CONVERGENCE
Real growth strategy from a startup CMO: The frameworks, interviews, & honest insights that 100k+ founders and operators actually use. The weekly newsletter by Lillian Pierson that cuts through the noise and gets straight to what works.
How Synter audited 2 years of ads data in 3 minutes and found ~$15K of wasted spend
Hi Reader, If you run Google Ads with smart bidding, the accuracy of your conversion count will make or break your campaigns. Think about it... you give Google a target cost per lead, which is the most you’re willing to pay, on average, to win one lead. Google then raises or lowers every bid to hit that target. It judges its progress by counting your conversions, meaning the leads that it believes your ads produced. Google never questions that count. That means a wrong conversion count will,...
How Payment Labs managed 0 churn & 37% bigger renewals over the last 2 years
Hey Reader, You've seen this photo a hundred times. An angler stands on a podium at the end of a fishing tournament, holding an oversized $1 million novelty check while the cameras go off. Funny thing is, I bet you never knew that the check is a prop. Han Park, the CEO and founder of Payment Labs, told me that the moment the check goes up, somebody backstage is often only just starting to collect the angler's banking details, personal information and tax documents. Before Payment Labs, the...
How to get 4x AEO impressions in 6 days, without creating new content
Hi Reader, If you pay for an AI visibility tool, or you're deciding whether to buy one, my new review shows you how I turned ThriveStack CitedBy recommendations into AI search wins within 6 days, and which of its numbers you can safely put in front of your board. In less than a month of testing ThriveStack CitedBy on my own site, Google Search Console recorded 3 wins: One blog post more than quadrupled its search impressions in 6 days, from 13 to 59. A second post jumped from roughly page 5...
How Daivik Goel turned customer questions into 27 payroll markets in 13 months
Hey Reader, A customer writes in and asks Daivik Goel whether Shor, his international payroll platform, can run payroll in a country like Finland. You can probably predict the answer: Shor doesn't cover that country yet. So Daivik goes and learns how payroll works there, down to the local details that nobody has written down anywhere. Do that enough times, and you get the record that Daivik has posted publicly, with dates. Shor launched in August 2025 with Employer of Record (EOR) coverage in...
Your skill files are an attack surface (and 6 other things I learned from Joel Horwitz)
Hey Reader, Last week, about halfway through my call with Joel Horwitz (founder of Synter - an agent platform for paid media), he told me about a founder who had launched one LinkedIn campaign with an agent and was happy with how it came out. The founder said that his CAC had landed around $45. Then Joel asked him the question that I'd now ask to every founder who is running agents anywhere in their growth stack. The question: “How much did you spend on AI to get there?” Fact of the matter is...
My 4-layer proxy stack for when attribution is gone (plus 5 rules)
Hey Reader, On September 2, my AI visibility score read 12. Four days later, with the same tool and the same 25 prompts, it read 22. Up 83%. I'll admit it... I already had the screenshot cropped. It would have made a beautiful LinkedIn post. Then a habit from my engineering years kicked in: you check the instrument before you celebrate the reading. Twenty minutes later, I had a spreadsheet which showed that my beautiful 83% was random variation. In fact, I hadn't published a single article in...
How Amro Elmasry turned one question to a Cisco rep into Bank of China as a client
Hey Reader, Picture a race garage in Australia on a Sunday afternoon. About 20 screens cover the wall, and every one of them is streaming live sensor data off a car that is somewhere out on the circuit. Tire temperatures, engine load, telemetry that nobody in the room fully parses in real time. A prospect is standing in front of those screens. He is a CFO, or maybe an IT director, and 3 weeks ago he would not even return a phone call. Nobody is pitching him. The person who explains the...
The six files I build before I write a single line of copy
The Strategy Room on YouTube — The six files I build before I write a single line of copy Watch me build the context layer your AI writer, scoring model, and CRM all lack. Strategy_Room_YouTube_SixFiles.file _ □ ✕ File Edit View Message Help Reply Forward Print Save From: Lillian Pierson <The Strategy Room on YouTube> Subject: The six files I build before I write a single line of copy Episode: AI-native growth system · 21 min watch THE STRATEGYROOM ON YOUTUBE NEW EPISODE Six files beforea...
How Stape hit 200k customers by giving back to the marketing analytics community
Same product, two frames. One reframe took Stape from 10,000 to 200,000 customers. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ Est. 2012 · Data-Mania, LLC Read in browser › The Convergence Founder-tested growth plays September 4, 2026 · The Weekly Edition Product-led growth 200,000 customers by giving the product away Same product, two frames. One reframe took Stape from 10,000 to 200,000 customers and opened the door to banks, insurers, and airlines. ¶ By Lillian Pierson, P.E. 8-minute read Growth desk ¶ From the...
From a Borrowed Couch to Building a $4.5 Billion Company
Hey Reader, Rob LoCascio's first company had just closed its doors. He was living on maybe $500 a month, showering at the New York Sports Club, and calling a sublet corner of an office home. He had a couch. He had an idea. So he taught himself to code. On that couch, he asked the question that became LivePerson: what if people could talk to each other, right there on a website? He invented web chat in 1997, patented it, took the company public in 2000, and grew it into a company that was...
Real growth strategy from a startup CMO: The frameworks, interviews, & honest insights that 100k+ founders and operators actually use. The weekly newsletter by Lillian Pierson that cuts through the noise and gets straight to what works.