Free advice is the most expensive advice you will ever take

It answers the question you asked. Nothing more.

Ask it about London and it tells you about the one in England. It won’t stop to check you meant London, Kentucky.

Ask it why your ads aren’t converting and it tells you about ads. It won’t stop to check whether the ads were ever the problem. It can’t. It has never seen your margins, and it has no idea what a customer costs in your category.

Ten tips. One that mattered.

Ask a general chatbot why your ads aren’t converting and you’ll get something like this: test new creative, refine your targeting, optimise your landing page, add retargeting, try video, use social proof, improve your offer, speed up your site, test your copy, increase your budget.

Every one of those is reasonable. On Justin’s store, only number seven mattered. It sat in the middle of the list with exactly the same weight as “test your copy”.

He was paying about $400 to win a customer worth $55. Following the other nine tips would have kept him losing about $2,750 a month.

• $2,750 lost every month on the chatbot route
• $19,000 gone in seven months, nothing fixed
• $20,000 capital needed to fix it properly
• 2.61× his return on ads by month seven

Where the bill actually comes from

The $19,000 is only the ad spend. The rest of the bill arrives quietly.

• Your nights and weekends.

  Working out which of ten tips to try first, then trying them one by one.

• Freelancers fixing the wrong thing.

  Paid to do the task well. Nobody checked it was the right task. Here’s why that keeps happening.

• Apps you didn’t need.

  Another subscription for a problem you don’t have.

• A rebuild nobody asked for.

  Weeks of work, and the same people still don’t buy.

• Your belief in the business.

  After the third thing that didn’t work, it’s hard to back yourself on the fourth.

Generic advice is free. Acting on it isn’t.

Use AI. Just not for the one decision that matters.

I use AI every day. It’s brilliant at writing the email once you know email is the job. It can’t tell you whether email is the job.

That decision needs your numbers, and someone who has watched hundreds of stores get it right and wrong. It’s why our free AI tools ask about your business before they answer anything.

Want to see the ten tips play out on a real store? Run the test →

The chatbot will always have an answer. The question is whether it’s yours.