About the founder
Shok + Koda is the studio practice of Dan Russell — what remained after nine years of agency work, when he kept only the craft.
I started my first marketing agency in 2014, a year out of college, and spent the early years learning an uncomfortable truth about my industry: most of it runs on the assumption that results are “soft” — not really trackable, not really anyone’s fault. Revolving-door agencies were a dime a dozen then, and they still are. I couldn’t understand how people slept at night taking clients’ money without being able to show what it bought.
So I went looking for the hard side of the business, and found conversion rate optimization — the science of measurably improving how many visitors become buyers. That led to the question underneath all of it: why do we buy? I’m a physics geek at heart, and that question pulled me into decision science and neuromarketing — research studies, training programs, and eventually a code of ethics for how I’d use any of it.
Out of that came the working library that still powers this studio: a documented collection of research-backed split-test patterns — I called them NeuroTactics — recording every test I ran, what it measured, and what it did against a control. Not theory. Receipts. That library, and the judgment built from running it across wine subscriptions, poker coaching, security manufacturing, dental consulting, forensic-handwriting education, and lab diagnostics, is the asset.
After nine years I retired the agency. Not because the work stopped working — the case files on this site are the record — but because I wanted the craft without the machinery around it. I wrote Snake Oil about what I’d seen in the marketing industry along the way.
Two Japanese ideas I kept returning to. Shokunin (職人): the craftsman who holds a standard whether or not anyone is watching. Kodawari (こだわり): the relentless pursuit of better, past the point most people call good enough. They describe the only way I know how to do this work — carefully, repeatedly, and with every claim carrying its measurement.
Shok + Koda is deliberately small. I take a limited number of engagements, do the thinking myself, and measure everything against a control. If you bring me a funnel, you’ll get an honest read on whether testing can move it — including “no, your traffic is too thin for significance,” if that’s the truth.
If that sounds like the kind of help you want, the next step is simple:
