The three checks I run before I agree you need ads

Hey,

Founders usually arrive with a purchase order, not a question.

• “We need ads.”
• “We need the listing rewritten.”
• “We need more reviews.”

Those are real needs. They’re also conclusions somebody reached before looking, and the order you check things in matters more than any single fix.

This is the sequence I run before I agree with anyone about what’s wrong.

The funnel comes before the listing. Impressions, then listing views, then installs, then whatever counts as activation in your product. The numbers themselves matter less than which step leaks worst. That’s the step where a fix holds.

An app with plenty of listing views and few installs has a conversion problem. Spending on ads there buys a faster demonstration that the listing doesn’t convert. Strong installs and weak activation is an onboarding problem, and rewriting the listing there just brings in more people to lose. Both founders, if you’d asked them, would have said they needed more traffic.

Your listing is written in your words. Merchants search in theirs, and those two overlap less than most founders expect. The gap shows up right there in your search terms data.

Almost nobody runs the third check. Is the number you’re chasing downstream of something healthy?

Review counts sit downstream of activation. Activation sits downstream of onboarding. Pushing hard on a number whose upstream is broken is the most expensive way to find that out.

The diagnosis is the deliverable. The fix is usually smaller than expected, and rarely the thing that was on the purchase order.

If you’re about to spend on one of those three, run the sequence first. It takes an afternoon and it changes what you spend on.

What’s the last growth thing you bought before anyone looked at the data?

Reply and tell me. I’ll tell you what I’d have checked first.

Ohad