The Bloke Who’ll Tell You Your Website’s Broken

Hi, I’m Simon 🙂

I help brands turn more visitors into paying customers. Without spending more on ads.

How I got here

End of 2006. I’m sitting in the MCG watching England get absolutely thumped in the Ashes (5-0, if you’re wondering – still hurts).

Between overs (sort of), I got a message. Three UK wanted me to join their eCommerce team. I’d been with them since launch in 2003, back when we were the weird new brand with massive unfashionable handsets selling video content. Everyone said video content would never be a thing. We just needed Nokia handsets, apparently.

Plot twist: they were wrong.

But there was a catch. Our parent company had stopped throwing money at us. We needed to actually make a profit. With shrinking budgets.

So I learned to squeeze every drop of value from the traffic we had.

What that looked like

We did things before most people had heard of them:

• Webchat in 2007 (revolutionary at the time)
• Multivariate testing on new pages
• Checkout exit surveys to find out why people weren’t buying
• Tracking customers who researched online but bought in-store

We tested everything. Most of it failed. Didn’t matter. Each failure taught us what didn’t work – and what did.

Despite marketing budgets getting slashed, we continued to grow online revenue. With an ugly website that looked like it was built in Microsoft Paint. The branding team hated us.

15 years later

I’ve worked mostly in telecoms and SaaS, but the principles are the same everywhere:

• Trust data, not hunches
• Test everything
• Fix what’s actually broken, not what “feels” wrong
• Pretty doesn’t pay the bills – conversions do

I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. Still do. But I’ve learned something from every single one.

Now I help founders do the same thing I did at Three – get more customers from the traffic they’ve already got.

Ready to see what’s stopping your visitors from buying?