The First Call
I still remember the first call like it was yesterday.
It was late in the evening for the founders, morning for me. We got on Zoom, and even through the fuzzy video I could tell they were worn down. Not just tired from the day — tired in the way you get when you’ve been carrying too much weight for too long.
They told me about their brand. A health supplements company they’d been building for just over a year. The products were solid. Customers who bought usually liked them. The formulas were well thought out, not thrown together like so many in the industry. On paper, it should have been working.
But sales weren’t moving.
They had a small agency running ads. A freelancer helping with design. Someone doing SEO on the side. Everyone was doing their piece of the puzzle. But the picture wasn’t coming together.
At one point, one of them leaned toward the camera and said, “We feel like we’re running on a treadmill. We’re sweating, we’re moving as fast as we can, but we’re not going anywhere.”
That line stuck with me. Because that’s exactly what it looked like.
I didn’t sugarcoat it. I told them I wasn’t there to bring in magic, or replace their team, or add another expensive tool. My role would be different. I would work with the people they already had. Align them. Focus them. Push them toward a bigger vision.
And I said something I’ve said to many founders before: “You don’t need more motion. You need more traction.”
They nodded. And with that, we started a four-month journey that would completely change the path of their business.d tell they were worn down. Not just tired from the day — tired in the way you get when you’ve been carrying too much weight for too long.
They told me about their brand. A health supplements company they’d been building for just over a year. The products were solid. Customers who bought usually liked them. The formulas were well thought out, not thrown together like so many in the industry. On paper, it should have been working.
But sales weren’t moving.
They had a small agency running ads. A freelancer helping with design. Someone doing SEO on the side. Everyone was doing their piece of the puzzle. But the picture wasn’t coming together.
At one point, one of them leaned toward the camera and said, “We feel like we’re running on a treadmill. We’re sweating, we’re moving as fast as we can, but we’re not going anywhere.”
That line stuck with me. Because that’s exactly what it looked like.
I didn’t sugarcoat it. I told them I wasn’t there to bring in magic, or replace their team, or add another expensive tool. My role would be different. I would work with the people they already had. Align them. Focus them. Push them toward a bigger vision.
And I said something I’ve said to many founders before: “You don’t need more motion. You need more traction.”
They nodded. And with that, we started a four-month journey that would completely change the path of their business.
Month One: Walking in the Customer’s Shoes
The first thing I do with any e-commerce brand is simple: I become the customer.
I went to their website with fresh eyes. I clicked through the homepage. I read the product pages. I went to checkout. And within minutes, I knew what was wrong.
The site wasn’t broken. That almost made it worse. If it had been broken, they would have fixed it. The real problem was more subtle. It was lifeless.
The design was neat, but it looked like a template. There was nothing about it that felt like them. Product descriptions were cold, clinical, and so packed with technical terms that even I had to read them twice. Checkout felt like filling out a form at the doctor’s office.
Imagine being a new customer, curious about trying a supplement to feel more energy or better focus. You land on the site, you scroll a bit, and you feel nothing. No connection. No reason to trust. No spark.
I called their design vendor. I didn’t tell them their work was bad. I told them the truth: “This site needs to breathe. Right now it’s all facts and no feeling.”
Together, we started making changes.
We added photography that felt human. Not glossy stock images, but photos of real people in everyday life. We simplified checkout so it was two steps, not four. We rewrote product pages in plain language: not “contains clinically studied compounds that…” but “helps you wake up with steady energy that lasts.”
Within weeks, the changes paid off. Time on site climbed. Cart abandonment dropped. Customers started finishing what they started.
One customer stood out to me in the data — Yael. She had spent almost fifteen minutes clicking back and forth between product pages, clearly interested. But when she hit checkout, she dropped off. Too many steps. Too many fields. It wasn’t that she didn’t want the product. She didn’t want the process.
After the changes, Yael came back. This time she completed her order. And if Yael stayed, I knew others would too.
That was the first spark of momentum.
Month Two: Out of the Shadows
The next battle was visibility.
The brand had been living off ads and repeat buyers. If someone didn’t already know their name, they weren’t finding them.
That’s a dangerous place to be. In supplements, hundreds of thousands of people are searching every day. Searching for energy. Searching for recovery. Searching for focus. If you’re not showing up when they type those words, you don’t exist.
I dug into their analytics. And it was worse than I thought. They had almost no organic presence. No rankings for important terms. No content to capture searches. They were invisible.
I called their SEO consultant. “You’re aiming at the wrong targets,” I said. “Let’s rebuild this from the ground up.”
We rewrote product descriptions in plain customer language. We cleaned up the site structure so search engines could crawl it easily. And we built cornerstone pages — articles that answered the simple, everyday questions their audience was typing into search bars.
It didn’t happen instantly. At first, the lift was small. But by the end of month two, things began to shift. Rankings climbed. New customers found the brand for the first time.
One of them was Avi. He searched for “natural recovery supplements after training,” found the brand on page one, and placed an order immediately. That one order mattered more than its dollar value. It was proof the brand was finally being discovered.
Avi wasn’t a referral. He wasn’t retargeted through ads. He was just a guy looking for a solution. And he found them. That’s when the founders started to believe in organic growth.
Month Three: The Story They’d Never Told
This was the turning point.
Up until then, the brand’s voice was cold. It gave details. It gave science. But it gave no reason to believe.
And in supplements, belief is everything.
I asked the founders to tell me why they started this brand. Not the pitch. The real story.
At first, they hesitated. Then the words came.
They told me about their twenties. How they both struggled with health issues. How they tried supplement after supplement, none of which worked. How they felt ignored by big companies that treated them like order numbers. Out of frustration, they started researching, testing, and mixing. They created their own formulas, not to sell, but to survive.
That story had never been told. Not on the website. Not in the ads. Not in the emails.
I knew right then it was the missing piece.
We rewrote everything. The homepage opened with their journey. The about page told their mission in plain, honest words. Product pages didn’t just list ingredients — they explained why those ingredients mattered.
We wove that story everywhere. Into the thank-you emails. Into the brand photography. Into social captions.
And customers felt it.
One reply came from Tamar, who had just signed up for the mailing list. She wrote back to the welcome email with a single line: “I’ve been looking for something like this. Reading your story feels like mine.”
That one line said everything. It told us customers weren’t just reading. They were connecting.
Engagement rose. Social mentions started to grow. People were sharing their experiences. The brand had gone from sterile to human. And people leaned in.
Month Four: Retention and the First Big Win
The last piece was loyalty.
Supplements are meant to be used over time. But the way this brand was set up, most customers bought once and disappeared.
The subscription program was buried. The offer was weak. The options were rigid.
We fixed it.
Subscriptions became the obvious choice. We framed them around results: “Stay consistent, see real change.” We added flexibility: skip a month, swap products, pause anytime. Customers didn’t feel trapped anymore. They felt in control.
We built upsells into checkout — gentle, natural ones. Someone buying a focus blend saw the recovery blend as a companion. Someone ordering one bottle was shown the value of three. Nothing pushy. Just natural steps.
And we rewrote the thank-you emails. No more lifeless receipts. They became invitations: “You’re part of something bigger. You’re part of this movement.”
This is where customer patterns came to life.
Noa bought a single bottle of the focus blend. A month later, she returned — this time she added the recovery blend at checkout. By month three, she had signed up for a subscription.
Eitan followed almost the same path. First order: one bottle. Second order: three bottles with a subscription. Third order: he added a different formula to try. These weren’t just numbers in a dashboard. These were people building routines.
And then came the big moment.
In the fourth month, on a Friday evening, the founders sent me a screenshot. Their sales dashboard was spiking higher than ever.
“We just had our best day of sales ever,” they wrote. “We thought it was a glitch. It’s not. It’s real.”
You could feel the disbelief in their words. For the first time, the treadmill had stopped, and the path forward was clear.
Four Months Later: A Different Company
By the end of four months, the numbers told the story.
Revenue up nearly seventy percent. Retention up by more than half. Subscriptions doubled. Average order value higher than ever. Emails driving repeat purchases week after week. This growth followed the same kind of clarity-first process I map out in my audit and roadmap approach.
But the deeper story wasn’t in the numbers.
It was in the founders, who now spoke with energy instead of exhaustion. It was in the vendors, who finally worked together toward a shared mission. And it was in the customers — like Shira, who started with a single purchase and was now subscribed to three different blends — people who weren’t just buying a product, but making it part of their life.
This wasn’t just a supplement store anymore. It was a brand people wanted to belong to.
The Lesson
There’s no magic in this story. No secret hack. No miracle tool.
We didn’t replace vendors. We didn’t double ad spend. We didn’t pile on new software.
We took what was already there, aligned it, clarified it, and told the story that had been waiting to be told.
That’s how growth works. Not from chasing shiny shortcuts, but from bringing focus to the foundation.
Sometimes, the biggest wins don’t come from adding more. They come from making what you already have work the way it should.
That’s what happened here. And that’s what can happen when you stop running in place and start moving forward with clarity.
Marketing Unplugged 
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