Brice McBeth
Founder
Brice McBeth founded Reap Commerce in 2009, before conversion rate optimization was a service most agencies sold, and he is a co-founder of Neurograph, a persona intelligence platform built for Shopify brands. He is also one of the few CRO people who has run the experiment on himself. He built his own store, Standish Salon Goods, hired his own agency to optimize it, and says A/B testing lifted its conversions by over 950%.
His first job out of college was at IBM on SurfAid Analytics, a web analytics service that predates Google Analytics. By his account, the team he worked with invented the single-pixel tracking GIF and settled on terms like page views and unique visitors that the whole industry still uses. Standish launched in 2011, and its expensive early lessons (including a $100,000 custom site he replaced with a $300 template) became his book, Salon Chairs Don't Sell Themselves. He serves on the board of the DFW Retail Executives Association and mentors founders through the SKU accelerator.
His argument is that the average customer does not exist. At Standish, the reports said his average order was $900. The real customers were a stylist replacing one chair for a few hundred dollars and a salon owner spending $15,000 to $25,000 on a full build-out, and no ad written for the $900 buyer would have reached either. His fix is the three random guys test: phone the people who did not buy, give them permission to deliver bad news, and listen. Neurograph is the software version of that instinct, which he calls an operating system for persona-based marketing. His line from our conversation that stuck with me: data doesn't lie, but it will gaslight you.
He lives in Irving, Texas, speaks Chinese, and describes himself on Instagram as an aspiring artist and father of three boys.
