Founder Insights

Ask ChatGPT About Your Brand Before Customers Do

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

The first thing I did when I started using ChatGPT for general searches was ask it about myself and my company. It knew us. It cited customer reviews. And it also mentioned a scam website that had been impersonating our brand. That mix, accurate and damaging in the same answer, […]

Five Checks Before You Sign With Any Agency

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We review our customers’ websites across development, analytics, Search Console, and Google Ads, which means we also see the wreckage when a partner choice goes wrong. These are the five checks I give clients who ask me how to choose a development or marketing partner, every one of them learned […]

We Lost a Client by Telling Them the Truth

Founder Insights, General

After two and a half years together, one of our clients left MageCloud this month for a major replatform we advised against. Their non-brand organic traffic was 10 clicks a day. I could not see how a complete front-end rebuild paid back before marketing did. I failed to convince them, […]

Name the Brand First. Worry About SEO Last.

Founder Insights, General

My friend Del Manning sent me five domain candidates for a client’s new brand and asked which one was strongest for SEO. The honest answer: none of them had any SEO value, and that was the wrong question anyway. I named my own company MageCloud ten years ago. It was […]

Why Agencies and Merchants Keep Failing Each Other

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

We support around 140 ecommerce clients and most of them also use other agencies. Not one of those agencies has ever asked to speak with the development team that maintains the site. SEO firms sell £3-5K PDF audits listing problems my developers find for free. PPC agencies run ad spend […]

Why Every Founder Needs a Second of Everything

Founder Insights, General

Three calls in one day. A client whose Polish freelancer vanished behind smiley faces and excuses. A $3M company whose only developer mentally resigned the moment they announced a platform migration. And then the one that hit my own business: Mercury telling us our bank account was closing. Single points […]

Own Your Hosting, Even When an Agency Runs It

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights

A potential client showed me their agency contract and every monthly bill had a hosting fee folded into it. The agency owned the server, the code, and the relationship with the hosting vendor. The merchant owned a dependency. Unbundling that one line item was worth $600 a month before we […]

Why UK Businesses Should Look at Ukrainian Developers

Founder Insights, General

When I lived in the United States, the outsourcing conversation was all about Latin America, because the time zones lined up. The UK has the same advantage sitting two hours away and most British businesses have never seriously considered it. After a decade of running a Ukrainian engineering team from […]

Why My Agency’s Business Goal Is Stability, Not Growth

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights, General

Someone walked into my office the other day and asked the simplest possible question: what is the business goal? After ten years running an agency, the answer that came out of my mouth was not revenue or headcount or any of the usual founder metrics. Here is what the question […]

Why We Offer a Fix-or-Nothing Guarantee

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights, General

Some of the hardest jobs that land on our desk are the ones other developers could not finish. When the work is uncertain enough that we cannot guarantee a clean fix, we guarantee one thing instead: the client only pays if we fix it. Here is what that promise actually […]

Why I Cut a Client’s Invoice in Half

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights, General

When the work ran longer than expected and neither side was at fault, I cut a client’s monthly invoice by 50%. The developer still got paid in full. Here is why short-term invoicing wins almost never compound into long-term relationships, and the three rules I run by every time it […]

Why I Will Not Sign a 47-Month Hosting Contract

Ecommerce Strategy, Founder Insights, General

A £750 hosting invoice landed with a 47-month contract attached, no pause clause, no way out. Reasonable specs are not the issue. The lock-in is. Here is why every ecommerce operator should treat a multi-year hosting contract without an out as a vendor red flag, and what to ask for […]

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