u/PerspectiveJolly952

b2b marketer here at a SaaS company, and i sat in on a stack of sales calls last week to update our messaging.

The customers described what they bought from us in completely different language than our SDRs are using on the calls, so now i'm caught between rewriting our positioning around what customers say or coaching sales to use our existing copy.

So I'd love to know what everyone is doing about this? feel like i'm picking between two bad options.

My dad is 61, the classic man who hasn't seen a doctor since the 90s because he "feels fine." After a mate of mine had a heart scare in his 50s i got paranoid and basically bullied my dad into doing a full blood panel as a birthday thing, paid for it myself so he couldn't say no.

He fought me the whole way, said it was a waste of money, that he eats alright and walks the dog. Felt fine, looked fine.

Among the 100 markers lucis panel covered, a fair few came back off, but 3 of them frightened me. His ApoB was high, his blood sugar had crept into the prediabetic range, and his blood pressure backed both of them up. None of it was an emergency yet, which is the whole point, we caught it while it's still diet, walking and maybe a statin conversation rather than something that happens at 3am. I know he thinks i'm a pain with how hard i push him on his health, but i've watched it slide these last couple of years and it scares me. I love my dad. I want him around for years yet, at my wedding one day, meeting my kids, not a name in a toast and an empty seat where he should be.

He's taking it seriously now, mostly because seeing his own numbers hit different than his son nagging him. If you've got a stubborn parent who "feels fine," this is your sign. Anyone else have to drag a family member into getting checked?

I did six years in the army, where the entire point is learning to push through anything and treating rest as something you earn rather than something you're allowed to take, and when i got out i poured all of that straight into the gym, training twice a day most days, weights in the morning and cardio at night, eating clean to the gram and barely touching a rest day because in my head a rest day was just losing ground, and on the outside it worked, i was lean and visibly strong and getting compliments constantly, so when my sleep fell apart and my mood flattened right out and my sex drive basically vanished i put the whole lot down to stress and told myself to push through, because pushing through was the only setting i'd ever been given.

It was only when a mate who'd been through something similar told me to get my hormones checked that i bothered, fully expecting to be told i was a picture of health, and instead my testosterone came back on the floor, lower than men twice my age, my thyroid markers were dragging along the bottom of the range and my cortisol was all over the place, and the thing nobody had ever explained to me is that you can train and diet your body into exactly this state, where you're hammering it harder than you're feeding or recovering it and it responds by dialling down everything it treats as non-essential, hormones included, so the leaner and more disciplined i got the worse the machinery underneath was running.

What gets me looking back is that i'm the guy the army spent years teaching that discipline and pushing harder is the answer to everything, and that exact instinct, the one i was most proud of, was the thing taking me apart, and because i looked incredible in the mirror i had no reason at all to question it, i'd have happily kept grinding myself into the ground for years telling everyone how disciplined i was while my body slowly shut up shop, and the really maddening part is that none of it would have flagged on a normal checkup because you have to specifically ask for the hormone and thyroid panel, where your standard bloods would have had me looking perfectly fine.

So if you're deep in a hard training and dieting stretch and feeling oddly flat, bad sleep, no drive, low mood, despite looking the best you ever have, get a proper hormone and thyroid panel done instead of assuming the way you look is the whole story, and because most GPs won't run all that off the back of "i feel a bit tired" you'll probably have to go private, so whether you book through a big name like Medichecks or one like Lucis or a smaller specialist, make sure testosterone, free testosterone and the thyroid markers are on it rather than just the basic stuff. Anyone else push themselves into the best shape of their life and somehow feel worse than ever doing it?

our PM and eng lead got into it during backlog grooming over whether SSO/SAML was a top-3 customer ask.

he had pulled the data from Productboard, which aggregates the support ticket themes, i had pulled mine from BuildBetter, which sits over our win-loss interview themes, both technically right but the ranked lists came out completely different.

our roadmap process is basically each function arguing for their own siloed data set, dressed up as customer-led planning, and we're all looking at a different picture so the loudest opinion wins by default.

haven't figured out the tiebreaker yet and the next quarter is shaping up to be a vibes contest.

thoughts?

stopped testing creative on meta a while back after sitting down with the sample-size calcs, and our ROAS hasn't dropped a point.

say you're spending $60K/month on meta split across 4 creative variants. your CPM is around $30, your CTR is around 2%, and your purchase rate from click is around 1.5% (which is standard for DTC)…

that gives you roughly 150 purchases per variant per month.

for one of those creative variants to be a statistically significant winner at a 20% lift in purchase rate (the bar that meaningfully moves ROAS), you need 28,308 conversions per variant at 95% confidence with 80% power.

at 150 conversions per variant per month, you need 188 months of data per test (which is 16 years).

drop the bar to a 50% lift (which would be enormous, since hitting that on creative is unicorn territory) and you still need 11323 conversions per variant, or about 75 months (which is 6 years per test).

at the spend levels operators on this sub are working with, you cannot statistically detect a creative winner inside any reasonable timeframe.

so what we've been doing is calling winners after 5-7 days based on whatever metric meta's UI surfaces first, which is often CTR or cost-per-add-to-cart. those metrics have higher event rates so they reach significance faster, but significance on CTR doesn't correlate with ROAS lift, and a creative that wins on CTR loses on purchase rate often enough that the entire optimization is uncorrelated with the metric that pays the bills.

to check this against our own data, i pulled our creative test results going back to 2024, pulling the post-purchase records from our backend (Scayle event log) and matching against meta's event manager, and

the numbers came up short, with our winners regularly showing no corresponding lift in 30-day post-test purchase ROAS once budget was rolled into them. those wins were luck we'd called skill.

so what i do now is run fewer tests, let them run for 8+ weeks before calling anything, and ignore every metric except 30-day post-test purchase data, with the rest of our weekly test cadence killed off, our ROAS not moving (predictably), and a chunk of weekly time reclaimed that used to go into creative test management busywork.

got the most polite resignation of my career from a rockstar senior engineer in milan who'd been with us since last year, just got promoted to staff with a 14K raise, came into monday's 1:1 and thanked me then resigned in the same breath.

i didn't understand at first, he sent me his accountant's spreadsheet and i spent the rest of the week working out how a 14K raise had turned into a pay cut.

turns out italy's IRPEF jumps from 35% to 43% at €50K and the 14K raise i'd given him pushed him just past it, on top of that he lost the carico familiare deduction for his kid that he'd qualified for under €60K, by the time the addizionali kicked in and INPS came off the top his net take-home was about €1,200 a year less than before.

got on a call with our milan ops lead at our EOR that night and she had a benefit-in-kind workaround sketched out by morning that would have kept him under the cliff while still landing him a real raise.

he'd already mentally checked out though, and had a competing offer at 68K base from a milan startup that knew the local math going in and netted him more than my 72K would have (with better hours).

this isn't even a one-off cliff, italy's IRPEF curve does this around 50K and again around 75K and again around 100K, so if you're a US founder issuing offer letters or promotions in italy without modeling the post-tax delta you can absolutely hand someone a pay cut while telling them it's a raise.

the comp instincts you build doing US ladders just don't apply to italy past a certain salary, you can be giving more on paper while taking away in practice.

unfortunately lost him to that milan startup, lost the headcount and the recruiter fees and probably a referral pipeline through his network and the 6 months of codebase context he'd built up, all because i bought into the US-trained instinct that more cash always equals more comp.

what i'd tell any US founder hiring senior IC's in italy now is to run the post-tax delta on every promotion before you issue the letter, and to ask your EOR (whether it's a big one like Deel or Workmotion or a smaller specialist), to model the cliff before you sign anything.

probably true in france and germany too at certain bracket cliffs but italy is where it bites hardest.

I already have experience building apps with React.js for the frontend and Node.js for the backend. I’m now working on bigger projects and I’m thinking about switching to Next.jsis it really worth changing my stack to Next.js instead of keeping React + Node.js separated?

I know Next.js offers things like routing, SSR, and API routes in one framework, but I’m not sure if it’s better for scalability and real-world large apps.

Would it be a good idea to fully move to Next.js, or should I stick with my current setup?