B2B Growth Think Tank

There are a handful of useful micro-insights (e.g., using real conversion rates vs. assumed ones, gross-profit thinking on paid ads, the distinction between cost-per-lead and acquisition cost) but they are buried under extended host monologues, anecdotes about the guest's brother, and generic encouragement. The ratio of actionable insight to filler is poor for a 30-minute run.

“if you don't do the math, what will happen is it'll feel good. You'll go and you'll start spending some ad dollars and sales will jump. And you're like, man, I'm selling more. This is great.”

“a lot of times people will say well I think surely I could get seven percent of people that come to the website to to buy my thing... e-commerce conversion rates are like 1.7 percent or something along those lines”

The core advice - do the math before spending, use realistic conversion rates, listen to your customers - is thoroughly conventional small-business wisdom with no contrarian framing or first-principles reasoning. The pivot-to-templates story and the pitch-deck-consultant partnership channel are the only mildly novel specifics.

“I wanted to build a software as a service business because I wanted that monthly recurring revenue... if I would have just watched what our customers were doing and what our customers wanted I would have learned a lot sooner”

“we started reaching out to pitch deck consultants and saying, hey, do you have anyone that helps with financial projections?”

Adam Hoeksema is a legitimate practitioner - co-founder since 2012, 40,000+ clients, genuine software-and-consulting operator - but his answers stay surface-level throughout, suggesting either limited preparation or interview dynamics that prevented him from sharing deeper operational knowledge.

“we have enough data from clients that we've worked with on consulting projects in the past to be able to kind of aggregate some projection data”

“we maybe three years ago started selling spreadsheet templates just the excel you know one-time cost... those different templates were selling more and faster than the software”

A handful of concrete data points appear (1.7% e-commerce conversion rate, 5 - 7 pitch deck consultant partners, 40,000 businesses, founded 2012, 1.5 years running Google AdWords) but there are no revenue figures, no before/after metrics, and illustrative examples (the restaurant in a town of 50,000, the coffee shop) are hypothetical rather than named real cases.

“e-commerce conversion rates are like 1.7 percent or something along those lines”

“we've got probably i don't know maybe five to seven pitch deck consultants that just keep us regularly busy”

The host consistently answers his own questions before the guest can respond, delivers lengthy editorialising after each answer, and pivots to off-topic territory (the brother's house purchase, the family business dynamic) that yields no B2B operator value. There is no pushback, no challenge to optimistic claims, and no follow-up probing on the research project the guest briefly mentions.

“I think that we as business owners, entrepreneurs, whatever we want to call ourselves, we are quite good at lying to ourselves sometimes”

“So I want to shift gears ever so slightly and talk about, so you started in 2012 and you started with your brother”