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“AI without strategy is chaos.”
Lucy Wang, Co-Founder & CEO of Pocketflows, joins me for a straight-talking breakdown of what’s real in small business marketing today. From funnel nightmares to the trap of instant gratification, Lucy calls out the shortcuts that sabotage founders—and shows us what sustainable growth really takes.
Inside this episode, we dig into:
- 🚦 Why “cookie-cutter” AI marketing fails small businesses.
- 🧩 The hidden costs of shortcut thinking (spam, over-automation, blind ROAS chasing).
- 📈 The smarter path: building loyalty, visibility, and a repeatable flow for growth.
- 💡 Real stories of how businesses can ditch chaos and unlock clarity.
Lucy’s approach is sharp, practical, and refreshingly human. If you’ve ever wondered why your ads aren’t working, or why growth feels stuck in neutral, this is your blueprint for cutting through the noise.
👉 Connect with Lucy Wang:
- Pocketflows
- Lucy on LinkedIn
- 📧 lucy@pocketflows.com
🎙️ Subscribe to Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising? for more no-fluff conversations on what’s real (and what’s just noise).
Creators and Guests
What is Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising??
"Is Anything Real in Paid Advertising?" is the show where agency founders, marketers, and skeptics unpack what’s actually working, and what’s just noise.
Hosted by Adam W. Barney (author, strategist, and energy coach with $100M+ in ad experience), this no-fluff, 20-minute video podcast dives into the tactics, tools, and truths shaping modern agency growth.
Each episode is a co-hosted conversation - unfiltered, spicy, and built for anyone tired of the same recycled playbooks.
🎯 Running a $250K–$5M agency? Join the mastermind: https://quickclick.com/r/cgat5uvqcd0zfa1c79ic2ca3u7gbzo
[00:06.0]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where founders unpack what's real and what's just noise in the world of funnels, founders, and full-blown marketing chaos. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney and today's guest dropped a line that should be on every strategist's coffee mug.
[00:23.4]
"Strategy is everything. AI can't do it." Lucy Wang is the founder of Pocketflows. And if your infrastructure feels bloated, broken, or downright haunted, she's the person to call. Lucy, welcome here. Thanks so much for having me, Adam.
[00:39.1]
Awesome. Quick gut check. Is anything real in paid advertising right now? Yeah. I still get targeted by a lot of brands or products that I'll click through. So as a consumer, I'm inclined to say yes. And obviously you click on some of those things every once in a while, so that.
[00:57.5]
That's an indicator there. Right? I've even purchased some of those things, so yes, exactly. I love it. Well, you're building Pocketflows, right? When marketing's complexity is what I would say at its peak, what kinds of funnel nightmares are hitting your inbox lately?
[01:15.1]
Yeah, that's a great question. Because we provide marketing infrastructure for SaaS platforms to help their small businesses grow, we see a lot of challenges with their end users. Small businesses across Main Street really, say, "hey, we don't have visibility into what's going on on the marketing advertising side." So a lot of times they'll spend money and set some budget, which is just what they have appetite for.
[01:42.9]
Not even kind of deduced or worked around in, any bottoms up, hey, this is what we should allocate way. And then after they allocate that budget, they say, "hey, go agency." And agencies sometimes comes back with leads, sometimes doesn't, sometimes comes back with more bookings, appointments, whatever it is that these businesses are trying to optimize for, and sometimes doesn't.
[02:05.0]
And when it's not working, they're not sure why. That why is a big question. Right? And I mean, I guess that bleeds into with those brands that you're talking about. What are they? What are most of those brands getting wrong? In 2025, there's so much complexity again in the marketplace.
[02:23.0]
There's so much that we all need to think about and identify in building our businesses. What are most people getting wrong? At least from what you see with Pocketflows? We've seen a lot of small businesses use AI too blanketly.
[02:38.3]
Rather, agencies for small businesses will use AI too blanketly. So what does this look like as end result? Because budgets for small businesses tend to be smaller, they'll say, hey, we can create this asset much cheaper, much faster with AI.
[02:53.5]
But then the end result is that the coffee shop and the eye doctor is sending the exact same copy and sometimes even the exact same image in their marketing email or their advertisement to that locale.
[03:08.5]
And now as a consumer, imagine I see two emails, sometimes even from the same domain that look identical. But one is telling me 20% off my email next pair of glasses, and the other is saying 20% off my next cup of coffee. I'm just really confused, right? Like why do these look the same?
[03:24.1]
And it's because someone used AI to generate them, but didn't take that additional step, and thought to actually put in the personalization around the brand of the small business itself. That's a huge roadblock I can imagine that so many people are facing just because they do blanketly pick to use AI without that human gut check, that strategy gut check that you mention that things are. Taking us back what moment or client conversation, whether pre-PocketFlows or in the early days of Pocketflows sparked that quote that I mentioned at the top where strategy again is everything and AI can't do it.
[04:06.1]
It's a great question. Might have to think about that for a minute. I do think it's more reps on goal. Just over time we've seen it wasn't one particular moment. We've seen instance and instance again of people really wanting to leverage AI, but without someone guiding the overall brand strategy or perhaps even just, hey, what are my goals around using AI?
[04:29.9]
It just flops and it's such a powerful tool and I wish that more people had some time or patience to play around with it and get to the point where they could actually be using it effectively. So we're so working along that process. I love it.
[04:46.3]
It's never finished. That's one of the beautiful things of being an entrepreneur or someone who's building a startup is the fact that it's never finished. You have to continue to iterate. Yeah, for sure. We say this internally a lot too. And I think if you asked me six, eight, ten months ago, where we thought we'd be, it would not be here necessarily.
[05:09.3]
I love it. I know you've got clients that have, you know, from probably your perspective or their own perspective all the tools, but they still face bad outcomes. Where do you start when it's not a tech problem, but it's more of a thinking problem? Yeah, it's a good question.
[05:26.7]
I think a lot of people still have a top line goal of I want to grow more revenue, but they haven't broken it down to, I mentioned visibility earlier, exactly how they're going to get there. So for example, as a small business, sometimes people aren't even sure if they'll do better by getting new leads or getting more engagement from their existing customers.
[05:47.9]
A lot of times it's actually the latter because depending on the business and the locale, there's saturation in the market. Right. There are only so many more new leads that you can get. So if you really focus on creating the best experience for your existing customers, hyper personalizing and catching them at the right time to bring them back into your business, your storefront, whatever it may be that you're offering to them, then you can actually grow a lot more with a lower spend too, than, if you were just saying, hey, I'm going to try to run as many ads and reach as many new people as possible.
[06:23.8]
Right. It's about using that customer loyalty. Right. And thinking about what I think a lot of people in the SaaS world think about is that long term customer value also. Right. And how do you bring those customers back in? I know with the examples, the eye doctor and the coffee shop piece of the conversation earlier, those are disparate businesses from face value, but at the same time they're both built on that loyalty and they need to personalize to their customers?
[06:51.6]
Right. A lot of. Yeah, go ahead. No, no, no, go ahead, Lucy. I was just going to say a lot of the motions that they would run are very similar. So if you take a couple of layers up and look at the abstraction, they feel the same, but you have to squint for it to be the same.
[07:09.2]
Right. And then once you actually look closely, that's where you need to personalize. That's where the additional lift comes from. Either it's their existing SaaS provider, a platform, it's something that they're taking that step to do, or it's something that the underlying infrastructure provider should help them do.
[07:24.4]
Right, Right. Do you think from a broad marketing perspective, do small businesses and businesses that you work with lean too hard on dashboards and that leads them to forget that strategy is A people thing or is it something more complex than that?
[07:42.0]
Oh man. I actually wish that we could say that they lean too much on dashboards because I mentioned lack of visibility earlier. I think a lot of people still aren't diving into the dashboard level or looking at analytics and thinking about, hey, like, what are the highest leverage?
[08:01.8]
KPIs or what are the highest leverage? And I don't mean to use words that they're not thinking about, but just say, hey, what are the metrics that I actually want to grow? Right. So that actually gets into thinking about, from your perspective with those businesses, how does, what I would call shortcut thinking, really lead to a dip, a cost in lost revenue?
[08:25.3]
Right. You know, that shortcut thinking, I think for especially small business owners, what I like to call microbusiness owners as well, here in this country, they love a shortcut that can get them somewhere, but maybe that's the thing that actually impedes them potentially and they need a strategy partner like yourself who works with that infrastructure piece to help guide them in that, in that sense. Move from what I would say is a fog.
[08:52.1]
That's maybe a self-induced fog or universe induced fog to flow. Yeah, I like to think about, actually, unsubscribe as the classic example of hey, this is why you shouldn't just What was the term that you used just now?
[09:13.7]
Fog to flow? Or shortcut? Shortcut. Yeah, Shortcut thinking. Thank you. Yeah, I like to think of unsubscribe as the classic, hey, this is why you shouldn't shortcut things. The messaging that you send out to your customers. You know, there are compliance laws against sending messages out.
[09:31.6]
Once one of your customers has unsubscribed, you kind of lose that channel, and you have to regain trust and get their attention back again. If you already have our attention, that's actually so precious because you know, in this attention economy, everyone is grappling with billion different notifications at the same time.
[09:51.1]
So, as one of these small business owners, I think sometimes it's easy to be like, well, the more messages I send, right, the more people that are going to click on them, then the more bookings I'm going to get, conversion, etc. There's a threshold to that, right? Once you start spamming too much, then people will start to unsubscribe.
[10:08.5]
That's a classic example of, oh, at that point you might actually be hurting your business more than you are helping your business. And so marketing isn't always something that you should do all the time. There's so much nuance to it, really. And I mean it gets back to that personalization.
[10:24.5]
It's that human understanding that's so critical. I'm on a board of a local organization, that helps small businesses grow. And the person who actually runs that organization yesterday said, Email? Nobody reads emails anymore.
[10:40.8]
Email is such a crowded place to sit. It's not about sending more emails, but it's about building that tribe. Right. It's not that 1:many, it's that 1:1 connection that I see is so critical. Right.
[10:56.6]
And even though I agree and disagree with that. I think email is very, very saturated. But the numbers aren't lying. You still do see more bookings, more appointments, whatever. These small businesses are usually selling, through email conversions.
[11:12.8]
The magic just happens when you actually send a good email. Right. So, it's good spam is still better than bad spam. If you're bad spam, then you're going to be put in junk and forever lost to the consumer and to the customer that you're trying to reach.
[11:33.7]
Right. If you're good spam, then at least maybe they'll think about it. Even if they're not going to come back right now. Just leaves a better impression. I think it also comes back to, hey, all of this is really important, but you need to make sure that you've focus on the core foundations of what you're offering, what your business is first.
[11:55.2]
You can't make bad coffee taste good with a good email. Oh, I love that. That's a triple pivot right there. I love that idea actually. Right. That's a great way to visualize that if your coffee doesn't taste good, then it's not going to be something people want.
[12:13.8]
But your email's not going to help. Right. It's not the critical piece there in that vein, I would love from your perspective, Lucy, what's a strategy shortcut that never works, even if it's something that looks good on paper?
[12:30.9]
Oh, that's a good question.
[12:39.5]
I think my strategy shortcut. Are there any that are coming to mind that you're thinking of? These are really popular shortcuts that I hear people using all the time. I don't want to stay in the vein of talking about email marketing because I don't think that's a valuable one, but you know, with a lot of you know, a lot of these businesses, even if they're lifestyle brands that are emerging in local areas, restaurants, food trucks, you know, any of those local operators, for instance, they always come to me and they say, oh, I need to stand up my social media, I need to build a presence on Instagram, I need to build a presence on Meta, you know, more broadly when it comes to Instagram and Facebook or I need to do LinkedIn ads and things like that.
[13:30.2]
Some of those strategies just don't make sense and I think it probably, or some of those channels rather don't make sense. I think it comes back to the strategy, right? And needing a clear cut strategy and knowing that you can't do everything all at once.
[13:46.1]
It's maybe more important from a strategy perspective to focus on one thing or two things initially then you expand over time. That's a different way to sort of frame that question. But maybe that leads down that. if something looks good on paper, right.
[14:02.6]
Of things maybe we assume we're supposed to do, it's more important to go through a process of an amplified pros and cons list, right. Of what's the real value you're going to get from something versus, or a SWOT analysis I suppose is another way to look at it.
[14:20.5]
Yeah, I think another somewhat related topic, I love what you just said is we see a lot of small businesses trust their agencies or providers with experimentation and I don't think they quite recognize how costly experimentation can be if they're not doing it right.
[14:39.0]
I mentioned earlier that actually the audience is limited in a lot of these businesses just because of either the locale that they serve or the services they're providing. And yeah, I think experimenting like running ABCDEF tests, maybe isn't the best idea if you're only going to have 2,000 potential customers.
[15:00.6]
Right. That are coming in because the ones that don't work are going to be pretty bad. So it's better to be more thoughtful about hey, what is the messaging that I really want to do but a little bit more confidence maybe to a smaller set of testing.
[15:15.9]
But sometimes in that smaller set of testing, the numbers are going to come back a little bit weird, and you can't only trust that number. I think a lot of the businesses need to lean back into their own authentic voice around, hey, what's the messaging that I can stand behind?
[15:34.0]
What's the messaging that feels authentic already in my customers love? That's what they should be extending when they go onto platforms like social media or digital ads for the first time, as opposed to trying to follow a trend or copy someone else's. I know trends can cause a lot of viral moments, which is great, but also like if it's too far removed from that brand or that business's core offering today, then it's actually not going to resonate.
[16:01.9]
Or maybe they'll bring a lot of people in for that initial first-level interaction. They realize, oh, like this business is pretty different. Like unless we're going to pivot your business altogether, you can't only pivot the messaging or the marketing, but not the business itself. Right?
[16:17.1]
Yeah. Actually I love that framework of thinking in those businesses that maybe only have a thousand or two thousand potential customers. My mind goes into, maybe digital channels aren't even the right move for you. Maybe it's about direct mail.
[16:33.4]
You could more cheaply, effectively implement a system like that where you target your messages through platforms that maybe feel antiquated. Maybe they're not as exciting. Right. Channels that don't get so much noise in the paid advertising space, but they can be so core to actually changing the game in terms of success for the business.
[16:57.8]
You know, I love that framework of thinking. Oh, I only have 2,000, you know, it's not your total addressable market, it's your sales addressable market. Right. Taking that lens is a critical piece there. Yeah, yeah.
[17:13.5]
Something else that I have more ideas now that I'm thinking about it for a little bit. You mentioned strategy shortcut. Something else we see is over-optimization for ROAS. So there are so many variables that you can play around with there, to optimize.
[17:29.6]
First of all, the benchmarks aren't super clearly set. So it depends on the look on industry that you're in. Some, small businesses think, hey, as long as I make 1x back or at least if I just get 1 or 2 more leads, it's been worth it for me.
[17:46.3]
Whereas I don't realize, oh, this is actually a really ineffective campaign. I could have done so much better. Right. And so we see that, and then also sometimes I think we try to over optimize because of a lack of benchmarks in the other direction. So they're like, oh, like how come I only performed 4x here?
[18:02.5]
Could I have gotten 20x? Because my friend works in a completely different industry, got 20x on this campaign that they ran over the past few months. So there's a lot of wishful thinking around the numbers there and I think there is a little bit of adrenaline rush sometimes when you see like, oh wow, this many click-throughs, like, here's what you know.
[18:23.1]
And I felt it too. But sometimes the numbers you need to dig in and think about, hey, like what's actually happening here. Does this seem right for the industry that I'm in and for what I'm trying to do? Right.
[18:38.2]
I love it. Well, Lucy, this felt truly like strategic therapy for anyone who's lost in an organizational or a strategy loop. Where can people follow you or learn more about what you're doing at Pocketflows? So across LinkedIn.
[18:55.4]
You can always send me an email: lucy@pocketflows.com come to our website, check out our offerings. And if you want to chat also go through Adam. He's the best, so he can connect you to, I'm sure a bunch of other folks who can help you out on this front. Cool. And obviously links will be below for anyone to check out what you're doing with PocketFlows.
[19:15.7]
One last question, though: If someone listening is stuck in automation overload but not gaining traction, what's your no-fluff advice for them to get unstuck? Oh gosh, automation overload, I love that term. Just stop what you're doing, maybe for a week or two.
[19:36.9]
And we've seen a lot of businesses do that and realize, hey, nothing actually changed. We saw the same amount of traffic and it just reminds you how much over-optimizing you're doing. That reminder to say no sometimes or take a pause.
[19:54.0]
I've had clients over the years do all sorts of crazy things like that and ask questions around, should we turn this off and see what happens? And it's amazing. I'm not saying it happens nine out of ten times. It's amazing how frequently you turn something off and that needle moves this much, not this much.
[20:14.2]
Right? Right, right, right. And then you can breathe a little bit again. And instead of focusing on very local problems. It'll give you the room to think about, hey, like, what's a different direction that I might want to take with my messaging? Or what are other platforms that I might want to try inside?
[20:31.0]
I love it. All right, Lucy, well, thank you again for joining us on "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where we separate what's real from what's just noise. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney. Be sure to subscribe, share, and check the show notes below for links back to Lucy and PocketFlows.
[20:48.3]
Lucy, thank you again for joining today. Thanks so much for having me, Adam. This is a great podcast and, yeah, excited to see more episodes come out. Awesome.