Vanessa Fox

Long Live the Open Web - Starshot Edition Over 100 people came to the "Future of the Drupal Economy" BoF at DrupalCon. Too many for the room, but our neighbors offered to swap their bigger space. Community comes through! 30 minutes wasn’t very long, but a wide range of opinions were shared. It was positive overall. I was impressed by what Matthew Grasmick from Acquia had to say. He referenced the Starshot strategy, and I recommend everyone read his/Dries Buytaert memo. It’s quite good, and provides clarity of vision. Link below. Their points on what's shifting is hyper-relevant to the ongoing discussion: "Shift 1: Empower content creators, marketers, web managers, and web designers to build and manage websites independently, without relying on developers. While maintaining our leadership position with developers, we will focus on enabling these non-technical roles to leverage our platform's capabilities fully." This is great, and Acquia appears committed to delivering Experience Builder to address this concern. They deserve all the credit for making a big investment in this part of Drupal CMS. This is a welcome turn from Acquia Site Studio, an acquisition that was (is?) part of their DXP suite. It's a proprietary tool that competes with Drupal itself, and runs counter to the practices of many agencies in the ecosystem. But Experience Builder is all being built in the open and will ship as pure open source, so no vendor lock-in. Cheers to that. Hopefully the implementation community has a chance to weigh in before launch. It needs to be a hit with themers/front-end devs as well as Drupal architects. "Shift 2: Extend our presence in the mid-market segment, targeting projects with total budgets (including design, development, hosting, and maintenance) between 25,000ドル and 100,000ドル (roughly, 30,00ドル USD to 120,000ドル USD). We will continue to maintain our leadership in the enterprise market and high-budget projects." Yes. Drupal needs mid-market projects in order to thrive. This is where I got my start, and it should be a wide "base" for the Drupal economy. This is the right economic target in my opinion. But the focus on "design, develop, host, maintain" feels antiquated. The "launch 'em and leave 'em" model is out; "prove and improve" is in. Shops that thrive today earn continued engagement based on outcomes achieved vs outputs delivered. There’s also the opportunity to deliver Websites as a Service instead of Website Services. Recurring revenue instead of time/materials. This could be huge for the ecosystem, and a great way to leverage site templates. Drupal as demand driver is probably done. Time was, you could say you knew how to Drupal, and the world would beat a path to your doorstep. That’s not coming back. We have to think differently. Buyers want solutions and value, not technical capabilities. This is where I want Pantheon to help the ecosystem. Marketing solutions, evolving our business models. More to come!

We just dropped our first YouTube video in a while. It reveals the exact 3-step process that took us from zero to 50ドルk/month. The biggest mistake in landing enterprise clients? Pitching massive projects upfront. The 30-page proposals. The scary price tags. The endless ghosting. We learned this the hard way after burning months on proposals that went nowhere. Then we discovered what actually works: Exploration Milestones. Think of it like Netflix ordering a pilot episode before committing to a full season. Small investment. Huge insight. Zero risk. In the video, I break down: → Why we start with 1,500ドル projects (not 50,000ドル) → The exact framework that converts 83% into major contracts → Real case study: How we landed a healthcare giant with 750 employees across 4 countries Watch the full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/d6sYv7ne And grab the free AI Exploration Milestone Blueprint in the video description. It's our exact template for structuring these game-changing pilot projects. Your move: Stop pitching the full season. Start with the pilot. What's your biggest challenge with landing enterprise clients?

We just dropped our first YouTube video in a while. It reveals the exact 3-step process that took us from zero to 50ドルk/month. The biggest mistake in landing enterprise clients? Pitching massive projects upfront. The 30-page proposals. The scary price tags. The endless ghosting. We learned this the hard way after burning months on proposals that went nowhere. Then we discovered what actually works: Exploration Milestones. Think of it like Netflix ordering a pilot episode before committing to a full season. Small investment. Huge insight. Zero risk. In the video, I break down: → Why we start with 1,500ドル projects (not 50,000ドル) → The exact framework that converts 83% into major contracts → Real case study: How we landed a healthcare giant with 750 employees across 4 countries Watch the full breakdown: https://lnkd.in/d6sYv7ne And grab the free AI Exploration Milestone Blueprint in the video description. It's our exact template for structuring these game-changing pilot projects. Your move: Stop pitching the full season. Start with the pilot. What's your biggest challenge with landing enterprise clients?

We completely restructured and redesigned our product cards across all product listing pages and recommendation sliders. The logic seemed bulletproof - cleaner design, better information hierarchy, easier for customers to process product details and make purchase decisions. Classic UX thinking, right? It bombed. Hard. The results: ARPU dropped from 3ドル.65 to 3ドル.43 (-5.95%) Statistically significant loss What went wrong: The data told a clear story - returning customers absolutely hated the change. Their ARPU dropped about 9% while new visitors showed no difference. Familiarity beats "optimization." Our existing customers were used to the old layout. When we changed it, we didn't create clarity - we created cognitive dissonance. The restructuring backfired: - Breaking product titles into separate lines (name, size, options) made customers worried they were missing information - What felt like "better organization" to us felt like "missing details" to them - Customers value predictability over pretty design The lesson: Sometimes your "outdated" design is actually perfect for your audience. Established customers have learned your interface. Change it drastically and you're asking them to relearn everything while they're trying to buy. Your existing customers' comfort with your site is worth (more than any design award.) Btw, I've put together an E-com Product Master Base, Want it? Comment "Base" And I'll send it your way Follow me (Samuel Hess) for more real CRO reality checks 👇

We completely restructured and redesigned our product cards across all product listing pages and recommendation sliders. The logic seemed bulletproof - cleaner design, better information hierarchy, easier for customers to process product details and make purchase decisions. Classic UX thinking, right? It bombed. Hard. The results: ARPU dropped from 3ドル.65 to 3ドル.43 (-5.95%) Statistically significant loss What went wrong: The data told a clear story - returning customers absolutely hated the change. Their ARPU dropped about 9% while new visitors showed no difference. Familiarity beats "optimization." Our existing customers were used to the old layout. When we changed it, we didn't create clarity - we created cognitive dissonance. The restructuring backfired: - Breaking product titles into separate lines (name, size, options) made customers worried they were missing information - What felt like "better organization" to us felt like "missing details" to them - Customers value predictability over pretty design The lesson: Sometimes your "outdated" design is actually perfect for your audience. Established customers have learned your interface. Change it drastically and you're asking them to relearn everything while they're trying to buy. Your existing customers' comfort with your site is worth (more than any design award.) Btw, I've put together an E-com Product Master Base, Want it? Comment "Base" And I'll send it your way Follow me (Samuel Hess) for more real CRO reality checks 👇

Agencies that only know how to "run accounts" are going extinct. Tech is catching up fast, but the future isn’t agencies vs. tech. It’s agencies with tech. They will converge. The smartest operators I know are already blending strategy, creative, and data. They’re building systems that make human decisions more accurate, not replacing humans. The agency of the future won’t be a service. It’ll be a strategic engine powered by tech.

"We need a website refresh." Those words strike fear into many SaaS leaders' hearts. It feels tactical. Expensive. A vanity project. But here's what I've learned working with multiple established B2B SaaS companies: What looks like a website problem is almost always a MESSAGING problem. We faced this exact challenge at one SaaS company. We started immediately on refining our ICP and building a compelling strategic narrative and then quickly rolled out the new message to a newly redesigned site. Our website redesign was a bold move—we chose the most creative concept presented by the agency that positioned us unlike anyone else in our space. Our employees loved it, prospects found it intriguing, and it initially achieved our goal: standing out in a crowded field with much bigger but more boring companies. But after being in-market for a while with this "clever" site built on our initial strategic narrative, the data told a different story. Our demo-to-opportunity conversion was lower than expected. Prospects arrived at sales meetings confused about what we actually did. 😬 Instead of defaulting to another website redesign, we did something powerful: we listened to customers, brainstormed with frontline client teams, and studied newly available data. Here's what that looked like: • Analyzed 12+ months of sales calls to identify how prospects described their challenges • Interviewed customers about how they actually use our solution (not how we thought they did) • Examined usage data to find the most-used features and five-year retention and upsell data to see which customers appeared to be getting the most value • Gathered customer-facing teams to understand what customers told us were the most compelling reasons they bought and continue renewing • Conducted competitive analysis to clarify our unique value • Led an executive offsite dissecting our most successful customer relationships, SWOT and competitor SWOT The result? A tighter strategic narrative and messaging framework that spoke more directly to customer pain points—a significant evolution from our first attempt a year earlier. Then, for our second website iteration, we partnered with Anthony Pierri 🎸 at FletchPMM (the GOAT of home page messaging) and built an entirely new homepage grounded in this research-backed story. When we launched this new customer-driven site: ▶️ Demo-to-pipeline conversion improved by 50%+ ▶️ We maintained the same inbound pipeline even after CUTTING ad spend by half ▶️ Sales cycles shortened as prospects arrived better qualified The hard truth for every SaaS leader: Your intuition about your market is probably wrong. The way you talk about your solution likely misses the mark. The fix isn't just a creative redesign. It's taking a humble step back, doing systematic customer research and having the courage to rebuild your story from scratch—even if that means scrapping work that seemed innovative when launched.

Yes, the best way to show up in the new world of search is to revamp your information architecture. But I'm seeing a lot of very sketchy content structure and navigation design recommendations coming from the SEO influencer hive. Their solutions for "query fan out" are.... middling, at best. No, you don't need "fraggles" or "chunking" or whatever term they've invented related to 1980s kids' entertainment. The concepts behind these recommendations are worth your attention, but the methods SEO leaders are advocating to your UX and info architecture are... less than ideal. They've nailed the cause, but not the cure. "Chunking" is trying to reverse engineer what UX folks call Content Modeling. Content Modeling is an established concept in content strategy that identifies core components of content and creates structured interfaces like SERPs. Or streaming platforms. Or AI overviews. (I learned it in 2014.) Another, similar approach is called object-oriented UX (OOUX). Both OOUX and Content Modeling are top-down structural evaluations based on the neuroscience of how people process and evaluate content. When people like and use your content because it's well-structured, it becomes mentioned and recommended more often, builds authority, EEAT, etc. (And yes, I have proof.) If you value your audience: don't change your navigation and page linking strategy without consulting someone who knows UX. SEO folks have a long trail of web garbage behind them, especially in structure and navigation. I saw a prominent influencer recommend "more in-line links" for "better UX" and... clearly he has never read the many pieces of research that say in-line links make navigation more confusing for all but the heaviest internet users. Navigation and information architecture belong with systems thinkers and editorial organizers who understand big-picture content strategy. I'm slotting some tips on info architecture optimization into my newsletter for the next month. (And the newsletter resumes tomorrowI I promise!) And in the meantime: - The great Sophia V Prater has many OOUX resources to share. Google "OOUX," and she owns it. - Button is an upcoming virtual conference about Content Design from the legendary creators of aforementioned Confab. - Greg Dunlap recently published a book called Designing Content Authoring Experiences, if you're looking for a more advanced look at creating systems that creators can use to build better structure. If you've never taken a content design or UX course before, the above are great places to start, before you go tearing up your navigation because some dude thinks you'll be mentioned in LLMs with the chunking. And if you need support on an upcoming IA project (especially prepping IA for AI), raise your hand and I'll send the names of some very smart structural thinkers.

The future of design and software consulting are going to be agencies that help you finish the last 10% of vibe-coded applications. They're going to help you with security, scalability, performance, and fixing those very small bugs where the LLMs get into the loop. I don't know who's building it, but they're going to crash it

The most dangerous trap in product development? Building what gets the loudest applause. Zeb Evans from ClickUp recently shared something that hit hard: he killed their feature request tracker because they were building for votes, not revenue. At WP SEO AI, we've taken a different approach. Every feature gets evaluated through three lenses: - Is this a new USP that differentiates us? - Does this increase stickiness and retention? - Does this create an upsell opportunity? Community feedback matters. But it can't be the only input. Even at 135 people serving over 1000 companies, I still spend 50% of my time with clients. Not because I have to, but because that's where you learn what actually moves the business forward. Sales calls reveal the truth. The feature everyone's talking about in forums? Might not close a single deal. The capability that three enterprise clients mentioned in the same week? That's what matters. It's not about ignoring feedback. It's about balancing community requests with actual business value. You can ship something that gets massive engagement and zero revenue impact. Or you can build what closes deals, even if it's quieter in the feedback channels. The hard part? Choosing to build for strategic value, not just vocal demand.

It's tempting to leave a prompt alone once it's working well. But "set it and forget it" doesn't work in AI. I recently chatted with Josh Kunzler, Product Designer at CopyPress, where we talked about what it actually takes to keep a system like theirs running well over time. They've built Thematical, an internal GenAI-powered platform for scaling content, and like most teams, they have lots of prompts running across different tasks. Each one requires iterations: - Models improve - Tasks shift - Bugs show up - Quality drifts The hardest part is that touching something that's already working can feel risky. Josh talked about how they've made it safer and easier to try things out, like testing a new model or comparing outputs without messing with what's live. Full case study in comments. #GenAI #LLMOps #PromptEngineering #llms #ContentOps

It's tempting to leave a prompt alone once it's working well. But "set it and forget it" doesn't work in AI. I recently chatted with Josh Kunzler, Product Designer at CopyPress, where we talked about what it actually takes to keep a system like theirs running well over time. They've built Thematical, an internal GenAI-powered platform for scaling content, and like most teams, they have lots of prompts running across different tasks. Each one requires iterations: - Models improve - Tasks shift - Bugs show up - Quality drifts The hardest part is that touching something that's already working can feel risky. Josh talked about how they've made it safer and easier to try things out, like testing a new model or comparing outputs without messing with what's live. Full case study in comments. #GenAI #LLMOps #PromptEngineering #llms #ContentOps

Inc. Magazine just featured my article about why your website should look like everyone else's. Companies that fixed their nonstandard checkout patterns saw conversions jump by an average of 35.26%. Here's what 10 years of data taught me about web design: 1. Your website isn't competing with your competitors' websites It's competing with every website your customer has ever used. Chartbeat's study of two billion page views found that 55% of visits last under 15 seconds. During those seconds, processing fluency determines trust. The easier something is to mentally process, the more positively we judge it. Users whisper "I can trust this" before they've read a single word. Fight conventional patterns during those precious moments, and you've already lost. 2. A simple test proved the point Move your logo from top left to center. Watch what happens. Users take longer to find their way home. Customer service tickets asking "How do I get back to the main page?" Users reach "Home" six times faster when the logo sits top-left. The Baymard Institute discovered companies fixing nonstandard checkout patterns saw conversions jump 35.26%. For a 100ドル million per year brand, that's 35ドル million lost to creativity. 3. Patagonia and Airbnb mastered the balance Patagonia's product grids are completely conventional. Their checkout flow is industry standard. But within that rock-solid chassis: environmental impact calculators and supply chain stories that read like investigative journalism. This approach helps sustain a 2-2.5% conversion rate, well above the apparel industry mean of 1.6%. Airbnb's search functions like any booking site. The revolution happened in the content layer. Listings with professional photography are booked 2.5 times more often, earning hosts approximately 1,025ドル extra per month. 4. The most creative websites often perform the worst Creativity in the wrong places is expensive. Baymard Premium benchmarks against 275 e-commerce conventions. Watch session-replay tools for rage-clicks on nonstandard elements. Look for spikes in logo-click rates signaling orientation failure. Nobody remembers the checkout flow. They remember how you made them feel while they were checking out. Follow conventions where trust gets built. Break them where memories get made. Full Inc. article: https://lnkd.in/gxTJ2YMm

Inc. Magazine just featured my article about why your website should look like everyone else's. Companies that fixed their nonstandard checkout patterns saw conversions jump by an average of 35.26%. Here's what 10 years of data taught me about web design: 1. Your website isn't competing with your competitors' websites It's competing with every website your customer has ever used. Chartbeat's study of two billion page views found that 55% of visits last under 15 seconds. During those seconds, processing fluency determines trust. The easier something is to mentally process, the more positively we judge it. Users whisper "I can trust this" before they've read a single word. Fight conventional patterns during those precious moments, and you've already lost. 2. A simple test proved the point Move your logo from top left to center. Watch what happens. Users take longer to find their way home. Customer service tickets asking "How do I get back to the main page?" Users reach "Home" six times faster when the logo sits top-left. The Baymard Institute discovered companies fixing nonstandard checkout patterns saw conversions jump 35.26%. For a 100ドル million per year brand, that's 35ドル million lost to creativity. 3. Patagonia and Airbnb mastered the balance Patagonia's product grids are completely conventional. Their checkout flow is industry standard. But within that rock-solid chassis: environmental impact calculators and supply chain stories that read like investigative journalism. This approach helps sustain a 2-2.5% conversion rate, well above the apparel industry mean of 1.6%. Airbnb's search functions like any booking site. The revolution happened in the content layer. Listings with professional photography are booked 2.5 times more often, earning hosts approximately 1,025ドル extra per month. 4. The most creative websites often perform the worst Creativity in the wrong places is expensive. Baymard Premium benchmarks against 275 e-commerce conventions. Watch session-replay tools for rage-clicks on nonstandard elements. Look for spikes in logo-click rates signaling orientation failure. Nobody remembers the checkout flow. They remember how you made them feel while they were checking out. Follow conventions where trust gets built. Break them where memories get made. Full Inc. article: https://lnkd.in/gxTJ2YMm

Building a 0-1 product is hard enough. Getting it to 20ドルM ARR is even harder. Sunsetting it despite this success, is the hardest. In this episode, Stacey Feero (Director of Product @AgencyAnalytics) shares how she built, iterated on and ultimately sunset a product that many would consider a success. She gives practical advice throughout this journey, especially on how to match user mental models with the product you’re building. Give it a listen now: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/emBVE2hp Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eHf_KcUa Apple: https://lnkd.in/ek9GhriY

Building a 0-1 product is hard enough. Getting it to 20ドルM ARR is even harder. Sunsetting it despite this success, is the hardest. In this episode, Stacey Feero (Director of Product @AgencyAnalytics) shares how she built, iterated on and ultimately sunset a product that many would consider a success. She gives practical advice throughout this journey, especially on how to match user mental models with the product you’re building. Give it a listen now: Spotify: https://lnkd.in/emBVE2hp Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eHf_KcUa Apple: https://lnkd.in/ek9GhriY

Shopify IS Becoming the Product Layer of the Internet Kurt Elster recent post about Shopify's quiet infrastructure play got me thinking about what this really means for agentic commerce. The MCP piece everyone's missing: Model Context Protocol isn't just another API integration. It's the plumbing that makes AI agents actual shopping partners, not glorified search boxes. Here's what changes: AI agents become your sales team They don't just answer questions - they understand context, remember preferences, and can complete transactions across any MCP-connected store. Maybe the most exciting thing is for B2B - Is Shopify ready for this? Every touchpoint becomes transactional Your customers' AI assistant can now shop your catalog while they're researching on Perplexity, planning in Claude, or working in any MCP-enabled app. Commerce becomes invisible infrastructure Just like Kurt said - Shopify isn't just a platform anymore. It's the product graph that powers AI-driven purchasing decisions across the internet. The shift that matters: We're moving from "visit my store" to "my products exist wherever customers think to look for them." Your brand presence becomes less about your website design and more about how well your product data performs in AI-mediated discovery and purchase flows. Humans are always involved - but now they're involved through conversations with AI that can actually complete transactions. The question keeping me up at night: Are we ready for commerce that happens in AI conversations instead of shopping carts? Because ready or not, that's what Shopify just made possible.

Most automation agencies are thinking too small right now. They’re trying to ride the AI wave with the same "we automate stuff" pitch that worked pre-ChatGPT. That’s not gonna cut it. ‎ We just wrapped Anti Roadmap Roadmap Club, the first-ever accelerator for automation agencies. In 8 weeks, grads generated 850ドルK in pipeline. Here’s the playbook: 1. Pick a vertical and commit. Generic agencies don’t get into big rooms. 2. Specialize in expensive problems—not just tools. 3. Anchor your offer to a high-value platform (think Salesforce, not Trello). 4. Shift from "wait for referrals" to outbound that starts real conversations. 5. Protect your founder bandwidth—stop scoping 200ドル jobs. 6. Internally re-align your team around the new vision (or expect chaos). 7. Stop rushing to close—enterprise deals move slower but scale harder. 8. Build fast. Learn faster. Execution > theory. ‎ Automation is entering its enterprise era. The agencies that win won’t be the fastest builders. They’ll be the best positioned.