For small business owners who are tired of buying customers
Your best customers are already in your building.
A short, story-driven playbook that shows you how to turn the customers you already have into people who come back, bring their friends, and sell your business for you, without spending another dollar on ads.
Instant access · read it in one or two evenings · three ideas or your money back
First, the part no one says out loud
You're doing everything they told you to do.
And it's costing more every year while delivering fewer results.
The reels. The carousels. The posts nobody sees. The ads that get more expensive every month and bring back less. You're chasing strangers who cost a fortune to reach and forget your name the second they leave.
And through it all, you're competing against businesses that all sound the same, all post the same, all fight over the same tired scrap of attention. You're starting to wonder how anyone is supposed to stand out anymore.
You're not imagining the squeeze. Customer acquisition costs have climbed 222% over the past eight years. Meta's ad prices rose 20% in a single year. Every year you run the same playbook, it costs more to get the same result.
So, you work harder. And here's the part no one says out loud: you're not behind because you aren't working hard enough. You're working plenty hard. More than half of small business owners lose sleep over their business multiple nights a week, and 53% describe themselves as emotionally drained or burned out.
You're not short on effort. You're pouring it into a bucket with a hole in it.
And here's why that matters more than you think
Nobody is going to tell you when it starts going wrong.
Customers don't complain about your business and storm out. They just quietly stop coming.
of customers walk away after a single bad experience. Fifty-nine percent leave after a few. (PwC)
Fewer than one in three customers will ever tell you why they didn't come back. Most of what you lose is invisible until the revenue is already gone. (Qualtrics XM Institute)
of small businesses don't reach year five. One in five business post-mortems names the same cause: outcompeted. (BLS · CB Insights)
So picture the next two years if nothing changes. There's no dramatic collapse. That's not how this goes. It's slower and quieter than that.
You keep renting customers instead of keeping them. Acquisition costs keep climbing while margins thin. Every month starts back at zero, because your revenue rides entirely on this month's ad spend. You want to raise prices, but you can't, because nothing is holding anyone but the price. Slow seasons stop being seasonal and start being frightening. And one day a competitor who isn't better than you, just more memorable, takes the customer who should have been yours, and you never even find out it happened.
That is not a failure of effort. It's a failure of design. Which is good news, because design is fixable and can cost little to nothing.
There is another way to grow
Loyalty isn't earned by being good.
It's built on purpose, in a handful of moments, and almost nobody is building it.
This is the thing most owners were never taught, and it's the whole reason some businesses grow without advertising while better-funded competitors have to buy every customer twice.
Being good is not the mechanism. Good gets you paid. Good does not get you remembered and remembered is the entire game.
Think about the last time a business was fine. The order was right, the staff were pleasant, nothing went wrong. Now try to remember which business it was. Nobody remembers fine. Fine is the most forgettable word in business, and forgettable is just a slower word for invisible.
Here's why. Your customers don't remember the average of your service. Nobody does. Human memory keeps peaks: a small number of specific moments where they felt something, plus how it ended. Everything in between blurs into nothing at all.
Which means the growth you're looking for isn't hiding in doing everything 10% better. It's hiding in a handful of moments you could count on one hand, and in most businesses, not one of them has ever been deliberately designed. They were inherited. They happen by accident, the same way they happen at every competitor you have.
The whole idea in one sentence
A handful of moments, designed on purpose, will turn more customers into advocates than any ad budget you will ever buy.
Not a campaign. Not a loyalty app. Not a rebrand or a six-month plan. A moment. The eleven-dollar prize wheel, the drink named after somebody's kid, the note in real handwriting, the cowbell at sunset. Small, specific, repeatable, and close to free.
What designed moments actually do
They move people up a ladder, and every rung is worth money.
This isn't "better service." It's a specific journey, with a dollar figure attached to each step.
The customer
Bought once. Compares you on price. Forgets you the moment they leave. You have to buy them back with advertising every single time you want to see them again.
COSTS YOU MONEY: up to $802 to acquire through paid searchThe loyalist
Comes back without being reminded. Stops shopping around. Absorbs a price increase without flinching, because they stopped buying on price. Your revenue is no longer a function of this month's ad budget.
STOPS COSTING YOU MONEY: keeping one is far cheaper than finding oneThe advocate
Brings people with them. Tells the story at dinner parties. Writes the review you never asked for. This is a customer who has quietly joined your marketing department and does not send you an invoice.
MAKES YOU MONEY: referred customers spend 200% more, retain 37% better, carry 25% higher marginsAnd this is why that top rung beats any ad you will ever run: 92% of people trust a recommendation from someone they know, and word of mouth drives between 20% and 50% of all purchasing decisions. A referred customer costs roughly $171 to acquire. The same customer through paid search can run $802.
Same person. Same business. The only difference is whether somebody had a reason to talk about you.
And why this works right now
The bar has never been this low.
Your competition is busy removing the last human from the building.
Forrester found 39% of brands declined in experience quality in a single year, an all-time low. Meanwhile, 79% of customers say they'd rather deal with a human than a chatbot, and 89% want to be able to reach one at any time.
Read that again, because the opportunity is sitting right inside it. The entire market is sprinting in one direction, stripping the people out, while customers stand there waving their arms saying please, no, we liked the people.
Everyone is running away from the one thing everyone actually wants. You get to run the other way.
Ordinary warmth now looks extraordinary. That is a temporary, enormous, nearly free advantage, and it belongs to whoever decides to pick it up first.
Which brings me to this
That's why we wrote Nobody Remembers Fine.
A playbook for finding your moments and building them on purpose, starting this week.
Everyone tells you to "create a great customer experience." Nobody tells you how. That's the gap this book exists to close.
We made it short on purpose. No frameworks you need a whiteboard for, no software, no six-month rollout. It's built from stories: a pub with a cowbell, a five-year-old with a drink named after him, a repair shop that lost a customer forever over fourteen dollars. That's how this actually gets taught.
You'll finish it in one or two evenings. You'll know which five moments in your business carry the emotional weight. You'll have picked one. And you'll know exactly what you're doing to it on Monday.
It already works. Here's what it looks like
A cowbell, a poem, and a pub nobody can stop talking about.
There's a beautiful oceanfront pub that opened in the fall of 2020. One of the hardest possible moments to open anything. No ad budget. No marketing team. Just a room with a view and a bar lead named Eric.
Every night at sunset, Eric rings a cowbell. The whole room goes quiet. He climbs onto a stepping stool, reads a short poem he wrote that day, and raises a glass. Then a room full of strangers toast together:
"Cheers to me, cheers to you, and here's a toast to a hell of a view."
That's the whole thing. It costs the pub almost nothing. And people plan their evenings around it. They bring friends. They film it. They come back and bring more people next time.
A builder who never once asked for a referral.
Michael ran MS Builders, constructing custom homes in the Bay Area. At the end of every build he sent the family flowers and a coffee-table book documenting their house going up, from empty lot to finished home.
Then came the part that made it brilliant: he timed the delivery to arrive during their open house, while the family was walking friends through the finished home, proud and glowing. Someone would always ask who sent them. And the homeowner, standing in the middle of the life they'd just stepped into, would say two words: my builder.
He never asked for a referral. He designed a moment where his happiest customer volunteered one, at their proudest hour, to a room full of exactly the people who might build a home next.
What's inside
Sixteen short plays. Every one ends with a single thing to go do.
Play 1
Feel it before you build it
Spend two weeks as a customer again, until you can recognize a great moment on sight instead of guessing at it.
Play 2
Find your five moments
Locate the five moments carrying nearly all your business's emotional weight, and fix the one that matters most first.
Play 3
Read the clues your customers are already leaving
Find where customers are already telling you what they care about, so you're building on truth instead of assumption.
Plays 4–5
Build something they can't get anywhere else
Invent one unmistakable ritual so distinctive a competitor can't copy it no matter what they spend.
Plays 6–8
Win the moments you're currently wasting
Turn names, milestones, and dead waiting time into real wins this week, at zero cost.
Plays 9–10
Turn your worst moments into your best ones
Master the recovery that makes a bad day the story customers tell, not the reason they leave.
Play 11
Design the referral that asks itself
Put something worth talking about right where your customer is proudest, and referrals ask themselves.
Play 12
Get your team creating moments without you in the room
Loosen one rule so a good employee can create these moments without asking permission.
Plays 13–14
Prove it to whoever needs proof
Get the numbers and language to defend this in a room full of spreadsheets.
Plays 15–16
Build the advantage nobody can take from you
Name the one feeling you want to be known for, and point every moment you've built at it.
Before I show you the price
What is one loyal customer actually worth to you?
Not a sale. A customer who stays.
Do the math on your own business for a second, because it's the only math that matters here. Take what an average customer spends with you, multiply it by how many times a loyal one comes back in a few years, and then add the people they bring with them.
For most owners that number lands somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand dollars. One customer.
Now compare that to what you're currently paying to find a brand-new one. If you're running Meta ads, roughly $230. Paid search can run past $800. And that's for a stranger with no reason yet to stay.
So the real question isn't whether $27 is a lot of money for a book. It's this: if one idea in here creates one loyal customer, what did the book actually cost you?
Nothing. It paid for itself several times over on the first person who came back.
And that's the conservative version. The whole point of designed moments is that they don't run once. The pub rings the cowbell every night. You build the thing once and it keeps working, for free, for as long as you keep doing it.
This is the cheapest thing you will do for your business this year, and quite possibly the only one that compounds.
The offer
Nobody Remembers Fine · $27
How to Create Loyal Customers, Raving Fans, and a Business People Can't Stop Talking About
one time · instant access · yours forever
A fast, story-driven playbook that hands you a simple, repeatable way to turn the customers you already have into your best source of growth.
- No software to buy
- No ad spend required
- No six-month plan
- Nothing to install, schedule, or subscribe to
You'll be reading it in about ninety seconds.
The guarantee
Three ideas, or you don't pay.
Read the whole thing. If you don't finish with at least three ideas you can use immediately in your own business, email us within 30 days and we'll refund your $27. No form, no hoops, no explaining yourself.
I'm comfortable making that offer because of how this book works. It isn't theory you have to go implement someday. Every play ends with one specific thing to do, and most of them cost nothing. If three of those don't land for you, I'd rather give you your money back than have you feel like you wasted it.
Included with the book
The tools that make it stick.
Reading it is easy. These are what make sure you actually do something.
The Experience Audit
A one-page walk through your own customer journey where you circle the felt experience at every stop: confused, ignored, frustrated, valued, appreciated, delighted. Most owners find the hole in their bucket in under twenty minutes.
The Feel + Tell Scorecard
Run any idea through it before you spend a dollar. Does it make someone feel something? Does it give them something to say? If it fails either test, it isn't a moment. It's a nice gesture nobody will remember.
Your One Thing Tracker
Action, test, measure, feel, repeat. The engine of the entire book on a single page, so this becomes a habit instead of a book you finished.
Let's put it all together
Here's everything you get.
- All 16 plays. The complete playbook, readable in one or two evenings
- The Two-Week Challenge. How to see your own business clearly again
- Find Your Five Moments. The audit that shows you where your weight actually sits
- The recovery method. Turning your worst moments into your most memorable ones
- The referral that asks itself. Advocacy by design, not by begging
- The leadership script. How to get a partner, boss, or CFO to say yes
- The worksheet set. The audit, the scorecard, the tracker
- The guarantee. Three usable ideas, or your money back
And underneath all of it, the one thing this is really for: a business people can't stop talking about, built with what you already have.
So here's where you are
You've got two versions of the next year.
In the first one, nothing changes. You keep doing what you're doing, because it's what everyone told you to do and there's no time to think about it. The ads cost a little more. The margins get a little thinner. You keep meeting customers for the first time over and over, forever, because none of them have any particular reason to remember you. And somewhere out there a competitor who is not better than you quietly takes the customer who should have been yours.
In the second one, you spend an evening with this book. You find your five moments. You pick one, just one, and you make it unforgettable this week. It costs you almost nothing. And a few months from now someone walks through your door and says my friend told me I had to come here.
That's the whole choice. Not a big, brave, expensive leap. One evening and twenty-seven dollars against another year of renting customers.
The businesses that grow this way aren't bigger than yours, smarter than yours, or better funded. They just understand something most owners were never taught. It's simple, it costs almost nothing, and you can start using it this week.
Who's telling you this
I spent a career helping businesses buy attention they could have earned for free.
Two decades running my own marketing agency. Ten years at Apple. I built the campaigns, bought the media, watched the dashboards, and delivered exactly what people asked me for.
And for a long time I thought that was the job. A client would come to me worried about growth, and I'd do what everyone in my industry does. Build them a bigger, smarter, better-targeted way to shout at strangers.
What I couldn't stop noticing was this: the businesses actually thriving weren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones people talked about. And when I looked closely at why, it was never the advertising. It was always something small, human, and nearly free that somebody had decided to do on purpose.
That was the turn for me. The growth engine everyone was paying me to build from scratch was already sitting inside the business they owned: unused, unnamed, and free. So I started writing down how it actually works.
That's this book. It's what I wish I could have handed every owner who ever sat across from me convinced their only option was to spend more.
"Your best growth engine isn't something you need to buy, build, or learn to code. You already own it. This book shows you how to turn it on."
Keri LaRue
Co-Author, Nobody Remembers Fine
Questions people ask.
My business is really small. Does this still apply?
It applies more, not less. Every example in this book is a small operation: a pub, a builder, a coffee shop, a restaurant. Designed moments are the one advantage that doesn't scale with budget, which is exactly why they favor you over the chain down the street.
I'm not a "people person." Does this only work for extroverts?
No. That's the most common misread of this whole idea. Designed moments are built in advance, on purpose, so they don't depend on you being charming in the moment. A note written at your desk, a ritual your team runs, a well-timed gift. None of that requires you to be outgoing. It requires you to pay attention once and then build something.
I sell online. There's no "room" for me to design a moment in.
Honestly, the opportunity is larger there, because the baseline is so much colder. Unboxing, onboarding, the wait, the problem, the milestone: those moments all exist whether or not anyone is physically standing in front of you.
How long is it, and how long will this take me?
You can read it in an evening or two. Each play ends with one specific action, and most of them can be done in an afternoon for twenty dollars or less. This is not a system you implement. It's a decision you make and then keep making.
Isn't this just The Power of Moments in different packaging?
Fair question, and the book is credited openly. The EPIC ingredients and some of the examples come from Chip and Dan Heath's work and I say so on the page where I use them. The difference is what this does with it. The Power of Moments explains why memorable moments work. This is a playbook for a small business owner with no budget and no spare time, built around your five moments, with the exact things to go do and stories from businesses your size.
What if it isn't for me?
Then you get your money back. If you finish it without three ideas you can use immediately, email us within 30 days and we'll refund the $27. No form and no explanation required.
Your best growth engine is already yours.
Every week you don't turn it on, a competitor who isn't better than you is quietly winning the customer who should have been yours. Not because they outspent you, but because they gave that customer a reason to remember them.
One read · three ideas you can use immediately · or your $27 back