Boozy Browsing: Pour Decisions in Web Development

Most bad agency relationships do not blow up. They quietly underdeliver. In part one of this Boozy Browsing episode, Matt and Meeky get into what a bad agency relationship actually costs an outdoor or DTC brand. Not just the retainer line. The lost months, the missed targets, the strategy that never quite showed up, and the slow erosion of trust between a brand and the team that is supposed to be growing it. This is the recognition half. How to tell the difference between a slow quarter and a relationship that is structurally not working, and why so many brands stay too long in engagements that stopped delivering a while ago. 

🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Andygator (Abita Brewing Company) | Matt: Palisade Peach Wheat (Breckenridge Brewery) 

💡 WHAT WE COVER: 
✅ What a bad agency relationship really costs beyond the monthly invoice 
✅ How to tell a slow quarter apart from a relationship that is structurally broken 
✅ The red flags outdoor and DTC brands talk themselves out of seeing
✅ Why misaligned expectations quietly sink more engagements than bad work does 
✅ What it means when escalations hit deaf ears and issues never get addressed 
✅ Why brands stay too long in engagements that stopped delivering months ago 

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS: 
• The real cost of a bad agency fit is measured in lost months and missed growth, not just retainer dollars 
• Most agency relationships fail slowly through drift and unmet expectations, not a single dramatic mistake 
• If you cannot get a straight answer on what is working and what is not, that is a red flag on its own 
• Escalations that go nowhere are a signal the relationship is already broken, not a rough patch 
• Brands routinely tolerate underperformance far longer than they would from an internal hire 
• Knowing the cost is the first step to deciding whether to fix the relationship or leave it 

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/ 
Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/ 
Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang 
Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F Part 2: https://youtu.be/YaHb60WbvOM 

🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 

#BoozyBrowsing #AgencyRelationships #OutdoorIndustry #DTC #MarketingAgency #AgencyRedFlags #DigitalMarketing #WebDevelopment #PourDecisions

Part two gets practical. If the relationship is not working, what do you actually do about it? Matt and Meeky move from recognizing a bad agency fit to handling it. How to address problems mid-engagement before they calcify. What questions to ask a current or prospective agency. How to define success in the first 90 days around numbers, not deliverables. And how to weigh the real, often hidden, cost of switching against the cost of staying. The point is not to fire your agency. The point is to stop drifting, get honest about fit, and make a clear decision either way. 🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Andygator (Abita Brewing Company) | Matt: Palisade Peach Wheat (Breckenridge Brewery) 
💡 WHAT WE COVER: 
✅ How to raise problems mid-engagement before they become reasons to leave 
✅ The questions to ask an agency, including the one most brands never ask 
✅ Why you should define success in the first 90 days with numbers, not deliverable lists 
✅ The hidden costs of switching agencies that brands underestimate 
✅ How to weigh the cost of staying against the cost of leaving 
✅ What a healthy reset looks like when the relationship is worth saving 

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS: 
• Most fixable agency problems are fixable only if you raise them early and directly 
• “What do you need from us?” is the question that separates a partner from a vendor 
• Success in the first 90 days should be defined by outcomes and numbers, not a checklist of deliverables 
• Switching agencies carries real hidden costs: ramp time, lost context, and momentum you have to rebuild 
• Staying in a broken engagement also has a cost, and it usually compounds quietly 
• The goal is a clear decision, fix it or leave it, not endless drift 

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: 
Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/ 
Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/ 
Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang 
Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F 
Part 1: https://youtu.be/b86-yDkittI 🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? 
Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 

#BoozyBrowsing #SwitchingAgencies #AgencyRelationships #DTC #OutdoorIndustry #MarketingAgency #AgencyManagement #WebDevelopment #PourDecisions

Most unhappy customers never complain. They just leave. In part one of this two-part Boozy Browsing episode, Matt and Meeky open the Silent Bleed arc with the 96% Problem. The vast majority of frustrated visitors will never file a ticket, send an email, or leave a review. They hit a broken filter, a slow page, or a checkout that misbehaves, and they quietly take their money somewhere else. This is the recognition half. Why outdoor and DTC brands almost never hear about the problems costing them the most, why the issues you can see are rarely the ones doing the damage, and why your site is probably broken in places nobody on your team has looked. 

🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Cote des Roses | Matt: Juicy Drop Hazy IPA 

💡 WHAT WE COVER: 
✅ The 96% Problem: why unhappy customers leave without ever telling you 
✅ Why the silent bleed is more expensive than the loud failures you do hear about 
✅ The hidden website issues that never show up in support tickets 
✅ Why “no complaints” is not the same as “no problems” 
✅ How unseen breakage erodes conversion and trust before anyone notices 
✅ Why testing on your own laptop tells you almost nothing about real users 

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS: 
• An estimated 96% of unhappy customers never complain, they simply leave [VERIFY STAT] 
• Support tickets and reviews are a tiny, biased sample of what is actually going wrong on your site 
• The most expensive site problems are the ones that fail quietly for a segment of users, not the ones that take the whole site down • “It works on my machine” is not evidence, real users are on different devices, browsers, and connections 
• Silence from customers is a signal to investigate, not a signal that everything is fine 
• You cannot fix what you never find out about, which is why part two is about monitoring 

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: 
Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/ 
Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/ 
Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang 
Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F 
🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 

#BoozyBrowsing #CustomerExperience #Ecommerce #DTC #OutdoorIndustry #CustomerRetention #UX #WebsiteMonitoring #PourDecisions #WebDevelopment

Part two gets practical. If customers will not tell you what is broken, your tooling has to. Matt and Meeky move from the 96% Problem to what to do about it. Automated uptime and transaction monitoring with tools like Pingdom. Real user monitoring that shows what actual visitors experience instead of what your laptop does. And keeping an eye on the SaaS platforms in your stack, because their changes and errors can break your site without anyone touching your code. The point is not to buy every tool. The point is to stop relying on customer complaints as your alerting system, because the customers who matter are not sending any. 

🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Cote des Roses | Matt: Juicy Drop Hazy IPA 
💡 WHAT WE COVER: 
✅ Why customer complaints are the worst possible monitoring strategy 
✅ Automated site monitoring with Pingdom and what it should actually watch 
✅ Real user monitoring, and why local testing misses what real visitors experience 
✅ Monitoring real user traffic to catch problems as segments of visitors hit them 
✅ Watching the SaaS platforms in your stack for errors and changes that quietly break things 
✅ What a minimum sane monitoring setup looks like for an outdoor or DTC brand 

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS: 
• If your first alert is a customer complaint, you found out later than 96% of the people affected 
• Uptime checks are table stakes, transaction and journey monitoring is where the revenue protection lives 
• Real user monitoring shows real devices, browsers, and connections, which is where the silent bleed actually happens 
• Third-party SaaS platform changes and errors can break your site with zero changes on your end, so watch them 
• Monitoring is cheap compared to the revenue lost while a problem runs unnoticed 
• The goal is simple: find problems before your customers do, or at least before they give up 

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: 
Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/ 
Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/ 
Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang 
Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F Part 1: https://youtu.be/ZKN3KcbiMb0 

🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 

#BoozyBrowsing #WebsiteMonitoring #RUM #Ecommerce #DTC #WebOps #SiteReliability #CustomerExperience #PourDecisions #WebDevelopment

Less hype, more shipping. In this Boozy Browsing episode, Matt and Meeky have a casual conversation about how they actually use AI day to day. Not keynote demos. The real stuff: letting Claude Desktop see your screen, automating visual regression tests, and knowing when an AI is confidently making things up. They also get into the money question. Everyone argues about AI costs, but compared to the developer hours it saves, the API bill is a rounding error. The better question is whether you have defined what done looks like, because an AI without finishing criteria will happily keep going forever. 
🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Super Märzen Bros (Florida Avenue Brewing) | Matt: Sad Panda Coffee Stout (Horse & Dragon Brewing) 

💡 WHAT WE COVER: 
✅ How we actually use AI in daily agency work, beyond the demos 
✅ Why AI API costs are the wrong thing to worry about 
✅ Hallucinations, and why AI needs clear finishing criteria to know when it is done 
✅ Claude Desktop seeing your screen, and what that unlocks 
✅ Automating Backstop visual regression tests with Scout 
✅ Why laziness is the mother of AI invention, and why that is a good thing 

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS: 
• The AI cost debate misses the point: the API bill is small next to the developer time it saves 
• A lot of AI progress is smoke in the air; judge tools by what actually ships, not by demos 
• Hallucinations are manageable when you give AI clear finishing criteria and check its work 
• Screen-aware AI like Claude Desktop turns “describe the problem” into “look at the problem” 
• Repetitive QA work like visual regression testing is exactly what AI automation is for 
• The best automations come from a healthy dislike of doing the same task twice 

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES: Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/ 
Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/ 
Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang 
Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F 
🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit 
#BoozyBrowsing #AI #PracticalAI #Claude #AIAgents #WebDevelopment #DevTools #Automation #AITesting #PourDecisions

Part two gets practical.

This is where Matt and Meeky move from the cost of performance issues to the fixes that actually matter. Image formats. Compression. Third-party tracking scripts. Hosting choices. The stuff teams keep postponing because none of it feels urgent until the site slows down enough to hurt revenue.

The point is not that every site needs a rebuild. The point is that most sites do need discipline. Better image handling. Fewer unnecessary scripts. Smarter hosting decisions. Less tolerance for things that add weight without adding va🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Hampton Water Rose 2024 | Matt: Boulevard Brewing Dark Truth[DRINK]

💡 WHAT WE COVER:

✅ Why image optimization is still one of the easiest performance wins on most sites

✅ WebP vs JPEG, where file size decisions help and where they do not

✅ Why tracking scripts are often useful and still expensive

✅ How to think about hosting when performance starts slipping

✅ Why “faster” is often the result of fewer dependencies, not more tooling

✅ What teams should fix first before they burn time on cosmetic optimization

📊 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Large, unoptimized images still do outsized damage to page speed and mobile usability

• Third-party tracking and marketing scripts can improve visibility while quietly degrading the experience they are supposed to measure

• Hosting matters more when the stack is already strained, especially under traffic spikes

• Better performance work is usually prioritization, not heroics, remove weight, compress assets, reduce script drag, and fix the obvious bottlenecks first

• Customers do not separate “technical issue” from “bad brand experience.” They just leave

• The speed tax shows up in bounce, abandonment, lower trust, and weaker conversion before it shows up in a postmortem

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES:

Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/

Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/

Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang

Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F

Part 1: https://youtu.be/v1izWyrZYqY

DATA SOURCES:

• Google Core Web Vitals documentation and image optimization guidance

• Industry benchmarking on image weight, mobile speed, and third-party script impact

• Amazon and Deloitte performance-to-revenue benchmarks referenced in this episode series

🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

#BoozyBrowsing #WebPerformance #Ecommerce #SiteSpeed #ImageOptimization #CoreWebVitals #Hosting #TechnicalDebt #DTC #WebDevelopment

A slow site does not usually fail all at once. It bleeds revenue a few milliseconds at a time.

In part one of this two-part Boozy Browsing episode, Matt and Meeky get into the hidden cost of web performance. Not vanity metrics, not Lighthouse theater, the real business tax of latency, image bloat, script overload, and mobile friction. The kind of problems that do not always trip alarms, but quietly make customers bounce, abandon carts, and trust you less.

Amazon famously found that every 100 milliseconds of latency could cost 1% in sales. Deloitte found that a 0.1-second speed improvement lifted retail conversions by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2%. That is the frame for this episode: speed is not polish, it is revenue infrastructure.

🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Hampton Water Rose 2024 | Matt: Boulevard Brewing Dark Truth]

💡 WHAT WE COVER:

✅ Why performance problems feel small to teams and expensive to customers

✅ How mobile slowness compounds revenue loss, especially on product and checkout pages

✅ What Google actually measures in Core Web Vitals, and why those metrics matter

✅ Why the “silent bleed” is harder to catch than a hard outage

✅ The difference between a site that loads and a site that feels fast enough to buy from

✅ Where performance debt starts showing up in conversion, bounce, and trust

📊 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Amazon estimated that every additional 100ms of latency cost 1% in sales

• Deloitte research found a 0.1-second speed improvement increased retail conversions by 8.4% and average basket size by 9.2%

• Google’s Core Web Vitals focus on loading speed, responsiveness, and visual stability, because those are the moments users actually feel

• Slow mobile experiences cost more than desktop teams tend to assume, because mobile users have less patience and more interruption

• Performance problems usually stack, images, scripts, third-party tags, hosting, and front-end decisions rarely fail alone

• A site can pass a casual visual test and still quietly lose money on every transaction

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES:

Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/

Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/

Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang

Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F

Part 2: https://youtu.be/C-CsVr0hcRE

DATA SOURCES:

• Amazon latency benchmark: 100ms of delay could cost 1% in sales

• Deloitte Milliseconds Make Millions research: 0.1-second speed improvements increase retail conversion and basket size

• Google Core Web Vitals guidance: LCP, INP, and CLS remain key user experience metrics

🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

#BoozyBrowsing #SiteSpeed #WebPerformance #Ecommerce #CoreWebVitals #MobileUX #ConversionRate #DTC #PourDecisions #WebDevelopment

Part two gets into the part that actually costs money: what's broken under the hood, and what happens when nobody catches it.

Stanford research shows developers using AI tools produce less secure code than those without. IOActive's 2026 whitepaper found 31.6% of AI-generated code samples are fully exploitable. Yet the developers shipping it report higher confidence in the result. That gap is where vibe-coded sites get hit.

We walk through the real e-commerce audit from part one, the SEO and functionality issues nobody saw, and what the open-source ecosystem inherits when AI-generated code starts showing up in plugin marketplaces.

What's in this episode:

- The actual security findings from a vibe-coded e-commerce audit

- False confidence in AI-generated code

- Why "we'll add security audits later" is the most expensive sentence in DTC

- Vibe coding as a new threat to the open-source ecosystem

- Balancing speed and quality with AI tools

Featured drinks: Josh Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon North Coast and Voodoo Ranger Fruit Force.

Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

Vibe coding ships fast. It also ships broken. Veracode's 2025 analysis found 45% of AI-generated code contains security vulnerabilities. Lightrun's 2026 report puts another number on it: 43% of AI-generated changes need manual debugging in production after passing QA.

Now those sites are in the wild, and we can recognize them on sight. Part one of this two-parter covers what gives a vibe-coded site away, why "looks fine" is doing all the heavy lifting in this corner of the web, and the cycle of product disappointment we're starting to see across DTC.

What's in this episode:

- The visible tells of a vibe-coded site

- Why AI-built sites confuse "it loads" with "it works"

- The judgment problem with AI coding tools

- The cycle of product disappointment in DTC e-commerce

- A real e-commerce site we audited that was clearly AI-built

Featured drinks: Josh Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon North Coast and Voodoo Ranger Fruit Force.

Part 2 covers what was actually broken under the hood and the false confidence problem in AI-generated code.

Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

We brought an agentic AI dev into our actual workflow. Not as a demo. Not on a sandbox. On real projects, with real consequences. Here's what actually happened: where it surprised us with senior-level work, where it published unapproved posts to a live site, and what we learned about supervising a coworker that doesn't sleep, doesn't ask, and doesn't always tell you what it just did.

Industry surveys put AI tool adoption among professional developers at roughly 76% in 2024 (Stack Overflow Developer Survey), but only about 43% of developers say they trust the accuracy of those tools. Our experience this past month explains the gap. 

🍺 Featured Drinks: Meeky: Soju + Bubly | Matt: Athletics Brewery NonAlcoholic Beer

💡 WHAT WE COVER:

✅ Hiring an agentic AI as a junior dev: what the day-to-day actually looks like vs. what the demos promise

✅ The "urgent mistake" — when an AI agent published unapproved blog posts to a live WordPress site

✅ Surprising senior-level expertise: where the agent outperformed our expectations on bug fixes

✅ Speed vs. oversight: the new tradeoff every dev team is now negotiating, whether they've named it or not

✅ Sub-agents and parallel processing: when one AI orchestrates others, who owns the failure?

✅ Why open source CMS platforms (WordPress, WooCommerce) make agentic dev safer than locked-down SaaS

✅ The internal apps we're building with AI assistance — and the ones we deliberately won't

📊 KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• 76% of professional developers used or planned to use AI tools in 2024, but only 43% trust their accuracy (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024)

• Agentic AI doesn't replace judgment — it shifts it earlier in the workflow, from writing code to defining guardrails

• Production deployment without human-in-the-loop review is the single biggest risk category we hit this month

• Open source platforms give you the visibility to debug what the agent did; closed SaaS leaves you guessing

• Sub-agent orchestration multiplies productivity and multiplies failure modes — both at the same time

• "Always monitor AI outputs to prevent errors" isn't a slogan, it's the new operations baseline

• The skills gap isn't going away — agents need direction from people who already know what good looks like

🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES:

Boozy Browsing: https://www.boozybrowsing.com/

Submit your site for a free 3E audit: https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

Matt Dorman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewdorman/

Meeky Hwang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meekyhwang

Full episode playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLY0olkZyu52_N6UPh9c0PXRGDm_I0lF3F

🎯 Want us to look under the hood of your site? Submit at https://boozybrowsing.com#submit

#BoozyBrowsing #AgenticAI #AIJuniorDev #WebDevelopment #WordPress #WooCommerce #DevOps #Ecommerce #DTC #AICodingTools #OpenSource #PourDecisions