[SaaS Series] Revolutionizing Conversion Optimization With Josh Payne

Josh Payne is the Founder and CEO of Coframe, an AI‑powered platform that optimizes website copy, UI, and conversion performance through machine learning. A serial entrepreneur, he previously co‑founded Autograph, a fan‑experience unicorn backed by a16z and Kleiner Perkins, and AccessBell, a video‑conferencing startup acquired by Tata Group. A Stanford graduate with BS, MS, and MBA degrees, Josh has authored over 20 papers and patents in AI and frequently guest lectures on generative AI. He is passionate about advancing AI‑driven tools that help businesses scale through personalization and intelligent automation.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:10] How Coframe uses AI to accelerate website conversion rate optimization
• [05:02] Why AGI House dinners sparked the idea for self‑improving digital experiences
• [07:36] Lessons from Justin Christianson on systematic CRO testing
• [11:42] How Coframe achieved 20-30%+ conversion lift for L‑Nutra’s Prolon website
• [12:53] Building Coframe’s early team through hackathons and personal networks
• [20:17] How a high-stakes Tata Group demo led to a 50%+ conversion lift
• [25:38] How Coframe creates website experiments in minutes instead of weeks
• [34:44] Insights on fundraising strategy for scaling a larger seed round
• [40:26] What Eric Schmidt taught Josh about energy, leverage, and scaling as a founder
• [48:12] Co‑founding Autograph with Tom Brady and building brand-safe digital collectibles

In this episode…

Many companies struggle to turn website visitors into paying customers. Conversion rate optimization often feels slow, costly, and dependent on endless iterations, leaving teams unsure how to test the right elements efficiently. How can businesses rapidly identify what truly drives user engagement and lift conversions without exhausting their resources?

Josh Payne, an AI innovator and serial entrepreneur with experience building self-improving digital systems, shares how his AI-powered approach solves this challenge by automating and accelerating conversion rate optimization. Drawing on lessons from CRO expert Justin Christianson, Josh explains the importance of systematically testing site elements, understanding visitor intent, and leveraging data-driven iteration. He also details how companies can scale experiments, reduce engineering and design burden, and uncover winning website variations faster to drive significant revenue growth.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz interviews Josh Payne, Founder and CEO of Coframe, about using AI to transform website conversion optimization. Josh discusses the power of iterative testing, lessons from raising capital for multiple startups, and the role of hackathons in building high-performing teams. He also shares insights on partnering with major brands, scaling experiments efficiently, and leveraging AI for competitive advantage.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Josh Payne on LinkedIn
• Coframe
• Autograph
• L-Nutra
• AGI House
• Product Hunt
• Tata Group
• How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg 
• Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle

Special mentions:

• Justin Christianson on LinkedIn
• Eric Schmidt on LinkedIn
• Jordon Durst on LinkedIn
• Rich Rosenblatt on LinkedIn
• Dylan Bathurst on LinkedIn

Related episodes:

• “Website Optimization Tips with Justin Christianson Co-Founder of Conversion Fanatics” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “How Two Simple Tweaks Resulted in Scaling Ad Spend from 20K to 200K Per Month With Ralph Burns of Tier 11” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Helping Startups Get the Funding They Need with Howard Marks Founder of Co-Founder of StartEngine” on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• “Building a Great Team and More Helpful Insights with Jason Swenk Host of The Smart Agency Master Class Podcast” on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Digital interfaces can feel alive — self-improving and optimizing over time — which is a profoundly compelling idea I’m interested in building.”
• “First, we are artisans, then we are automators; deeply understanding a process before automating is crucial for impactful AI.”
• “You have to pick your market intelligently. Otherwise, you’re going to waste time and miss the true business opportunity.”
• “When you commit to fundraising, you’re committing to make that business as successful as possible — through thick and thin.”
• “Most experiments get thrown away; it’s a numbers game, but the winners you find will compound and drive real growth.”

Action steps:

1. Implement systematic, iterative experimentation: Focus on running frequent, small-scale tests to learn what truly influences your audience, avoiding sweeping redesigns based on gut feelings.
2. Leverage AI-powered tools for optimization: Use platforms like Coframe to speed up conversion rate optimization, reducing manual effort and enabling more impactful tests at scale.
3. Prioritize learning from customer feedback and analytics: Analyze session replays, heatmaps, and conversion data alongside qualitative input to ground improvements in real user behavior.
4. Build a strong, action-oriented team through practical collaboration: Evaluate potential team members in real work settings such as hackathons before making long-term commitments to ensure fit and execution capability.
5. Embrace a bias for action and execution: Move quickly from ideas to deployment, focusing on testing solutions rather than endless planning, to stand out in environments slowed by bureaucracy.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Josh Payne of Coframe. You can check him out at Coframe.com. 

Josh, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. We have to mention Justin Christianson. I had Justin Christianson. I was looking at this today. He started Conversion Fanatics, sold it. And you know, one of the top experts in CRO, you know, conversion rate optimization and many other skills. I was looking, I think I had him on six years, almost six years ago at this point. That was really interesting. That’s how Josh and I actually met.

And I had Ralph Burns of Tier 11. So, you know, we’ll talk about Coframe and what it does, but there’s a lot of agencies that actually can use them and help their clients as well. Ralph Burns has an amazing agency, Tier 11. He’s also got one of the top podcasts out there. So I told Ralph, you must have Josh on your podcast. Howard Marks of StartEngine, who I had on the podcast, and Josh was telling me before we hit record, actually, we’re going to talk a little bit about it. StartEngine used Coframe as well. 

Jason Swank. There’s so many. I mean, Jason Swank built up an agency to eight figures and sold it, and then he started a group which he wished he had when he had an agency group to help other agency owners. He also has a great podcast as well. That and many more and InspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a couple ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the strategy, accountability and the execution and production. 

Two we actually get people on podcasts. Okay. I love making introductions. Josh knows this, but if you want to put it on hyperdrive and you want to go on a bunch at once, we have to set up a whole campaign and do that. So we will get you connected with some amazing people there. 

And three, we’re an easy button for a company’s gifting program, so we make gifting and staying top of mind for your clients, partners, and prospects. Simple, easy, and actually affordable. You just give us a list. We do everything else. Okay. Usually we’re setting up a campaign of, you know, three, four gifts a year for multiple years because I love to give to my best relationships. 

So, Josh, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it stress free for our company so they can build amazing relationships. And for me, I found no better way to profile someone who I admire, have them on the podcast, share with the world what they’re working on. Also, send them sweet treats in the mail. So go to rise25.com or email [email protected]. 

I am super excited to introduce Josh Payne. He’s the founder and CEO of Coframe. He also co-founded Autograph with NFL legend Tom Brady. For that company, they raised $200 million at a $2 billion valuation backed by A16z Kleiner Perkins. He also founded Access Bell. 

Access Bell was acquired by Tata Group. Tata Group, if you don’t know, they own so much. They’re a $400 billion conglomerate. When I was in London, I’m like, oh, Tata Group owns this hotel. Josh also created the first major autonomous AI agent for code generation, GPT Migrate, and he’s authored over 20 peer reviewed papers and patents. 

Josh, thanks for joining me.

Josh Payne: 03:56

Thanks for having me. Great to see you, Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:57

And, you know, let’s talk about Coframe and what you do there. And I’ll pull up the video and we’ll pull up Coframe as you talk about it.

Josh Payne: 04:10

Amazing. Yeah, I’ll give you the rundown. So at Coframe, we are obsessively focused on helping companies increase your conversion rate. We do this with AI accelerated conversion rate optimization. So growth, experimentation, testing out different variations of your website to try to drive more wins and more lift.

Ultimately, the website for many businesses is a really key piece of their business and a revenue driver. And it’s one of those amazing things where if you tweak that lever, it’s pure upside. If you increase your conversion rate, it’s pure. It’s, you know, new leads, new purchases, etc., etc.. And so we are very, very focused on helping businesses rapidly increase the rate at which they’re able to get those wins and increase that conversion rate.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:58

So what gave you the idea for Coframe?

Josh Payne: 05:02

Coframe emerged a little bit from reverse. I have to say, actually. As you mentioned just now. I’ve, you know, I’m very, very interested in AI for code generation. I think it’s an incredible use case. It’s something that I use almost on a daily basis now. And this is one of those use cases that is just extremely helpful with. Now from a website optimization perspective, I’m not coming from a deep background of, you know, digital marketing, right? 

I’m coming at this a little bit as initially I was a little bit of a newbie for sure. And people like Justin, you know, very thankful to them helping to to be a Sherpa along this path and in Autograph, I think was the first place where I really saw the power of growth marketing and how that could really help scale a business quickly, but the idea for Coframe actually emerged from one of these dinners that we hosted at a community called the AGI House, that I’m part of. This dinner, we brought together a bunch of AI leaders. We were talking about the future of consumer experiences and digital interactions, and I had a thought throughout the middle of this dinner about what digital interactions and digital interfaces would be like in 5 or 10 years, and it hit me that every digital experience that we have as a consumer, should it in fact be adaptive and personalized and almost like living. 

So this idea that digital interfaces can themselves feel alive and be living things that are self-improving and optimizing over time, that was a really compelling idea, something I’m profoundly interested in, generally speaking, is self-improving systems. And so I wanted to build something related to that. I kind of did it on the side. Still working on Autograph at the time, but I was enamored with this idea and put something out there. Launched on Product Hunt. 

Got some traction and turns out there’s a really great business case application to this idea, which is conversion rate optimization. And from there on, we started building more and more capabilities into this, and it’s become the thing that it is today.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:16

So what are some of the learnings from Justin that helped shape the product? Because like you said, I mean, you’ve guest lectured at Stanford. You know, we were talking about your background of 20 peer reviewed papers and really geeking out on AI stuff. What was some of the feedback Justin gave?

Josh Payne: 07:36

Justin is a genius when it comes to conversion rate optimization. He’s one of those people who knows the business in and out and is on the ground floor, is able to really do the thing. He’s not just someone who was a figurehead of the agency. He was in the weeds. He’s probably run he’s like 20,000 plus experiments personally over his career.

And so I can really think of no better person that has that level of, of insight. I’m very, very grateful that he decided to join us. But what we learned from him, I would say broadly, is around the aspects of what’s the core of conversion optimization. What is the actual problem that you’re trying to solve here? It’s finding what holds weight in the eyes of your visitors. It’s trying to figure out what are the things that matter to this audience, and build your own internal model of who this person is on your site based on their persona. 

And so it’s less about just, you know, going and taking a big swing and having a big design first redesign of the whole page experience, but rather about systematically testing different elements of the site, trying to figure out in an iterative fashion what actually matters to the audience. And then each new test will surface insights that will help guide the next test, and that becomes an iterative process. And those types of systematic processes are exactly what AI is fantastic at. So I would actually say it’s a perfect match, because Justin’s approach, I think, is one of the best suited for AI systems or machine learning based systems, which is really, really interesting.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:08

There’s a couple questions I’m curious about. I mean, I have a lot of Tom Brady Autograph questions, but we’ll get to that later. You know, who is this for? And then I want to talk about getting customers because you have some huge companies as customers here. I mean we look at OpenAI for example. But who is this for? I mean, I see our agencies, you like CRO agencies using this for their clients and then obviously direct clients. Who are the best use cases?

Josh Payne: 09:43

Yeah. So for the most part Coframe focuses on customers that are consumer facing. The OpenAI one that you mentioned is not a customer. I don’t think they would have much use for Coframe, but rather a partner. And so this is more like, you know, featured in, we had a joint blog that we wrote together.

We worked with our team to create a model that was specifically designed for creating conversion optimization experiments. So far as I’m aware, we have the distinction of being the only marketing tech company that’s directly partnered with OpenAI in this fashion, which is really cool. But Coframe is really useful for companies that have a lot of web traffic, and the website is a key driver for the business. 

So companies that are in the consumer domain tend to be a really good fit for this. E-commerce companies tend to be really, really good fit for this. Anything where you move the conversion rate up on the website, it has a direct impact on the revenue or the profit of the business. That’s where we really are quite helpful.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:44

Is there like a traffic minimum? Like someone comes to you and goes, Josh, we have X number of visitors hitting our pages. And you’d be like, well, you know, this makes sense or doesn’t make sense. Like, what would that minimum be typically?

Josh Payne: 10:59

Yeah. Generally speaking, what we usually look for is at least 200,000 monthly visitors. If it’s a high ticket item, it can be less than that. If it’s, you know, selling really, really high ticket items. And that incremental needle move is really impactful.

I think, you know, going down to 100 K monthly visitors could make sense. But generally speaking, we look for that 200 and above all the way up to, you know, millions and tens of millions.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:23

Maybe let’s talk about an example. So we can get into the weeds a little bit and we will have Josh, I’m going to have him kind of share his screen and share through an example in a little bit. But talk about the pharma company a little bit and what they’re doing.

Josh Payne: 11:42

Right. So one of the companies we work with is called L-Nutra, which has this product called Prolon, which we’ve been optimizing for for the last couple of months now. And this company is an e-commerce company. Their whole aim is to sell this product Prolon.

And when we started talking they had explored other vendors. They explored conversion optimization agency offerings. They had explored testing tools. The reason why Coframe was interesting to them is because it fully took conversion optimization off their plate. Their team was involved in the sense of approving different variations and experiments. But beyond that, we were able to completely drive the program. 

And within this matter of just a couple of months, we’ve been able to drive really significant wins for them. I can’t share exact numbers, but 20 to 30% plus conversion lifts depending on the test. But this is what we’ve seen so far, which is for them. I think they’re very happy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 12:45

I’m wondering, you know, starting the company. Right. Talk about building the team initially.

Josh Payne: 12:53

Yeah. So initially it started out with me, myself and I, a little bit of a lonely endeavor. I was just kind of hacking around, as I mentioned, with ideas related to self-improving user experiences and had this, this product that could sort of like self optimize your headline of your website. Right? Just very simple.

Find the best headline. You test a couple variations out, you see what has the highest conversion rate or whatever you’re optimizing for. You feed that back into the system and it comes up with new ideas based on those results. And then that repeats endlessly. So at the beginning it was pretty lonely, you know, built this out for fun, kind of on the side a little bit. Launched it, got some traction, got some investment interest, decided to raise a pretty big financing round. 

And then at that point we decided to bring on our initial team members. And my philosophy for finding people is you want to try to get your clearest sense of how they will work with you before you work fully with them. So something that’s been very helpful to us is creating environments in which we can get to know someone in a work setting as well as we can before actually making that offer. So one of the strategies that’s worked really well is hosting these hackathons. So a hackathon is an event where you bring together a bunch of people, usually software engineers or related functions, and you have either a day or a couple of days to build something completely brand new from scratch. 

And at the end of these hackathons, typically you have a judging session and people from the industry or, you know, people who are experts or what have you will be able to assess the different projects and kind of rank them and you’ll have prizes for the winners and so on. 

We’ve hosted several such hackathons. AGI House, which is that community that I mentioned that has the dinners, hosts very large, you know, 200 person plus hackathons every, every other week or so. And Coframe has sponsored a few of those. And of the ones that we’ve sponsored, we’ve found several really great hires. 

I think we found like four of our very early founding team through these hackathons, really get to know someone how they build. Basically what we did is we scooped up the first place winners for hackathons. It was kind of our strategy. So that’s been a really fantastic, I guess channel for us. Other than that really it’s about kind of that, that personal network, like trying to figure out as much signal as you can about someone before you really go all in working with them. 

I’ve had the privilege of working with several incredible people throughout my career, and a few of those we brought in to work with on Coframe. So, that’s my personal strategy. You really just want to try to get as much signal as possible before, similar to a B testing, right? You want to test, try to get as much signal as possible on variations before you implement them into the site fully.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:02

What are some of the prizes or incentives at the hackathon? Obviously there’s companies there. They can get hired. Do some of them get funded, like what are some of the prizes?

Josh Payne: 16:12

Yeah, I mean, the biggest prize for a lot of people I think is just the bragging rights. I mean, it’s like, hey, I won this hackathon and it usually goes on your resume or whatever it is.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:22

It’s like street cred.

Josh Payne: 16:23

Street cred. Yes. For hackers, the most nerdy street cred possible. But other other common things are, you know, they’ll have sponsors there who will, you know, offer credits for their platform. Some people offer cash prizes. I mean, these hackathons, we typically had prize award amounts in the like thousands of dollars. So it’s not, you know, not trivial. So a lot of companies will sponsor these hackathons. The purpose of getting visibility to those people that they can hire them. 

I’m seeing a similar trend with venture capitalists going to hackathons to scout out talent that they might be able to put an investment into if they start a company, either from the hackathon or thereafter.

[Continue to Page 2]