Nobody built it, so I did

The story behind Affect + why it took 15 years to get here

Some of you may have heard me tell this story already, but a few years into my career, I was sitting in a quarterly business review and watched something I never forgot.

Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there.

Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again (woohoo…).

And then nobody said a damn word.

Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal and ok.

I’ve never been able to stop thinking about that room. How weird it was to be in that room when it was “normal” to everyone else in there. Then when I made my way over to Refine Labs I finally had a place where the team agreed “nah, that’s messed up and not how businesses should operate.” I’ve watched versions of that scene play out with countless clients, peers, and board horror stories for fifteen years. All incredibly smart people with good intentions + wanting to succeed, but they were unknowingly optimizing for the wrong thing because the wrong thing was what the system rewarded.

The thought that kept creeping in

The more I learned + experienced how marketing actually works, from ecosystems to force multipliers to the way a BDR call lands completely differently when the prospect has been consuming your content for months, the more I kept having this thought that our measurement frameworks seemed to be answering a different question than the one we were (or should’ve been) asking.

Every attribution tool I’ve ever used answers things like “what did each channel do?” or “who gets credit for this deal?” This leads to budgets being dictated by local maximums within channels, not a global maximum for your GTM team.

And that’s because nobody built a tool for the person who owns this outcome. The VP of Marketing, the Head of Sales, and the CFO + CEO all need to answer a completely different question: is our system working? Where is it broken? What do we do about it?

I’ve audited 100+ funnels over my career + keep finding the same patterns over and over. That’s the beauty of pattern recognition - when you can spot the same leaks, the same misdiagnoses, the same confident optimization of the wrong thing, and the same lack of outcome. That’s why we’re left giving a very wishy-washy answer to the board when they ask which channel should get more budget to hit growth targets, meanwhile the real problem is a constraint that, when “more” is added to it, only leads to more firedrills and missed targets.

If you give a mouse a cookie…

This newsletter has been the place where I’ve been working through various ideas publicly for the past few years. Some of you have been here since the beginning + for that I’m forever grateful. (and you also probably know my love of cookies, so I couldn’t help myself with the heading for this section 🤷‍♂️)

I’ve shared my thoughts on ecosystems vs. channels, AKA the argument that force multipliers don’t exist inside individual channels, that they exist in the interplay between them.

You’ve read my thoughts on being data-driven vs. data-informed, why one of the worst things you can do is disqualify a lead simply because it’s a junior title who submitted the demo request, and how most of our “goals” aren’t really goals at all.

What I didn’t tell you is that while I was writing all of that, I was also pulling the thread that leads us here to today.

The thread was a simple question: if measurement is this broken, why hasn’t anyone fixed it? What are we missing that’s making this so hard to solve for?

Meanwhile, I was reading various books + across different genres as I have been for years. Manufacturing books from 1984, biographies of people who built things in completely different domains, economics papers, the list goes on. One thing I didn’t read much of though were marketing books. I’ve read enough of those over the years to know those rarely ever get to a meaningful depth + are typically just platitudes we already know.

One of the first “aha” moments I had came from a line in the manufacturing book for 1984 (Eliyahu Goldratt’s “The Goal”) which is a novel about a manufacturing plant + their struggles. Here’s the part that stopped me in my tracks:

“The contribution of any single person to the organization’s purpose is strongly dependent upon the performance of others.”

So I read the line again. Then I replaced “person” with [channel, campaign, team, program, etc.] and realized that’s the ecosystem + force multiplier argument I’ve been making.

The problems we think are new aren’t new. They’re the same problems we’ve always had, just dressed in different clothes.

The next thread

A few months later, I was reading The Almanack of Naval Ravikant + came across his framing of the principal-agent problem. He called it the single most fundamental problem in microeconomics, but as you’re about to see, I realized it was the answer to something else we marketers have been struggling with.

Basically, the principal is the person who owns the outcome. Then the agent is the person acting on their behalf. The underlying problem he described is that agents optimize for what the principal can measure — not for the outcome itself.

I about threw my book across the room after reading that. Was a very real moment where I felt like I finally had a justification that I wasn’t crazy for going down the Goodhart’s Law rabbithole that I’d been going down lately. He framed up the entire problem with B2B marketing measurement, but using an economic concept.

The board asks us which channel is working because that’s what they can measure. So the marketing team optimizes for cost per lead on that channel because that’s what they’re rewarded by the board for. Plus, attribution tools are built to show what each agent (i.e. each channel, campaign, person, etc.) contributed toward that. Yay for credit assignment + local optimizations!

Nobody is building for the principal in the above scenarios. The person or leadership team who owns the revenue outcome + needs to understand the system as a whole in order to see where the constraints are and what to do about them. Zero help for this person/team.

So we ultimately have things like Goodhart’s Law, the principal/agent problem, and the theory of constraints all coming together in a perfect storm here. Three very different frameworks from three very different disciplines all pointing to the exact same problem.

There’s no coincidence here. As I said earlier - same problems, just wearing different clothes. Lucky for us, we know what’s really underneath those clothes thanks to these problems already having been solved, so it’s just been a matter of time to translate that to our domain.

So I kept waiting for someone to build the tool that fills that gap. And waiting. Anddd waiting some more. But nothing ever came. Attribution tools have been evolving, but not in this direction.

So I built it instead.

What is it?

Affect is a revenue diagnostic for B2B marketers and revenue leaders. It diagnoses exactly where your funnel is breaking, benchmarks your rates against real peers in your industry, and tells you what to fix first.

You run a free audit in three minutes + it benchmarks your conversion rates. It tells you where you stand relative to your industry, GTM motion, and maturity. Then it diagnoses what’s actually wrong with your funnel - a real, specific diagnosis based on your inputs. It names the root cause, gives you a prioritized action plan, + then a library of 50+ plays with timelines and success signals that you can take to improve your numbers.

Imagine you went to the doctor with chronic stomach pains and at each visit they just told you “take more pills,” but those stomach pains never got better. You’d start to question their credibility after 2–3 visits. Meanwhile, what you’re really trying to understand is why you have those stomach pains in the first place. You don’t want the band-aid solution of taking more pills to mask the pain.

This is the cycle we marketers have been in for decades. It’s time to break it.

You’re the first to hear this

This is the first place I’m publicly announcing that Affect is live. It’s a fully functioning app (well, as fully-functioning as can be at initial release 😉) + I’m already using it myself.

It’s been fun to build this. One thing that immediately came to light for me when going about this is that I’ve managed to createe a new category. I tried to find market comps for something like this + there’s nothing out there. This has all been done historically through a combination of things like:

• Consultant audits that run anywhere from $15-30k

• Industry benchmark reports from places like Gartner + cost a couple grand

• Having an in-house or fractional marketing leader ($$$ as you know)

• Then having some type of agency or internal team member who knows how to measure performance overall (but usually ends up being someone in Finance who definitely does NOT understand marketing and leads to all of those fun ROI conversations…)

So the category “name” of revenue diagnostic, the pricing I’m starting this at, etc. - I’m genuinely curious for your thoughts + feedback. Give it a shot + let me know how you’d explain what it does to a friend or colleague. More curiously, how much value does this give you? I personally know the power of what a 1% improvement to a conversion rate can do to a funnel, but that doesn’t always translate to software purchases.

The first 50 people who sign up as paying customers are going to be given the founding member rate of $99/month for life. One flat rate per entity (AKA unlimited users/teammates) + a rate lock for life (I can’t stand those “your rate is going up at renewal!” emails).

Here’s how I’ve been thinking about pricing for those who are curious.

After the first 50 sign up, the price is going to go up. The people who get in first shape what this becomes + I want those people to be the ones who believed early enough to take the bet.

But if you’re not ready to pay yet, that’s completely ok - just run the free audit first. See what it tells you about your funnel + has you start thinking about. You can come back to it + re-run it as many times as you like as time goes on.

One final note

I’ve spent years waiting for the “right” moment to do something like this, the time when I’d have more certainty to start building. Ultimately, for permission that was never going to come from anywhere/anyone.

The thing that started as a note in my phone didn’t come from some sexy or extravagant business plan or market analysis. It came from reading various books + listening to different podcasts + feeling something click. So I pulled the thread + kept pulling, building the tool I’ve always wanted out of necessity for myself, not from some ulterior motive. Or as Naval Ravikant said, “Find the problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else. You’ll outcompete anyone doing it for the outcome because you’re doing it for the thing itself.”

This is that problem for me.

Your version of this exists somewhere. The problem that feels like play to you but looks like work to everyone else + is the thing you keep coming back to. I’m not trying to AI-pill you here, but the bar has never been lower to follow your curiosity in building something. I even mentioned this in last week’s newsletter - products aren’t going to be the moat anymore, the underlying knowledge + experience that you uniquely have is what the market is going to value the most as new entrants flock in left + right.

So have fun, be curious, and go try out Affect :)

See you next Saturday,
Sam

P.S. don’t worry, this newsletter isn’t now going to become me pitching you on Affect every send moving forward. It’s going to continue as it always has, me sharing what I’m seeing + learning while leading marketing here at Loxo, but I may also start sharing some of the things I’m seeing + learning as I work with other marketers who use Affect. Trends, insights, what is/isn’t working, etc. - all the normal stuff you’d expect from me :)