed.
An 86-minute guide to finding product-market fit
Rob Snyder (@RobSnyder1) is the author of The Power of Pull, has helped over 50 startups go from zero to $1M+ ARR, and is the most requested guest by my podcast listeners.
We discuss:
đ¸ The PULL framework for finding a customer whoâs "weird not to buy"
đ¸ Where the best startup ideas come from
đ¸ The cold outreach message that gets calls
đ¸ How to run your first sales call (and why he skips design partners)
đ¸ The "Hail Mary" question and "goblin mode"
Listen now đ
youtu.be/19qrLchbQEc
I saw this the picture and was surprised how ânormalâ Holmes and Billy are in VC backed startup founder terms.
Rich kid sociopaths, who deluded themselves into lighting other peopleâs money on fire, were a dime a dozen in that world during ZIRP.
Not defending Holmes (and definitely not Billy), but it does appear a bit like theyâre being made an example of rather than being the exception.
I operated @ConvertFlow entirely from my phone this week using Al...
Jk jk @ethanhdenney held my phone so l could lock in on one thing - Getting married!
Feel like this is the only sane way to look at this era weâre going into.
Acceptance that weâre going to be operating without status quo and constantly adapting.
All while the price of everything doesnât make sense but is cheap compared to the near future.
Jon Denney retweeted
âCMS is cookedâ is probably the worst of the âis/are cookedâ series.
Why would anyone use a CMS anymore?
It feels so archaic to open up a Webflow, WordPress, or HubSpot visual editor and click around editing text and uploading images.
I'm doing all of my content management the same way I write the front-end code.
CMS companies are cooked. It's just extra baggage nobody needs anymore.
Quiz funnels beat storefronts for high consideration brands.
Not because the storefronts are badly built.
Because a shopper who doesn't know what they need should be funneled through a guided shopping experience, rather than expecting them to browse a product catalogue.
Fera Pets sells pet supplements across digestion, mobility, calming, skin and coat, immunity, and cardiac health, for both dogs and cats, in multiple formats.
An ecommerce brand thinks of those as product collections and SKUs.
While the shopper thinks of it like: "My dog is twelve, he's stopped finishing his food, and he won't stop scratching."
So instead of dropping that person on the storefront with a product catalog and hoping they figure it out, Fera asks seven questions:
â Dog or cat?
â The pet's age?
â The primary health concern?
â Whether the pet is already on a multivitamin?
â Are they a picky eater?
â Any allergies or sensitive skin?
â Stomach issues?
The recommendation that comes back is associated with Dr. Michelle Dulake, their veterinarian co-founder, and the shopper can add a full recommended group to cart.
The result? Higher order rates and higher AOV than the traditional storefront.
The pattern we keep seeing with high consideration brands (supplements, skincare, anything where the buyer is diagnosing before they're shopping) is that a storefront that is a product catalogue essentially asks the customer to be the expert.
You have to filter by ingredient, compare six products, and decide which one is for you.
The default Shopify store is architected for low consideration apparel brands, not high consideration brands that drive higher AOV.
It's no wonder the average Shopify storefront converts at 2-3%, while we're finding quiz funnels consistently convert at 10%+.
Why? A quiz correctly inverts the shopping funnel, starting with a consultative questionnaire that triages shoppers into a 1:1 personalized sales funnel.
The customer describes the problem, the brand is the one who knows the answer, and @ConvertFlow powers all the decision logic and data routing.
Full case study linked below:
Anyone who has built a business pre-AI knows that sales and marketing is orders of magnitude harder than everything else.
That includes software development.
Compensation of roles hasnât reflected that for marketers but thatâll shift because of AI leveling the playing field of tech.
The remaining demand for developers ends up:
1. Standing up, maintaining, securing and scaling complaint AI software factories
2. Building the foundational AI models and data sets
3. Designing the product experience (AI product designers are developers, just more tasteful)
For us founders with products, I think AI means shifting the 80/20 from 80% of time on product and 20% on distribution, to 20% and 80% on distribution.
Does this mean product suffers? No, it means product is so much easier to develop with AI software factories, that it frees us to work on distribution (the actual hard work).
What's happening to Webflow is interesting.
It probably boils down their large user base being developers and not actually their ICP.
Which is probably growing brands with budget concerned about marketing/SEO/growth.
Meanwhile developers care about flexibility of AI coding and speed of standing up new client sites.
Developers are price sensitive but are their channel for onboarding tomorrow's growth phase brands.
Jon Denney retweeted
The âEconomistâ finally caught up to Miami.
The city where power came to play is now where power lives.
And the numbers in this piece are wild.
Miamiâs metro economy grew 23% from 2020 to 2024, almost twice the national rate. Central Miamiâs economy is now roughly half the size of Manhattanâs. Fifteen years ago, it was a quarter. More than 150 financial firms have moved here. Shout out to @FrancisSuarez for his leadership on this.
Iâve lived here almost my entire life, so this headline means something to me.
The article is also honest about the next part. Rents are higher than New York. Prices have jumped nearly 40% since 2020. Florida spends less on research than every other top-ten state economy. And a low-lying coastal city canât shrug off climate risk.
None of that makes me less bullish. It makes the assignment clearer.
We have to make it possible for working families and young builders to stay, put real muscle behind universities, research and homegrown companies, and build infrastructure and resilience with the same urgency we bring to towers.
New capital found a city generations of immigrants and entrepreneurs had already made global.
Now we have to make this boom last AND make sure the people who built Miami can still see themselves in its future.
I would never bet against Miami or Florida đşđ¸
NEW: Scheduler Element For @ConvertFlow Funnels
With ConvertFlow's scheduler element, now you can add the link to your booking platform's calendar widget and drive bookings right from your ConvertFlow funnels.
â Native support for Calendly, Cal(dot)com, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, ChiliPiper, SavvyCal, OnceHub and more (don't see yours? let us know!)
â Track bookings in your funnel reports
â Manage redirects and run automations upon booking
â Conditionally display the right calendar links to qualified leads using logic
Full update linked below:
Is AI actually replacing SaaS?
At ConvertFlow weâve been deep in building no-code UI for a decade.
We get to see in action marketing teams as small as a solo consultancy, as well as teams at Fortune 500s.
AI reached a tipping point this year in terms of intelligence, so we shipped in-app AI agents as an alternative to no coding.
What weâre seeing is that AI truly is a platform shift for software development, but so far looks more like an evolution of SaaS rather than a âshiftâ to a new platform.
Hereâs what weâve learned so far:
AI appeals to power users in a pinch
My first assumption was that AI chat would be an interface appealing to a broader audience.
I assumed AI chat would be the superior interface to tactile UI, because one could simply describe what they want.
AI harnesses are already how weâre building ConvertFlow, so âvibe buildingâ through AI chat must be how everyone wants to build everything right?
So we ship in-app AI chat.
We get it in the hands of account management, our template builders, our agency partners, our enterprise customers and then everyone through our free plan.
The result? Some adoption from power users, minimal adoption from everyone else.
This is with the AI agent UI being heavily prioritized in-app.
Some kinks naturally get found and reported for us to iron out, but improvements became incremental pretty quickly.
So far, it appears power users are using AI chat mostly out of curiosity.
Some of it is having our AI do heavy lifts, like importing content from HTML files and screenshots, or uploading CSV files to create conditional logic.
These are things I consider to be absolute game changers and Iâd assume our power users would be kicking down the door to get their hands on.
But thatâs simply not the case.
I also assumed every new user would default to using the AI first.
It appears that is also not the case, at least today.
Our in-app AI agent is being used more by power users than by new users.
So if the new users arenât defaulting to AI, what are they doing?
AI appeals to those who know what to do
âThe customer knows their problems. They do not know the best solutions.â
- DHH
Unsurprisingly, ConvertFlowâs funnel templates continue to be the primary way users are onboarding today.
Fewer are using the AI to vibe build funnels from scratch than using the no-code builder to edit pre-built templates.
The dominant path continues to be:
1. Marketer sees template they want
2. They choose that template
3. They edit and ship
The AI chat for making those edits appears to be a tool users sometimes choose to use to get the job done.
Based on how users use ConvertFlow today, AI chat doesnât appear to be a replacement for WYSIWYG visual editing and UI for controlling deterministic workflows.
Itâs an alternate UI path.
The prompts weâre seeing are mostly for heavy lifts for net-new, nondeterministic work, not a long series of fine-tuning prompts.
It appears the UI is still preferred by our existing users for fine tuning.
In retrospect this makes sense.
Delegating to AI may feel risky for making edits to high traffic funnels sitting in the revenue stream, unlike the large code contributions that AI coding produces for new projects.
This feels like a narrative violation today when weâre steeped in narratives pushed on social media about AI disrupting everything, SaaSpocalypse, etc.
There is a meaningful difference between:
âBuild me something new.â
andâŚ
âModify this funnel that already makes me $100,000/month without breaking it.â
Thereâs low risk tolerance for nondeterminism for business critical workflows, while thereâs high risk tolerance for new projects.
This could explain why AI coding adoption is massive and making headlines, while AI agent adoption in existing businesses is slower than social media would have you believe.
Platform shift or platform evolution?
At first AI looked like a platform shift away from SaaS.
I now believe weâre NOT seeing a shift to a NEW platform, but simply an evolution of the SaaS platform.
1. AI chat as an alternate UI path, not a replacement, the way both a screwdriver and a hammer exist in your toolbox
2. MCP servers distributing APIs, with agents being a new class of users to serve, rather than replacement of existing users
This means AI helps SaaS penetrate markets deeper and in the long run the industry grows as a result of AI.
âBut isnât SaaS dying? Every companyâs stock is down and multiples have fallen off a cliff!â
Perhaps multiple headwinds are hitting SaaS at once:
- Interest rates being an order of magnitude higher than during the zero-rate era
- Investor demand shifting to non-incremental upside of AI investments
- Consumer spending weakening, tightening budgets further down the chain
Perhaps the decreased demand for SaaS is partly driven by capital being expensive and generally less available for expanding headcount, contracting services and purchasing software.
And perhaps AI coding is actually eating into a portion of the software industry where users want to make their own decisions with custom code thatâs now cheap to produce.
All may be true at the same time.
Based on my experience, I believe the narrative attributing the SaaS downturn primarily to AI isnât correct today and is premature.
Software buyers != custom coders
Where AI is truly a platform shift is for software creation, and thatâs the real AI story today producing the big successes making the headlines.
AI coding has completely changed the software development industry in the last year.
This extends to web development in general.
For custom coding, once youâre onboarded to AI coding, itâs very hard to go back.
AI heavily disrupts custom coding, but does it disrupt paying for software?
In many ways, yes.
Thereâs some portion of the SaaS industry thatâs heavily overlapped with custom coding, where software buyers purchase the app because itâs easier than custom coding.
AI makes custom coding an order of magnitude easier and more accessible, so naturally custom code becomes the solution of choice in that scenario.
We provide software where âno codeâ is a value proposition of some users, and we have seen an increase in churn from those users (stated churn reason in cancelation survey).
However, the primary value of a large portion of paid software isnât just avoidance of custom code.
Marketing teams continue to use ConvertFlow when they could go custom code more easily now. Why?
After our initial churn wave of âno codersâ, what remains are those who are buying for our software less so for its âno codeâ value, but the decisions it makes on their behalf.
Decisions that look like:
- Templates with content layouts and UX designed based on data and taste
- Workflow patterns and naming conventions based on consensus from users
- Interfaces that âjust workâ for users of varying skill levels
- Logic rules that can be toggled on without configuration
- Turn-key integrations that just need authentication
- Pre-built reports that enforce practitioner best practices
That collection of pre-made decisions have compounded for a decade, and are packaged together, forming our âproductâ that customers buy.
Our good-fit customers today are different than the users who once bought for a âno-codeâ tool but may now use AI to custom code making their own decisions.
When AI makes custom coding cheap and easy, buying software starts to look less like paying to eat out because you canât cook, and more like dining at a great restaurant because itâs simply better.
In the AI era, winning SaaS products increasingly sell judgment and taste, not merely access to functionality.
Most brands use Klaviyo like an email tool.
New promotion? Send a campaign. Holiday coming up? Send another campaign.
This is NOT how winning brands are using Klaviyo.
Instead, their email automations glue together their offer strategy, merchandising and customer journey using flows.
On The Funnels Show, @ethanhdenney and I reverse-engineered the email/SMS flows behind the top brands generating $100s of millions, in case same billions in revenue, much of which is flowing through their email marketing.
We also seen patterns across of thousands of ConvertFlow customers.
Here are a few I could distill:
- Abandonment flows (e.g Qure Skincare sends abandonment emails for 18 days!)
- Quiz results flows (e.g IM8 turns quiz results in a personalized supplements protocol delivered via email)
- Subscription flows (e.g GrĂźns uses post-purchase email to convert customers in recurring subscription revenue)
- Education/nurturing flows (e.g AG1 stops selling on day 7 and starts educating potential buyers, Branch Furniture promotes being an "ergonomist")
The common denominator:
Their automated email flows are extensive, heavily optimized, and are driven by a working offer strategy.
They're not "spray-and-praying" their retail calendar.
Full video in the comments đ
NEW: @ConvertFlow's MCP Connector For AI Agents (Claude etc) đ
ConvertFlow's MCP connector enriches your AI agent with funnel experiments and website audience insights.
Once the MCP is connected, have your AI agents automatically get latest ConvertFlow funnel reports, surfacing wins and experiment ideas, right within your own AI.
Our masterplan is now coming together... đ
Today:
â Upload HTML/MD files from Claude etc to ConvertFlow's in-app AI, importing your funnel designs to ConvertFlow's funnel infrastructure for hosting, analytics, integrations and A/B testing.
â Fine-tune with AI chat in the visual builder, without touching code or software dev workflows. Invite your marketing team. No vibe coding mess.
â ConvertFlow's in-app AI manages A/B split-tests, supplying ideas to spin up, sending them to you in Slack weekly. Our AI choses winners automatically.
â Connect to Claude/MCP. ConvertFlow's AI and data enriches Claude with funnel experiment and visitor insights, driving further actions across all your tools.
Coming Soon:
â Full agentic control of your funnel experiments through Claude/MCP.
â Import funnel designs directly from Claude/MCP chat.
â BYAI (bring-your-own-ai) to manage campaigns. Skip our dashboard.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" - William Gibson
