About me

I’m Adam, founder of LonelySquare.

I’ve spent more than 20 years figuring out why customers choose one business over another.

Today, I turn that experience into a playbook for your business: what to say and do at the moments that matter, so more customers choose you.

20+ Years

Studying how customers choose

50+ Brands

Built and led, from review sites to online communities

40+ Markets

From yacht charters to personal finance

5,000+ Products

Compared, positioned, and sold

Here’s how figuring out why customers choose became a twenty-year obsession...

Selling when you control almost nothing.

I learned this in affiliate marketing.

If you’re not familiar with that space, here’s the short version:

You don’t sell your own product. Instead, you take something someone else made and put it in front of a stranger.

Then you convince them that they should choose it.

And it’s pretty unforgiving.

If they buy it, you get a cut of the sale. If they don’t, you get nothing.

I had almost no control...

• If the product was clunky, I couldn’t fix it.
• If the price was too high, I couldn’t offer a discount.
• If the customer hesitated at checkout, I couldn’t talk them through it.

The only lever I could pull?

How I showed customers why they should choose it.

It took a lot of experimentation. It wasn’t always smooth, and I failed a lot. In the early days, I lost over $50,000 of my own money on campaigns that just didn’t work.

But over time, the patterns became clearer. My campaigns began converting at higher rates than the competition, in some cases up to 500% higher.

40 markets. And they’re all the same (kind of).

With that success, I scaled the business and built a team. Over the years, we sold across more than 40 markets, from enterprise software and mattresses to private yacht charters.

If you can think of it, we’ve probably helped sell it. And a few things you’d never think of, too...

Synthetic coyote urine, caskets, Turkish hair transplants, commercial goat rentals, and psychic readings all made the list.

I couldn’t become an expert in all those markets. So I focused on the thing they all shared:

Why a customer chooses.

Because it turns out that the person choosing enterprise software and the person hiring a herd of goats have more in common than you would think.

• Both have a problem.
• Both have options.
• Both want the best solution for their needs.
• Both are scared of making the wrong choice.

The product will always change. But why a person chooses? Not so much.

Understanding why people choose became an obsession. I wanted to know not just which changes worked, but why they worked. So I kept testing different ways of presenting a product, to see what helped more customers choose it.

I’ve run over 4,100 tests, more than one a day over the past decade. That’s how I learned to spot where a business is hard to choose, and what would help win customers over.

And the excitement hasn’t worn off. To this day, I still rush to check the results and see what each change reveals about how and why people choose.

But the first sale is just the beginning.

For a long time, our job ended when someone bought the product. We got our cut and that was it until the next customer bought.

But then we started working with partners who paid recurring commissions...

These deals didn’t just pay out once. They kept paying for as long as the customer stuck around.

And that let me see what happened after the sale.

Customers from one of our campaigns stayed for three years. Customers from another were often gone in three weeks.

Same product. Same price.

But why customers chose it in the first place made a difference to how long they stayed.

So I wasn’t just testing which campaigns got people to buy anymore. I was looking at which ones brought in customers who stuck around.

After enough years of that, I got pretty good at understanding what wins customers over and keeps them choosing you.

Selling the brand better than the brand.

There was still a catch...

We could find the right customer and get them interested. But to buy, they had to go to the brand’s website.

Then it was up to the brand to close the deal.

And too often, they fumbled it.

So we started building our own pages and planning what customers would see before we sent them to the brand.

And we obsessed over this, tweaking every tiny detail until the right customer had the clarity and confidence to buy.

Eventually, some of our pages converted better than the brand’s own.

In one high-volume comparison market, ours converted five times better than the brand’s own landing page.

That’s when the relationship flipped...

Brands that had been paying us to send them customers started asking us to work on their own websites too.

They had every advantage:

• The product.
• The service.
• The data.

But we were doing a better job of getting customers to choose them.

Working inside those businesses gave me something affiliate marketing never could:

The full picture.

Before, we’d hand customers over and hope the brand didn’t lose the sale. There wasn’t much we could do about it.

Now, when customers weren’t choosing the brand, we could find out why.

And actually do something about it.

That became LonelySquare.

You’ve probably never heard of me.

In affiliate marketing, the moment competitors think you’re successful, they copy you. The pages, the angles, the offers. All of it.

The only way to protect a winning campaign is to keep quiet about it.

For 20 years, the brands got the credit and we got the commission.

With LonelySquare, I’m putting my name to the work.

It’s for businesses with genuinely good products or services that too many customers still aren’t choosing.

I find where you’re hard to choose. Then I build a playbook showing your team exactly what to say and do, so more customers choose you.