The MPP Blog
What we're building, and what we're learning doing it.
We run performance marketing for growth-stage companies and build the software we wished existed. These are the field notes: product launches, playbooks that worked, and the occasional argument with the industry.
Notes · Latest
Field notes: the week of August 26, 2026
A too-strict form field, a report nobody read, and a rescue that flipped to a rebuild: field notes on a week where the best moves were subtraction.
Notes
Field notes: what we changed this week
This week's field notes: we moved a form and moved it back, killed a report nobody read, changed our first 30 days, and added a grader check for buried phone numbers.
Playbooks
Choosing between a rebuild and a rescue
Rebuild or rescue? The decision comes from diagnosing your asset's structure, surface, and plumbing, not from how tired you are of it.
Industry
What AI actually changed about content marketing
AI made content drafts free, which means volume is worthless and judgment is everything. Here is what actually changed, and the trap most teams fell into.
Opinion
The metrics we put on a client dashboard, and the ones we leave off
How we decide which marketing metrics earn a spot on a client dashboard, which ones we cut, and why every number needs a target to mean anything.
Playbooks
How to brief an agency so you get what you wanted
Most bad agency work traces back to the brief. Here is how to write one that transfers your judgment so you get what you actually wanted.
Industry
Email is still the highest-margin channel you own
Every other channel rents you attention. Email is the one marketing asset you own, and its margin math beats paid every time when you build it right.
Opinion
Why we stopped writing 40-page audits
We spent two years writing 40-page marketing audits before admitting the document was a performance, not a plan. Here is what we do instead.
Playbooks
Landing pages: the eight decisions that matter
Landing pages are a set of eight decisions, not a checklist of forty tactics. Here is the order that actually moves conversion.
Playbooks
When paid search stops working, check these six things
Paid search rarely fails all at once. Six checks, in order, to find where the money is leaking before you touch a single bid.
Playbooks
The service business guide to review generation
Review generation is a timing and friction problem, not a service problem. Here is the follow-up system that gets service businesses more, fresher reviews.
Opinion
Attribution is broken. Here is what we do instead.
Attribution assigns confident credit from broken data. We measure blended results, run holdout tests, and ask buyers directly instead.
Culture
What a fractional CMO actually does in the first 30 days
A real fractional CMO spends the first 30 days mapping your economics and fixing leaks, not launching campaigns. Here is the week-by-week sequence and why it works.
Industry
Why your website speed score is not your speed problem
Your PageSpeed score is a lab estimate, not a revenue signal. Here is what actually moves conversions, and when to stop optimizing speed entirely.
Playbooks
How to read a marketing report without being fooled by it
Marketing reports are stories someone chose to tell. Five quick reads to separate what actually happened from how it was framed to flatter the sender.
Playbooks
The local SEO checklist we actually use
The unpadded local SEO checklist we run with service clients, in order, with the reasoning attached and the busywork left out.
Product
MPP goes MCP: we built our own Model Context Protocol servers
Chat assistants that cannot touch your systems are a party trick. We built three MCP servers so Claude can work inside our CRM, our clients' websites, and their WordPress installs, with the same permissions we have.
Opinion
What is performance marketing, really?
The term has been stretched to mean "we run ads and send a dashboard". Here is the definition we hold ourselves to, and the four questions that separate a performance partner from a vendor with a report.
Industry
Why franchise models will never die
Every few years someone announces that direct-to-consumer, aggregators, or AI will finish off franchising. It keeps growing. The reason is a structural advantage that technology does not touch.
Product
Introducing the MPP Website Grader: including the score nobody else gives you
Speed, code health, and SEO are well-covered by existing tools. The fourth score is the one that matters now: whether AI assistants can read, understand, and cite your site.
Opinion
What happens to WordPress websites now?
Forty percent of the web runs on a twenty-three-year-old PHP application, and the industry has been predicting its death for a decade. Here is what we think actually happens, and what to do if your business is sitting on one.
Product
Introducing Pulse: team chat that does not lose the decision
Chat is where decisions get made and where they disappear. Pulse is our Slack replacement, built next to the work so the conversation and the record stop being different places.
Playbooks
How to build a peptide website that converts without getting you shut down
Peptide brands operate in one of the most compliance-sensitive corners of the internet. Here is how to build a site that ranks, converts, and survives contact with the FTC, the FDA, and your payment processor.
Product
Introducing Motion: the notetaker where our notes stop going to die
Every company has a graveyard of documents that were written once and never read again. Motion is our attempt to make notes that stay connected to the work they came from.
Product
We built our own CMS, because clients should be able to fix a typo
The gap between "the client wants to change one sentence" and "a developer has to deploy" is where agency margin goes to die. So we closed it.
Industry
The SEO landscape changed underneath everyone. Here is what still works.
Ranking first stopped guaranteeing a click, and answer engines started reading your site instead of your customers. A practical account of what has changed, what has not, and what to actually do.
Product
Introducing Flow: project management that knows who the client is
We tried ClickUp, Asana, Monday, and Jira. Each one was a good product and none of them knew anything about our clients. So we built Flow inside the Portal, where that context already lives.
Culture
Independence is not a holiday for us. It is the business model.
Most agencies buy people's time and resell it at a markup. We built the company around a different trade, freedom in exchange for accountability, and today is a good day to explain why.
Product
We stopped paying for eleven tools and built the MPP Portal instead
Every agency runs on a stack of software that almost fits. We added up what ours cost (in dollars and in context-switching) and decided to build the thing we actually wanted.