Hi. I’m Jesse.

I ride mountain bikes. I write. I spend as much time as I can in the woods with my family. I grew up in Maine and live in Sweden now. Long story. The long version takes a beer.

I also like a particular kind of puzzle. A page gets plenty of visitors, a handful of them turn into customers, and nobody can tell you where the rest went. I find that fun. My wife says I’m a weirdo.

Sometimes the fix is a line in an ad. Just as often it’s taking something away. A sentence that makes people flinch. A form field nobody needed. A whole step in the funnel that’s there because somebody built it that way once and nobody asked since. I look for the spot where one change does the most work, and then I borrow a trick from Charlie Munger.

Munger spent part of his twenties as an Army Air Corps meteorologist. The job wasn’t really forecasting. It was keeping pilots alive. So he flipped the question. Instead of asking what the weather would do, he asked what kind of weather killed pilots. The answer came back short: icing and thunderstorms. He didn’t have to be the most accurate forecaster on the base. He had to get very good at spotting probable icing and probable thunderstorms, and telling pilots to stay the hell away from both.

He ran his money the same way for the rest of his life (may he rest in peace). Figure out what loses it. Don’t go there.

I was a commercially rated pilot and flight instructor for a few years, so nobody had to sell me on avoiding icing and thunderstorms. It took me longer to see that the same move works on a marketing funnel. When a new client comes in, one of my first questions is, “What might be causing us to lose the customers who already showed up?” Then I write the list. Then I design tests that can help route us around the worst things on it, the way you’d route around a nasty thunder cell on the radar.

Avoiding a negative thing can be a better use of time than chasing a positive one, at least when it comes to conversion rate puzzles. That’s been my experience. Not every time. But often enough that I keep doing it.

Did you know? The woods here in southern Sweden look more like Maine than you’d think. Spruce and birch and even a couple maples in our yard. It’s good to be able to look at trees, or better yet, walk under them, when you’re in a line of work where your best ideas usually come when you’re not chasing them.

If you’ve got a landing page that’s leaking, send it over and I’ll tell you in writing what might be costing you customers.