Founder Insights

Why LinkedIn Follower Counts Are Easy to Fake

Founder Insights, General

A cheap trick for inflating a LinkedIn following shows why the follower number proves little. Paul Ryazanov on what to judge an operator by instead. […]

Twenty Years on LinkedIn, Mostly Wasted

Founder Insights, General

I created my LinkedIn profile in October 2004. In the twenty years since, I have spoken with more than 20,000 prospects, partners, and clients, and treated the platform as a time-waster the entire way, because clients arrived through Rentacoder, Elance, and our site anyway. Those channels have dried up. Four […]

Skip the Fancy Audit Report. Send a Loom

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

A client project brief went up: please do not use ChatGPT content, no generic recommendations, we already know about H1 tags, include the word AlphaMage to prove you read this. Six hundred words of filtering for a real expert. My proposal was a Loom video, one hour and ten minutes […]

Big Brands Break Too. Cheap Audits Catch It

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

One morning of approaching prominent brands about speaking at Ecommerce Camp turned up a national retailer with DNS problems and a seven-brand Magento group with security issues. Large in-house teams drift from their day-one sharpness. A $49 video audit from a random guy would have caught both, which is exactly […]

Your £1M Store Is Already a Success Story

Ecommerce Camp, Founder Insights

While lining up speakers for the next Ecommerce Camp, I keep meeting business owners who underestimate what they have built. Founders who started from nothing and grew to $1-5M in annual revenue do not see themselves as success stories, because they are comparing against brands that make millions a month. […]

Our Emergency Policy for 46 UK Stores

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

46 UK businesses trust us daily to support their websites when something fails. Most of the time nothing does: we deploy twice a month and plan every release. But when a third-party provider breaks something at 2am, our clients have direct access to account managers, developers, and me. The policy […]

Why We Started Visiting Our Customers in Person

Founder Insights, General

We are establishing a new tradition at MageCloud: visiting customers where they work, talking through their problems face to face, and filming a little of it. The first visit was to Where Saints Go, the furniture brand Mark Wilman built, and an hour in the room taught me things three […]

The SEO Boost That Came From Ignoring the Advice

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

It might look like all my posts are about failed SEO engagements, so here is a success story with a twist. One client worked through five different SEO vendors while his site stayed flat. Then traffic jumped, significantly and durably. The boost came from changes his ecommerce manager made against […]

I Sold Onions at Twelve. Now I Hire Hustlers

Founder Insights, General

My first business was selling onions at a market in Ukraine. I was about twelve, taking produce from the farm and selling it when times were tough for my family. Flowers came next. That hustle is why I am obsessed with helping young people find their first opportunity, and why […]

My Developer Replied From a Basement in 24 Minutes

Founder Insights, General

I was not sure I wanted to share this. Clients are sometimes afraid to work with development teams that are not based in the US or UK. Then I texted my developer in Dnipro and he answered from a basement during a missile attack, and was back online 24 minutes […]

Why I Still Answer Emails That Pay Nothing

Founder Insights, General

The standard advice says pre-screen everyone, protect your calendar, and only talk to people who can pay. I generally agree, and I still answer emails from people who will never be clients. In Silicon Valley, founders who had built and exited companies gave their time to a nobody with questions, […]

One Office, a War, and Thirteen Cities

Founder Insights, General

A few years ago I could not have imagined being in the UK. We had just invested about 400K into our own office space in Ivano-Frankivsk, we were serving more than 100 brands worldwide, and revenue was around 2.5M a year. Then everything changed. Today the same team works from […]

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