Today’s edition is a special sample edition of a new newsletter launching today from The Marketing Misfits, Kevin King and Norm Farrar.

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According to Steve Larsen, what is the ONE thing most entrepreneurs fix when their funnel stops converting, even though it is almost never the actual problem?

Answer at bottom of email

Steve Larsen has built and torn apart more funnels than most marketers have ever seen. He’s the former lead funnel builder for Russell Brunson at ClickFunnels. Creator of the "Capitalist Pig" brand. A guy who's obsessed not with traffic, but with message.

When Steve sits down at Kevin and Norm's virtual cigar lounge, he says something that stops the room:

Chew on that.

Most entrepreneurs think their funnel is broken because the numbers are bad. Low opt-ins. Poor conversions.

High cost per click. So they rebuild the funnel. New colors, new layout, new checkout page. Same results.

Steve's diagnosis is almost always different. The funnel isn't broken. The hook is wrong.

He tells the story of a precision medicine client. Brilliant product. Smart positioning. But nobody was buying.

The hook talked about what the product did, but didn't speak to what the customer was already feeling. The customer was already in pain. The message wasn't acknowledging that pain in their language, their words, their moment.

Steve calls it the "Red Ocean, Blue Offer" strategy. You enter a crowded market, the red ocean where dveryone's competing, but you bring an entirely different offer. Not a different product. A different frame. A different angle of attack.

Here's the practical takeaway. Your competitors aren't your enemies. They're your educators. Everyone who's spent money in your market to fail has already trained your future customers.

Those people already know the problem exists. They've tried solutions that didn't work. Your job is to show up as the next evolution, not as a substitute.

The marketing lesson? "Tell me more" is the only real metric. If your hook doesn't make someone lean forward and want to know what comes next, the funnel doesn't matter. Fix the hook first.

This week we paired two sharp conversations about the conversion stack: Steve Larsen on funnel strategy and messaging, and Luca Borreani on why landing pages alone are losing the conversion war.

The common thread? Static is dying. Static pages, static hooks, static "buy now" buttons. All of it assumes the customer arrives ready. They don't. They arrive confused, skeptical, or half-committed. Neither a clever headline nor a pretty template is going to close that gap.

Build a hook that attracts the right people with the right awareness level, then design a conversational experience that handles their real objections. The ones they're too embarrassed to put in a form field.

Watch These Misfits Episodes to Dive Deeper:

Eugene Schwartz wrote Breakthrough Advertising decades ago. It remains the most important book on copywriting ever published. His 5 Stages of Awareness framework is the reason.

Here's the framework every serious marketer should tattoo somewhere visible:

Stage 1: Completely Unaware. They don't know they have a problem. Your job: create a pattern interrupt that introduces the problem without pitching a solution yet. Think Red Bull's early extreme sports content. Nobody was searching for a high-energy drink.

Stage 2: Problem Aware. They know something is wrong, but don't know solutions exist. Your job: name the pain accurately. "You're not converting because your hook is wrong" lands here.

Stage 3: Solution Aware. They know solutions exist but haven't committed to one. Your job: position your category, not your product. Introduce funnels as a concept before pitching your specific funnel software.

Stage 4: Product Aware. They know your product exists and are comparing. Your job: differentiate. Features, proof, testimonials. Eliminate objections systematically.

Stage 5: Most Aware. They know you and just need a trigger. Your job: make it easy. Urgency, discount, guarantee. Don't oversell to someone already sold.

Practical application: Look at your last 5 ads. What awareness stage are you speaking to? Most brands talk only to Stages 4 and 5, leaving 80% of their potential market completely unaddressed.

Stop guessing what subject lines will perform. Start testing systematically. The highest-converting subject lines share three traits: they stay under 50 characters to avoid mobile truncation, lead with the most compelling word or offer, and match the tone of the content inside.

Proven formulas: specificity wins ("5 ways" beats "several ways"), genuine curiosity gaps your email actually closes, and direct CTAs that prime the reader before they open. Run a simple A/B test on every broadcast.

Change only one element: a personalization token, urgency phrase, or emoji. Over time, your test log becomes a proprietary playbook no competitor can copy.

One hard rule: avoid ALL CAPS, excessive exclamation marks, and trigger words like "Free!!" Modern spam filters flag them, and so do readers.

For help with email marketing for your brand, contact dragon.fish

ZipChat is AI-powered conversational commerce for e-commerce stores.

ZipChat deploys a smart AI chatbot on your store that learns from your product pages, FAQ, and chat logs to handle objections, answer specific buyer questions, and drive conversions. 92-93% of conversations handled without human intervention.

Top users report 58% conversion rates from chat sessions. Plans start at $49/month with a 7-day free trial. Use code PODCAST10 for 10% off forever.

The Brand: Nugget, a kids' play couch startup from North Carolina.

The Strategy: Instead of spending on traditional advertising, Nugget leaned entirely into community and user-generated content. They built a Facebook Group ("The Nugget Community") that became a space for parents to share elaborate fort designs, creative builds, and testimonials.

No ads. No influencer deals. Just the product doing the talking through the people who loved it.

The Result: The waitlist strategy, combined with limited production runs and community-built demand, turned Nugget into a cult brand. The couch regularly sold out within minutes of restocking, and the secondary market saw resales above retail.

By 2021, Nugget was doing tens of millions in revenue with virtually zero traditional ad spend.

The Lesson: A product that enables creative expression gives customers a reason to share it publicly, turning buyers into brand ambassadors. The community is the marketing. The fort photos are the ads.

Most people have no idea that the cigar world has its own literary history too: in 18th and 19th century Cuban factories, cigar rollers worked in silence while a designated "lector" read novels and newspapers aloud to the entire floor.

These lectores were elected and paid separately by the workers themselves. The practice influenced early labor organizing and spread to Tampa's Cuban cigar communities in the U.S.

That is the original "content marketing." Skilled hands, sharp minds, real stories.

The next Collective Minds Society Cigar & Whisky trip is Feb 18-22, 2027

Most funnel audits focus on design and traffic. The faster fix is copy. AI can scan your funnel pages and identify exactly where the message breaks down, all in under an hour.

One hour of AI copy audit will find more conversion leaks than a week of analytics review.

Q: What is the most common reason marketing funnels fail to convert?

According to Steve Larsen, the hook is the most common failure point, not the funnel design itself. Most entrepreneurs fix layout, colors, and copy while leaving the core message unchanged. A hook that fails to speak to the customer's current pain level will underperform regardless of how well the rest of the funnel is built.

Q: What is the "Red Ocean, Blue Offer" strategy?

It means entering a proven, competitive market with a completely differentiated angle. Instead of finding an untapped market (blue ocean), you step into a crowded one and position your offer so differently that it no longer feels like a direct competitor. The goal is to attract the audience that tried other solutions and found them lacking.

Q: How does AI chat improve e-commerce conversion rates?

AI chat tools like ZipChat handle objections in real time that static pages can't address. ZipChat users report 16-20% conversion rates from chat conversations, with top performers reaching 58%. The chat logs also reveal exactly why visitors leave, which informs copy and page improvements no analytics tool can surface on its own.

Q: What are Eugene Schwartz's 5 Stages of Awareness and why do they matter for ads?

The five stages run from Completely Unaware through Problem Aware, Solution Aware, Product Aware, and Most Aware. Most brands write ads only for Stages 4 and 5, targeting people who already know the product exists. The 80% of the market at Stages 1 through 3 requires entirely different messaging, and that is where the biggest untapped growth usually lives.

The funnel design. Steve Larsen said it plainly in his Marketing Misfits episode:

When a funnel stops converting, almost every entrepreneur's first instinct is to rebuild the funnel. New colors. New layout. New checkout page.

But Steve's diagnosis is almost always different. The hook is wrong, not the funnel. Watch the full conversation with Steve.