BASECAMP23 BLOG
Practical growth strategy, real numbers, and honest takes from the front line of running marketing for $1M-$50M businesses. If you're an owner-operator deciding how to invest in marketing — or an operator with a team that needs senior firepower — this is for you.
You set your daily budget to $50. Seems reasonable — you're testing the waters, you don't want to blow through cash. Two weeks later, you've spent $700, got may
You've seen those sites with thousands of "city + service" pages. "Plumber in Austin," "Plumber in Dallas," "Plumber in Houston" — 500 pages that all look suspi
You're sitting at $2.5M in revenue and your website needs work. Do you hire a full-time developer? Outsource to an agency? Buy a Webflow subscription and learn
You've been told that Performance Max is the future. Your Google rep called it "AI-powered" and showed you a slide deck with 23% better ROI. Then you turned it
You're still approving Instagram captions at 9 PM because you don't trust anyone else to "get" your brand voice. You've hired three different marketers in the p
You spent three months dialing in your ads. Cost per lead dropped. CAC looked healthy. Then, without warning, the unit economics flipped. Now you're paying $400
You just launched three ad sets on Monday. By Wednesday, one has spent $187 with zero conversions. Another is at $312 with two conversions at $156 CPA. The thir
You've been burned before. The last agency left you with a tracking nightmare — three different UTM naming conventions across campaigns, none of them documented
When your Meta ads tank, the easy answer is 'the algorithm changed.' The real answer is almost always one of 6 specific issues — most of them inside your account, not Meta's. Here's the diagnostic framework to figure out what's actually broken.
Most owner-operators get sold by sales reps and serviced by junior staff. These 12 questions cut through the pitch deck and reveal what your engagement will actually look like — and the agency models that genuinely work for $1M-$20M businesses.
Most business owners look at one number to judge marketing performance: revenue. That's how you fool yourself for years. Here are the 6 metrics that actually tell you whether your marketing is working — and what to do when they don't.
Most agencies hide what's in their pricing. Here's exactly what $13,500/month gets you across paid media, SEO, email, and social — broken down by hours, deliverables, and outcomes.
After running marketing for 100+ owner-operated businesses, the same expensive mistakes show up over and over. Here are the seven that cost the most — and how to avoid them.