Your Marketing Stack Is About to Get Smaller
When traffic gets scarce, every tool in your stack has to justify its rent.
Like most skincare enthusiasts, I have a brand I’m loyal to. Mine is Medik8. Specifically: Advanced Night Ceramide (I never skip a night), Liquid Peptides Advanced MP, and C-Tetra Luxe — the vitamin C serum that finally made me understand what people meant when they said “glow.” And ooh, how it melts into your skin like clarified butter. (Sadly, this post is not sponsored by Medik8, but if any of you Medik8 marketing folks are reading this, you have my address.)
Medik8 is also the kind of brand that would benefit enormously from a smart quiz funnel.
Skincare is the category for personalization. Nobody walks into a Sephora knowing the exact two products that they need. At best, they go in expecting to buy Too Faced’s Born This Way The Natural Nudes Eye Shadow Palette, but end up walking out with Makeup by Mario’s Ethereal Eyes: The Original palette. (Shoutout to Makeup by Mario for this maturing lady’s makeup needs.) Everyone wants someone to tell them what to use. Brands like Curology and Function of Beauty built entire businesses on this insight — get someone to answer six questions, deliver a personalized recommendation, then convert them into a subscriber.
A Medik8 quiz funnel could be magic for them. So here’s what I’d do if I were running their marketing — and why I think this is a useful exercise for any small DTC brand. Below is my fully fleshed out idea, but you can listen to today’s episode of the Zero Click Marketing podcast for a more conversational version. Details are here in the newsletter, the thought process is in the pod.
What the quiz funnel needs to do
The basic shape is familiar:
A customer lands on medik8.com and sees an opt-in: “Build your Medik8 routine in 60 seconds.” They take the quiz — skin type, primary concern (anti-aging, brightening, breakouts), routine complexity preference, budget — and get a personalized 3-step routine at the end. They drop their email for the recommendation. Then the brand has 30-90 days to convert them into a buyer.
That’s the front-end. The back-end is where most small brands lose the plot. Not that it’s their fault. It’s just that personalized marketing is that hard. Because to do it “right” with the conventional stack, you’d need:
A quiz tool (Typeform, Octane AI, Outgrow)
An email service provider for nurture emails (Klaviyo, Mailchimp)
An SMS platform for high-intent leads (Postscript, Attentive)
A lead enrichment tool to figure out who’s actually filling out the quiz (Clearbit — RIP — Apollo, Crossbeam)
A CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive)
Zapier to ping someone on Slack when a high-LTV lead shows up
Stripe / Shopify to take the money
That’s seven tools. Anywhere from $400-$1,500/month at small DTC scale. Seven dashboards, seven APIs, seven places where data can go to die. And critically: seven handoffs where leads get dropped, mis-tagged, or sent the wrong follow-up because the SMS tool didn’t know the email tool already unsubscribed them.
If you’re a small brand, you literally cannot afford this stack to run inefficiently. So most brands compromise — they skip the enrichment, or they skip the SMS, or they let the CRM rot because nobody has time to clean it. The funnel works at a fraction of its potential.
What I’d actually do… now
I’d build the whole thing in Typeform.
Not because I have brand loyalty to Typeform (I don’t, particularly — I just used their forms for years like everyone else). But because they just built out something called Growth Flow that collapses most of the stack above into one place. I’ve been poking at it for the past few weeks and it’s the most surprised I’ve been by a marketing tool in a long time. And yes, this newsletter is sponsored by Typeform, which is why I got early access.
Here’s how the Medik8 quiz funnel maps to it:
Capture. The quiz lives in Typeform — same as it would anywhere. Six questions, pretty, on-brand.
Enrich. This is the part that blew my mind. The moment a customer submits with her email, Typeform pings third-party data providers and pulls back a profile — age range, location, professional details if it’s a work email. Match rates in the 70-90% range. This is what Clearbit used to do as a standalone product before HubSpot bought it and put it down. Sad Amanda has been waiting years for a replacement. It was hiding inside a form tool.
So now Medik8 knows: this lead is a 40-year-old in Los Angeles who works at a tech startup. The quiz only asked her about her skin.
Organize. A contact record auto-creates. Every future form she fills out — CSAT survey, restock notification, referral signup — ties back to the same record. No CSV, no nightly Zap, no manual deduping.
Act. A workflow kicks off automatically. Welcome email with her personalized routine (C-Tetra Luxe + Liquid Peptides in the morning, Advanced Night Ceramide at night — that’s just my routine, but you see how this works). Three-day delay. Social proof email featuring customers in her enrichment-derived demographic. Seven-day delay. Targeted discount code. If she scored as a high-intent lead based on her quiz answers, she gets an SMS instead of waiting for the next email. The Medik8 team gets a Slack ping when a high-LTV lead converts. Amanda gets plump, glowing skin in about eight weeks (hey, beauty takes time).
Close. Checkout via Stripe block inside the email flow. She never has to bounce to a separate ecommerce experience for the first purchase. (Bigger brands will still need full Shopify integration for inventory and subscription management — but for the first conversion off a quiz, this is enough.)
Understand. AI-generated insights tell the marketing team which quiz paths are converting, which segments are dead weight, and what’s trending up.
That’s the entire funnel in one tool.
Why this matters beyond Medik8
The reason I’m writing this isn’t really about Medik8 or Typeform. It’s about a pattern I think is going to define the next few years of marketing tools.
The unbundled SaaS era was a luxury of cheap traffic. When leads were $2 and you had thousands of them per week, it was fine to lose 10% to tool-handoff issues. The math worked. Now leads cost 5x more and arrive at 1/5th the volume, and every drop in the bucket has to land in the cup. Stitching together seven best-of-breed tools made sense when traffic was abundant. In a Zero Click world, the cost of stitching is higher than the cost of compromising on a few features.
This is the same pressure that has Notion turning into a CRM, Linear into a docs tool, and Typeform into a growth stack. Watch what the small teams are switching to. They’re voting with their wallets.
If you’re a founder or a small-team marketer right now, the question is no longer “what’s the best [thing] in [category]?” It’s “what’s the fewest tools I can run my entire customer journey through?”
The answer is probably smaller than you think.
And Medik8, seriously — call me.
This essay is a paid partnership with Typeform. They asked me to play with Growth Flow and write about it honestly. I did. The Medik8 fandom is unsponsored and possibly clinical.
Peep my YouTube channel if you want the video version of this episode of Zero Click Marketing.
🧁 Petits Fours
Four delicious considerations because this newsletter is, after all, called the “Menu.”
🔥 Rand Fishkin wrote a banger on why “make great content” is no longer enough: The argument is spicy but useful: if Google and AI tools can summarize, remix, and commoditize your content before anyone clicks, then the more defensible move is to build something they can’t replace with an answer box — an inimitable product, service, experience, or community. Content still matters, but increasingly as marketing for the thing, not the thing itself. Read it here.
🍋 My favorite vitamin C serum: Look, nobody asked (ugh) but I really do love Medik8 C-Tetra Luxe. That’s not an affiliate or referral link or whatever. It is just my duty as a girl’s person (I dunno, maybe you’re not a girl who’s reading this) to not gatekeep great products. I love their Advanced Night Ceramide too, but I think it can be a little strong for sensitive skin.
💙 My good friend Talia wrote a truly excellent post on optimizing for conversions in a zero-click world: The gist: your buyers are forming opinions about you long before they hit your website — in AI answers, Reddit threads, YouTube reviews, LinkedIn feeds, etc. So your job isn’t just to “show up everywhere.” It’s to understand what people already believe, fear, and need to hear by the time they do land on your site. Talia connects zero-click marketing with emotional targeting in a way that’s very smart, very practical, and very worth your time.
📚 A little book update: The Zero Click Marketing book crossed 500 preorders in two weeks, and I’m feeling very grateful about it. If you’ve been meaning to order, preorder bonuses are still available. And if you’re outside the U.S., consider grabbing the audiobook bundle so you can skip the hefty international shipping fees. You’ll snag your preorder bonus, Rand and I will sell more books, and it’s a win for indie publishers. Big hugs and thank you to everyone who has supported so far.