About CJ
Sports marketing, e-commerce, agency work and higher education. Different products, different buyers, different stakes. The journey was broken in all of them.
In sports marketing the audience problem is pre-solved. Fans have already cleared their Saturday. Their kid is in face paint by 9 a.m. The job is to not ruin it for people who already love you. It looks like good marketing. It's a captive audience with a forgiving journey—and it hides every structural problem underneath.
E-commerce was more honest. A button in the wrong place, a trust signal that appeared too late, one extra field in checkout—each one moved the numbers. The product never changed. The path to buying it did.
Agency and copywriting work confirmed it across clients. The businesses that struggled weren't struggling because the copy was wrong. The copy was usually fine. Buyers were arriving, reading and leaving—not unconvinced, just unclear on what to do next.
Not unconvinced. Just unclear on what to do next.
Higher education made it impossible to ignore. Niche graduate programs don't have captive audiences. Every ambiguous step in the journey is a reason to wait on a decision that already has a 2-year timeline and a 5-figure price tag. Running a broad playbook on niche programs produced 3 months of nearly nothing. Rebuilding the journey around how that specific person makes that specific decision produced enrollment growth over 200%.
Same product. Same audience. Rebuilt journey.
Captive audiences hide journey problems. When people already want to show up, you can't tell if the path is working or if they're tolerating it.
The product is never the variable. The path to buying it always is.
Copy gets blamed for structural problems. Most of the rewrites were unnecessary. The path was broken, not the words.
Every ambiguous step is a reason to wait. The longer the decision, the more the journey has to do. A broad playbook on a niche program produces nearly nothing.
Solopreneurs and small teams are building and delivering and improving the product. Journey problems accumulate in the background until results stop making sense—and the instinct is to rewrite the homepage again.
The tools here are priced so that smaller teams can actually use them. Start with the Journey Leak Finder. It's free, it takes about 40 minutes and it tells you which stage of your journey is the problem. The paid tools are there if you need to go deeper.
The question behind everything: am I being the problem? Most journey problems aren't caused by bad products or wrong audiences. They're caused by a business that built the path for someone who already trusted it.