You know the ones.
They have a website.
They run ads.
They show up to trade shows.
They post on LinkedIn about their “growth.”
Nothing is actually working.
Revenue is flat. Or slipping.
They blame the economy. The algorithm. Rising ad costs.
They hire another agency.
Try another tool.
Sit through another webinar.
Nothing moves.
They’re not dead.
But they’re not alive either.
They’re zombies.
I’ve been inside enough of these businesses to know how this happens.
Most of them had a moment.
A window where the market was easy:
They built a business on top of that moment... and mistook the moment for a model.
Locked inside.
Stimulus checks.
Nothing to do but buy online.
Every DTC brand looked like a genius.
CAC was nothing.
Conversion rates were inflated.
Subscription businesses printed money.
Then it stopped.
The market moved.
Amazon sold it cheaper.
iOS killed attribution.
Customers stopped renewing.
Competition showed up.
And instead of adapting... they doubled down.
More ads.
Same funnel.
Same checkout from 2021.
Same email flows built for a warm list that doesn’t exist anymore.
Same strategy.
Shrinking results.
Most of these businesses don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a market problem.
It’s not traffic.
It’s not conversion.
It’s not retention.
It’s that what they’re selling doesn’t fit the market anymore.
And no amount of Meta spend or HubSpot workflows is going to fix that.
I watched this happen up close.
FilterEasy poured tens of millions into a filter subscription model.
Team. Tech. Playbook. Spend.
It didn’t matter.
You can buy the same filters on Amazon... cheaper, faster, easier.
The market solved the problem better than they did.
There was no moat.
The SaaS tools keep selling software.
The agencies keep running ads.
The dashboards keep updating.
Everyone gets paid.
The business keeps bleeding.
That’s the zombie tax.
You keep paying to optimize something that was never going to work.
After 20 years inside these systems, here’s what I know:
The businesses that survive don’t fix their marketing.
They fix how they see.
They step outside the business and ask:
“Is this actually working... or did it stop working a long time ago?”
Because they built it.
Because they’re proud of it.
Because admitting it’s broken is expensive... emotionally and financially.
That’s why I built VM.
Drop any domain.
In ~60 seconds you get:
Not what you think is broken.
What the market is telling you is broken.
Some of the outputs are uncomfortable.
Good.
If your score is Average or Weak... that’s not failure.
That’s clarity.
Now you know what to fix.
If it comes back Unknown... that’s worse.
It means you don’t exist.
No signal. No footprint. No presence.
That’s not a marketing problem.
That’s an existence problem.
If it comes back Good... even better.
Now you know where not to waste money.
The zombie businesses won’t run their domain.
They’ll keep blaming the economy.
The ones who are ready to see it clearly will.
You already know which one you are.
👉 https://michaelpelland.com/vm