IWANTGROW · Decision funnels for DTC brands

Charles Boustany · Founder

Who you'd actually be working with

I have been on every side of this business. Including the side where it's my money.

I built an ecommerce brand to seven figures across 20+ countries and sold it. Then I co-founded a growth agency, scaled it to 15 people and six-figure monthly recurring revenue in under 18 months, worked across 500+ brands, and sold my stake in 2025. In between I led a 25-person marketing team across a multi-brand retail group spending over $1M a month, where the job was as much restructuring and hiring as it was media.

What I learned from all of it is that I liked the work far more than owning the business. Payroll and sales calls ate the week. The part I actually enjoyed was being inside accounts, rebuilding offers and watching a number move. So this is me, on your account, doing the work myself. Not a team you get introduced to once and then never speak to again.

And I still run my own Shopify brand today, which means everything on this page gets tested with my own money before it goes anywhere near yours.

2014 – 2019Built & soldMy own 7-figure ecommerce brand, 20+ countries

2019 – 2023Led at scale25-person team, $1M+/month in media

2023 – 2025Built & sold againOperexx, 15 people, 500+ brands

NowHands onMy own store, plus a few brands at a time

150+ ecommerce brands, across

Beauty & skincare
Supplements & health
Electronics
Fitness & outdoors
Apparel
Household & pets
Food & beverages
and many more

The traffic tax

Is your CPA too high? It's not your ads.

Why are you paying £60 to acquire a customer for a £40 product? Because most of what you spend never had a chance. Here is where the money on a standard product page actually goes, before anyone gets near a checkout.

50%

30%

20%

50%

Wasted clicks

You paid full price for high-intent traffic and lost them on arrival, because your product page drops them into a catalogue instead of explaining why you are worth it.

30%

Retargeting bloat

They did not understand the product the first time, so now you chase them for fourteen days and usually end up discounting just to close a sale you had already paid for.

20%

Actual conversions

The small group who worked out on their own that your product was good, in spite of the page rather than because of it. That fifth of your budget is carrying the other four.

Same click, different destination

Your ad did its job. Then you sent it here.

A product page is a shop. A typical landing page is a shout. A decision funnel is an argument. Only one of them is built for a stranger who has never heard of you.

The default

Your product page

✕

Its actual jobLet someone who already decided pick a size

✕

First screenProduct, price, variant picker

✕

ProofThree scrolls down, past where people leave

✕

Ways outNav, footer, related products, search

✕

Premium priceCannot justify it, so it just looks expensive

Your ad's promise dies on arrival

The old way

A typical landing page

~

Its actual jobForce an impulse buy before they think

~

First screenHype, urgency, a countdown timer

~

ProofA logo bar and a star rating

✓

Ways outFewer, at least

✕

Premium priceHandles it by discounting it away

Wins the click, trains a discount habit

What I build

The argument

A decision funnel

✓

Its actual jobWin the comparison happening in their head

✓

First screenThe exact promise the ad just made

✓

ProofBeside each objection, as it arrives

✓

Ways outOne road in, one road out, chosen by you

✓

Premium priceJustifies it, so the price becomes the point

The stranger understands why you win

Run your own numbers

What is your product page costing you every year?

Put your real figures in. At the same ad spend, a lower cost per purchase buys more orders. Nothing else has to change.

Currency

Monthly ad spend

$

Your cost per purchase now

$

Average order value

$

Assume CPA improves by 40% I got 76% on my own store. The slider starts well below that.

Extra revenue per year, same ad spend

$0

0Extra orders / month

$0Extra revenue / month

Nothing about your spend changes. You just stop losing the clicks you already paid for.

Let's go get that

The self-diagnosis

Do you actually need this?

I do not care about your company size. Whether you are doing $1k a month or $1M a month, what matters is the nature of your product. Works for performance brands and taste brands alike, so supplements and skincare sit here next to fashion, jewellery and décor. Tick anything that sounds like you.

0

Tick the ones that sound like you. Even one means a standard product page is quietly costing you money every day.

Book a free audit

The architecture

Four moves, in this order, every time.

The format changes depending on the audience. The underlying argument does not. This is the sequence that makes someone change their mind.

01
Name the default
Show the buyer exactly what they are settling for right now. The hidden flaws in the thing they already own, the ones they have quietly accepted. No dissatisfaction, no sale.

"Your current premium underwear loses its shape after three washes, because most brands pad the elastic with cheap filler."
02
Prove the case
If you sell on performance, prove it works: a claim grounded well enough that a sceptic cannot wave it away. If you sell on taste, prove it is theirs: who it is for, how it looks on a real person or in a real room, and what it replaces. Same job, different evidence.

Performance: "A patented bamboo-microfibre blend. Three times softer, naturally thermo-regulating, and it does not lose tension."

Taste: "Cut for people who are tired of looking like everyone else in the room. Shot on five body types, in real light, with the drape you actually get."
03
Remove friction
Answer the objection at the moment it forms, not in a returns policy nobody opens. Shipping, sizing, guarantees, and the quiet one: will this actually work for someone like me.

Proof, guarantees and FAQs placed beside the claim that triggers the doubt, rather than collected in a block at the bottom.
04
Force action
One offer, stated plainly, with the number spelled out. The same call to action at every point where a decision could be made. No navigation, no related products, no exit you did not choose.

Bundle, saving and guarantee in one place, repeated at each decision point down the page.

The obvious objection

"But mine isn't better. It's just nicer."

Fashion, décor, jewellery, lifestyle. Nobody buys a dress because it outperforms another dress, and no lamp has a mechanism. If that is you, the argument above still holds, it just changes what counts as evidence. Brands win in one of two ways, and both of them break on a standard product page.

Mode one

Performance brands

The buyer is askingDoes this actually work?

You win by proving mechanism. Ingredients, construction, dosage, how it holds up after thirty washes. Supplements, skincare, tech, functional apparel.

On a product page it fails because the page states a claim it never earns. The buyer has heard the same claim from four other brands this week.

Mode two

Taste brands

The buyer is askingIs this me, and will it look right?

You win by proving context. Who it is for, how it looks on a real body or in a real room rather than on white, what it replaces, and why it will not look cheap in six months. Fashion, décor, jewellery, lifestyle.

On a product page it fails because the page shows the object in isolation and asks the buyer to imagine the rest. Most of them will not bother.

So what do I actually build

Six things that change when the product is bought on taste.

This is the part most agencies skip, because "make it look nicer" is not a strategy and a prettier grid is not a funnel. Here is what actually goes on the page instead.

01

Cast the buyer before you sell the product

Every taste brand has a "for whom", and that is your mechanism. Naming it out loud makes the right person feel recognised and lets the wrong one leave, which is a feature. A page that tries to be for everyone is chosen by nobody.

02

Sell the edit, not the item

One product on a white background gives a buyer nothing to picture. A look, a capsule, a room. It answers "what do I actually do with this", and it lifts AOV by construction rather than by discounting.

03

Prove it will not look cheap in person

That is the real fear, and taste brands do have a mechanism for it. Fabric weight and GSM, seam and construction detail, materials, finish, close-up texture. Most brands bury all of it in a spec tab nobody opens.

04

Real bodies, real rooms, real scale

The gap between studio photography and what lands on the doorstep is where returns are made. Several body types with heights and sizes worn. For homeware, shot in a room with something human-sized for scale, because "wrong size for the space" is the number one décor return.

05

Kill the fit doubt where it forms

Not in a policy page. At the size selector. Fit described against a brand they already own, the returns promise stated inline, and sizing confidence built from review language rather than a generic chart. This is usually the single biggest lever on an apparel page.

06

Real scarcity, and a wardrobe not a reorder

Fashion has honest urgency built in: drops, limited runs, seasonal cuts, sizes genuinely selling through. Most brands throw that away and bolt on a countdown timer nobody believes. And since nothing gets replenished, the post-purchase flow introduces the adjacent piece rather than nudging a repeat.

One number I would look at before touching anything: returns.

Apparel and homeware are the categories where you can lift conversion and lose money doing it, because the extra orders come back. I optimise on returns-adjusted contribution margin per order rather than raw conversion rate, which usually changes what gets fixed first. If your returns are concentrated in specific sizes it is a fit-communication problem. Spread evenly, it is an expectation problem in the imagery.

I run an apparel brand of my own, so this is a category I sell in rather than only advise on. The argument that moved my own numbers was half fabric and half who it was cut for.

Which one is right for you

You don't have to know. That's my job.

The format is a decision before it is a design, and the right one depends entirely on your brand, your category and how cold your traffic is. An advertorial can beat a straight offer page by double, or lose to it by the same amount, for the same product.

I look at what you sell, who is clicking and what they already believe, then tell you which two to build first. You never have to pick from a menu.

UnawareProblem awareSolution awareProduct aware

Unaware

The advertorial

Reads like an article, not an ad. The product appears a third of the way down, once the problem feels real. Best for cold traffic that ignores anything that looks like selling.

Unaware

The listicle

"Seven things nobody tells you about X." Cheap to produce, easy to test angles inside, and it earns the scroll before it asks for anything.

Problem aware

The mechanism page

Leads on why this works when the three things they already tried did not. Essential in a sceptical category where every competitor claims the same result.

Problem aware

The founder story

Why this exists at all. Converts unusually well for newer brands and anywhere the real objection is trust rather than price.

YOUTHEM

✓✕

✓✓

✓✕

Solution aware

Us vs them

A direct comparison against the obvious alternative, including the things you lose on. Honesty about one weakness buys credibility on everything else.

Solution aware

The review-led page

The product introduced through other people's words, built around real customer language. Powerful for high-consideration buys and anything slightly awkward to purchase.

Product aware

The offer page

Bundle, saving and guarantee in the first screen. For retargeting and warm traffic, where the persuasion is finished and the only thing left is the deal.

Any stage

The quiz or qualifier

"Is this right for me." Splits your traffic so each person gets one conversation instead of five, and hands you first-party data your ads can use afterwards.

Why this is possible now

This used to be a quarter's work. Now it's a week.

Which is the real reason most brands only ever built one page and left it there. The build was never the hard part. It was everything you had to buy and hire to get one live.

Days 1–2

The offer and the argumentReviews and support tickets mined for real language, the default named, the mechanism written. This is the slow part, and it is the part that decides the result.

Days 3–4

Copy and designWritten and laid out together, because copy designed after the fact never fits the argument it is meant to carry.

Day 5

Built in ShopifyYour store, your domain, your checkout, your pixel. Nothing new for your team to learn and nothing to break between two sites.

Week 2

Live, with traffic on itThen a second format running against the first, so by the end of the month the market has told us which conversation it wants.

What this used to require

A developer on retainer. A separate page builder at $200 a month. A designer who needed a brief. Two weeks of back and forth, a page that lived on a different domain, and attribution that quietly broke because your events fired in one place and the purchase happened in another.

Then, because it cost so much to make one, nobody ever built a second to test against it.

ReploUnbounceInstapageLeadpagesA developer on retainerA three-week timeline

The proof is in the CPA

I did not touch the ads. I changed where they landed.

My own bamboo apparel brand, sending Meta traffic straight to the product page. So I built a decision funnel: named the default (cheap cotton that loses shape), proved the superiority (bamboo), and handled the objections before asking for the sale. Same ads. Same creative. Same audiences.

Before · standard product page£71.81 Cost per purchase across 25 campaigns. 8 purchases in 31 days.

→

After · decision funnel£16.87 Same account. 30 purchases in 20 days.

Before · Jan 1 to Jan 31, 2026 Meta Ads Manager showing £71.81 cost per purchase across 25 campaigns in January 2026

After · Mar 1 to Mar 20, 2026 Meta Ads Manager showing £16.87 cost per purchase and 30 purchases in March 2026

−76%

Cost per purchase fell from £71.81 to £16.87. Those are account totals, not a cherry-picked campaign.

And look at the volume, because that is the part people miss. 8 purchases in 31 days became 30 purchases in 20 days. Roughly six times the daily order rate, at the same spend, from the same ads.

That is the difference between an account you cannot scale and one you can.

The whole machine

Right now you are managing six people.

A copywriterA designerA developer A media buyerAn email personSomeone for the numbers

Six calendars, six invoices, six opinions. And when the numbers go flat, every one of them points at the other five.

Or one operator who does all six, and has done for ten years.

Which means when something is not working, there is nobody to point at but me. That is the whole pitch.

What I actually do

Six jobs. One invoice.

01

The offer

First, always. Most conversion problems are a good product sold on the wrong terms. Bundles, guarantees, pricing, what is actually on the table.

02

Creative and ads

Concepts, scripts, copy, and the ads themselves. Written for the awareness level your customer is actually at, not the one you wish they were at.

03

Decision funnels

Designed and built, not specced out for somebody else. The funnel that took my own CPA down 76% is one I wrote, designed and shipped myself, inside Shopify.

04

Email and SMS

Klaviyo end to end. Flows, segmentation, campaign calendar, deliverability. The cheapest revenue in your account and usually the most neglected.

05

Media buying

Meta and TikTok, consolidated and fed with creative volume instead of sliced into a hundred audiences. Judged on marginal CPA, never the blended average.

06

Tracking and reporting

CAPI and pixel deduplicated, event match quality watched, and one scorecard on MER, new customer CPA and contribution margin so nobody argues about numbers again.

Email and retention

Your cheapest revenue is the part nobody is looking at.

Almost every brand I open up is spending hard on acquisition and running a welcome flow somebody built two years ago. Retention is where the margin lives, and it is usually the fastest thing to fix, because you already paid for that traffic once.

Get a free Klaviyo audit

Flows that do not fight each other. Every flow gets an entry rule, an exit rule and a suppression rule. The most common thing I find in an inherited account is one customer getting three contradictory emails in a day.
Segments built on behaviour. Not just engaged and unengaged. Replenishment timing, category affinity, discount sensitivity, and the people quietly on their way out.
Deliverability treated as a real metric. Watched on purpose, not discovered after your sending reputation has already gone.
Honest attribution. Klaviyo's default window is generous and will happily take credit for revenue your Meta ads bought. I report it against MER so you can see what email is really adding.
Measured on revenue per recipient. Not open rate. Opens stopped meaning much the day Apple started prefetching them.

Questions

The things people ask before we start.

What does working together actually look like?

Almost always it starts small: one decision funnel build, or a paid audit of the account. That way you see the work before you commit to anything.

If it goes well it usually becomes something monthly covering ads, funnel and email together, because those three fail as a set and fixing one while the other two stay broken rarely moves the number. No twelve month lock-ins.

What does it cost?

Less right now than it will later, and I would rather just be straight about why.

I sold my agency last year and I am rebuilding a portfolio of my own work. So I have real availability, I am doing every part of it myself rather than handing you to a junior, and I am pricing to win the work rather than to protect a margin. Whoever comes in now gets the version of me with time on their account.

Tell me what you are spending and what you need, and I will give you a number the same day. It will be the lowest it is going to be.

How fast can a funnel be live?

A first version inside a week from kickoff, covering the offer, the copy, the design and the build. Then we point real traffic at it and iterate on what the data says rather than on what either of us thinks.

The slow part is almost never the build. It is agreeing what the offer actually is.

How do you decide which format to build?

From how warm the traffic is and what the objection actually is. Cold prospecting traffic in a sceptical category usually wants an advertorial or a mechanism page. Retargeting wants an offer page. A crowded category where they are already comparing wants an us versus them.

But that is the starting hypothesis, not the answer. We build two, run them against each other, and the market settles it inside a couple of weeks.

Does this work for fashion or homeware, where there is no mechanism to prove?

Yes, and it is where the gap is usually widest, because most fashion and décor pages are catalogues rather than arguments.

You are not proving performance, you are proving fit and context: who it is for, how it looks on a real body or in a real room rather than on a white background, what it replaces, and why it will not look cheap in six months. Same four moves, different evidence.

I run an apparel brand of my own, so this is a category I sell in rather than only consult on. The other thing I would look at early is returns, because apparel is the one category where you can lift conversion and lose money doing it. I optimise on returns-adjusted contribution margin, not raw conversion rate.

Do I need Replo, Unbounce or another page builder?

No. Everything gets built in Shopify, on your store. Same domain, same checkout, same pixel.

That matters for more than the subscription. Sending paid traffic to a separate page-builder domain is one of the most common causes of broken attribution I see, because your events fire on one domain and the purchase happens on another. Keeping it all in Shopify avoids the problem entirely.

I already have an agency. Does that work?

Often, yes. A common setup is that I own the offer, the funnel and the email while they keep buying media, and everyone benefits because their ads suddenly land somewhere that converts.

What does not work is two parties making creative decisions with no agreement on who owns the number. So we settle that in the first week, or I would rather not start.

How small is too small?

If you are spending under roughly $1,000 a month on ads, a one-off build makes more sense than anything ongoing, and I will tell you that rather than sell you the bigger thing.

If you are pre-revenue and still working out whether people want the product, you do not need me yet. You need sales, and I will say so.

What happens if it does not work?

Sometimes it does not. Every test gets a kill threshold agreed before it runs, so we stop things quickly instead of arguing about whether they need another two weeks.

I would rather tell you something failed in week two than protect my own work until month three. That is the entire reason I report on MER and contribution margin instead of the platform numbers that flatter me.

Do you write the ads too, or just the funnel?

Both. Concepts, scripts, copy and the ads themselves. A great funnel behind weak creative still fails, and good creative pointed at a product page is exactly what produced the £71.81 cost per purchase further up this page.

They are one system, which is the whole reason I do all of it rather than one piece of it.

Where are you based and how do you work?

Remote, covering EST and European hours, so I overlap with North America, the UK and the EU. English and French.

Let's talk

Tell me what is broken and I will tell you where I'd start.

No pitch deck, no discovery sequence. Send me your store and roughly what you are spending, and I will come back with what I would actually do first and why. If it turns out you do not need me, I will say so.

Or just book 30 minutes.

Free, no obligation, and you will leave with something useful whether or not we work together.

I look at your funnel and your ads before we speak
You get the two things I would change first, and why
If your product does not need this, I tell you on the call

Book a free 30-minute audit

CALENDLY INLINE EMBED SLOT
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boustanycharles@gmail.com +1 514 632 2238 linkedin.com/in/cboustany Remote · EST and European hours

Everything between the ad and the repeat purchase.