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Our sponsor for this newsletter is Helium Customer Fields!

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Name. Email. Password. If you want to add anything else to your customer sign-up form on Shopify, tough luck. Customer Fields can help. Create registration forms as unique as your business. Add new fields, get new email subscribers, or let customers edit their account info. 14-day free trial.

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In the past, I’ve referred frequently to the idea of uncertainty. I wrote a book about uncertainty, and then I co-hosted a podcast about uncertainty. I refer explicitly to the current moment being uncertain in my pricing documents.

Are we really all that uncertain, though?

• We are structurally aware, in a public health sense, of what is about to happen with respect to the current pandemic, as well as future pandemics.
• We are societally aware of our likely responses in the collective.
• We are able to more-or-less reliably predict the various outcomes of this election, as well as near-future elections.
• We are aware of what is happening with respect to the supply chain, and we have experience in its attendant knock-on effects in the rest of ecommerce.
• We are aware of what is happening within social media, and recognize the complete unsuitability of reliance on paid ad revenue to drive customer acquisition.

None of this is unconditionally good or bad. It just is. The question is how you will react to it.

Why “BFCM tips” don’t work

In our latest lesson, we talked about what stores should do for the holidays this year.

Like all of our lessons, it is actionable. You can do things after reading it. But given the subject matter, it is probably a great deal less actionable than most of you would think, and it is definitely a lot more muted than you would think.

Every time a value-based designer sticks the landing on BFCM weekend, they feel like this gif. Value-based design is a long-term practice involving slow, deep, patient work. BFCM is one weekend in a vast year. If you do the necessary work to understand your customers and make the numbers go up for the other 361 days of the year, then BFCM is yours to lose.

We are seeking one more client for optimization work. Throw your email address here to begin a conversation.

This week, for paid members

A busy week!

The fourth zine in our series about store design is now available. It’s about the highly profitable act of usability testing.

On text, I wrote a little bit about the new dialectic.

Now that we’re no longer working to secure another client, we have been doing more of our favorite thing: research. In particular, we have been researching our crowded industry, looking at what other optimization agencies do.

After a brief period where Draft had three open slots for consulting work, we now have two. Throw your info over here if you’d like to begin a conversation, or get started today with a roadmap.

Our repositioning, of course, is continuing apace. We seek to structurally ruggedize the business against what we view as an ongoing state of global crisis. More specifically, direct-to-consumer ecommerce has always had significant issues, which we’ve outlined in multiple threads. These issues are exposed by collapse.

Towards that end, we are acutely aware of our ability to generate outsize economic value, especially in solving expensive problems for larger ($10M+ ARR) software & ecommerce businesses. After all, the larger the business, the greater the value. Others are aware of this, too. Draft hasn’t been open to the possibility of custom work in almost a decade. We are now.

As a result, if you’re interested in pursuing one-off projects that are focused on customer retention, education, and increased lifetime value, hit reply to this email and get in touch. We don’t bite.

I wrote a thread on Black Friday optimization, and learned that everybody loves it when I say objectively correct things. Noted!

A note on duck tests

I’m the latest guest on the Milk Bottle podcast, talking about your favorite topic: store design. In it, I talked a little about a major experiment that we ran for the Wander Club, where we provided tiered discounting for their entire product line. Conversions doubled overnight, and they ended up expanding their business significantly.

As we move into the fourth quarter of 2022 and contemplate a structural repositioning, I want to provide some reflections on the role of design, and how it can properly serve online stores.

It begins with a tweet from my pal Cennydd:

Design should be actively hostile to business as usual. Business as usual is killing us.

No matter what you think about design, the second sentence of this is objectively correct. Does anyone think DTC is doing okay right now? Does anyone have a sense of optimism about it?

As consulting goes, we sell materially three things:

• Teardowns
• Research-driven optimization consulting
• Research-driven audits & prioritized strategy

These all have names, but you don’t care, because ultimately you’re buying an outcome.

Still, the names that I gave these three things are bad. One of them is nine years old. The other is seven. They were born of an industry, and a time, that looked a lot different than things do right now, both in terms of who we serve and what we do for them.

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Blink is a specialist eCommerce SEO agency, grounded in data science. We know eCommerce – and DTC – inside out, and typically we grow organic revenue by at least 100% with 12 months for our clients. To find out more visit blinkseo.co.uk or follow us on LinkedIn.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Blink!

Blink is a specialist eCommerce SEO agency, grounded in data science. We know eCommerce – and DTC – inside out, and typically we grow organic revenue by at least 100% with 12 months for our clients. To find out more visit blinkseo.co.uk or follow us on LinkedIn.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

We’ve been posting more mastheads to Applied Draft. Take a look!

And today, a big announcement: we’re the latest guest on the Unofficial Shopify Podcast, talking about all things store design & consulting. Tune in!

This week, for paid members

Last week I did something that I almost never do: I got angry on the internet, and wrote a thread on a very bad website.

I think in ways that necessitate long-form communication. I craft complex arguments from basic principles. I work in systems thinking, and systems are always gnarly. My client reports routinely top 3,000 words – and they are edited down to that length. So I consider a 1,200-word thread to be on the short end of something that distills a complex idea, conveys it to the public, and proposes next steps.

Twitter is not the right place for me to exist in right relationship to the kinds of ideas that I like to convey. For that reason, while I definitely think my mailing list is the better channel for following me, I was nudged to do this by a dear friend & trusted colleague, because Twitter is going to represent a different sort of audience, and because threads appear to be the coin of the realm in DTC these days.

I invite you to take a careful look at the thread right now. It’s a 10-minute read that should hopefully shift your thinking about what design is, and how stores should invest in it.

We’ve written a lot about home page mastheads for our members over the past year, for a few reasons:

• They are a high point of conversion, since they represent most customers’ first impressions of your business.
• They are politically fraught, making them an important aspect of consultative work.
• They are usually poorly executed, with generic copy, features that don’t matter to customers, etc.

So we’re going to start picking apart a few stores’ mastheads every week. Some of them are good. Most of them are not. All of them need some form of improvement.

Subscribe via RSS and you’ll learn something.

New zine alert: I am slowly expanding on the themes in Store Design. The first installment is on heat & scroll maps. You can grab a copy of You installed a heat & scroll mapping tool on your store, signed up for a paid plan, and then never used it for some reason right now, at the bottom of this page. Go forth!

I’ve been on a few interviews lately, and every time, people ask me if I’m afraid. Afraid of the world collapsing, afraid of global conflict, afraid of the supply chain, afraid of the stupid virus, afraid of all of it. I tell them the truth every time, which is that I am not afraid.

I’m not afraid of too many things. I don’t fear death. I don’t think I fear my surroundings very much right now. I don’t know what to fear, or what comes next, and so I would rather be grateful for my conscious existence in the present moment than panic about imminent societal collapse.

As we move into the busy season, I’ve been thinking about how I’ll be spending our time at Draft, and what really matters to me in my life.

In past years, I would work really hard from August until around the second week of December, when economy shipping deadlines would hit. Then I would drop off the face of the earth from then until March.

This year will be a little different, for a few reasons:

• The only important thing I launched this year, text, is both fun for me to make and generating a small profit. People seem to love reading it, to the point where it has become many others’ “drop everything and read this” newsletter, even though it is not a newsletter, only text, an endless & beautiful avalanche of text. I like focusing on text. I think text is worth my heartbeats.
• I have enough money to make it through the rest of the year. If nobody pays me to do anything between now and December 31, Draft will lose a small amount of money, but ultimately we’ll be fine.
• Society is fractally collapsing.
• I’m tired.
• So are you.

The busy season is approaching. If you want to work together, please buy a teardown or get in touch.

This week, for paid members

• This month’s deep-dive presentation covers four different 201-level interview techniques that work especially well during global recession & societal collapse. Timely!
• Our weekly paid lesson talks about how to research, execute, and adapt to major changes in your store’s positioning. Sometimes you need to serve a different sort of customer, or solve a different sort of problem!
• Our design of the week tracks a very subtle free shipping threshold. Did you miss it?

People have been enjoying text lately. If you’ve been around these parts for a while and you want more writing about life stuff, you might want to join us.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for new camera brand Hung Supply.
• Our weekly paid lesson is all about the relationship between optimization & development. In what ways do they connect with one another, and in what ways can they work together to improve executional velocity?
• And finally, our design of the week covers an interesting add-to-cart button. That’s it! That’s all I’m telling you about it. If you want to know more, you know what to do.

Limited copies of Store Design are still available.

This week, for paid members

• Our design of the week is for the funniest pagination we’ve ever seen. Should pagination be funny? The answer is no.
• And our weekly paid lesson is a big one, talking about BI dashboards and what they can teach us. Dashboard maintenance is effectively a full-time role – making sure the data is clean, and providing actionable insights with it. We used to do this as a standalone offering, but we found that it really requires a solid 40 hours per week of work, and so we think internal resourcing is the way to go. Nonetheless, stores have a need for this, and they want to know where to start. So let’s talk about it!

Today, I’m thrilled to announce a new text on how to get started with design for your store. It’s called Store Design, and it’s out now.

You are never “done” designing your store. There’s always new customer insights to gather, new things to fix, new issues to uncover. This is the most exciting part of design! Once you’re done fixing all the low-hanging fruit, that’s when your job gets really interesting.

At the same time, we’ve found that most people don’t know how to peel back these layers. They think design is just the surface layer of the store. Maybe more sophisticated store owners think design is the layout of the buy box, or the placement & treatment of upsells.

We take a more expansive view of design – because after a decade of hands-on experience, we’ve come to realize that “design” is often the right answer to the question. Store Design gets you in the right mindset – by redefining what you think “design” is, making the case for a clear design process in any store, and providing some clear next steps for you to take.

Last week, we mentioned an improvement to teardowns for store owners. Here it is: if you’re a store owner, buying a teardown also gets you a half-hour strategy call for free. That also means: if you buy a teardown on behalf of a store owner, they get a half-hour strategy call for free.

That’s it. Please clap.

This week, for paid members

For those of you who subscribed because I wrote about a sandwich eight years ago, I have written about a sandwich again. You may wish to subscribe to text to read it.

On the Draft front, we’re improving our teardowns. More on that shortly. Reply if you’re interested in being a beta tester.

This week, for paid members

This week, for paid members

• Our paid lesson takes a brief shift away from mindset issues and talks about segmentation. How do you figure out what segments are likely to have an impact on your conversion strategy, and how can you thoughtfully research for them?
• And our design of the week discusses the weirdest use case we’ve ever seen on a product detail page.

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for clean beauty brand Elate.
• Our design of the week is all about an, uh, interesting link target from a home page masthead.
• This week’s paid lesson discusses when & how to resource for new initiatives. What does communication look like? How about turnaround? What would a home run look like when hiring for your business?

Want in? Join us now – now named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is The Current!

So many ecommerce news sites, so little time 😥. In 5 minutes or less, The Daily Current will fill you in on the top stories that matter most every day in the world of ecommerce. Subscribe here.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

I’d like to thank everyone for their interest in our relaunch of Draft Revise. In the process of sifting through questions, I realized that I put together something over our holiday break, but I never posted it here.

We think a lot about optimization maturity here at Draft. Optimization maturity is the level of experience, sophistication, and process that you have with researching customers, careful experimentation, and revenue recapture.

Your familiarity with optimization dictates our ability to execute. And it also affects the sort of consultative education that we need to do on a day-to-day basis. We put together a spreadsheet that shows how optimization maturity progresses over time, and you can download it for free here.

We tend to find that organizations improve in their maturity by the time we’re done working with them, but only in a linear basis: they increase in maturity in a predictable fashion, moving from one set of expectations to the next.

Early spring is the right time to begin optimizing your store. We’ve been saying so for 8 years now. So it’s probably not a surprise that spring is when we always do our big launches.

We have one thing left that we’d like to talk about today: Draft Revise.

Draft Revise is our flagship consulting service, operating continuously since August of 2012. Slowly but surely, Draft Revise has evolved into what you see now: a research-first, design-driven optimization practice, proven to get results.

The constraints

The subject line pretty much says it, yes? Enrollment wraps up for these two courses at 5pm CDT today:

• Draft Analysis
• Ecommerce Email Mastery

Don't sleep! Ping us if you have any last-minute questions, we're around all day.

Some updates

• We cleaned up the place a little. New colors, better buttons, spicier home page, overhauled nav.
• Enrollment in Draft Plan is ongoing.
• We have 1-week turnarounds for teardowns. This is the lowest it can get, don’t sleep!
• Thanks to some updates on our merchant’s end, we now accept instant ACH payment for all of our products, as well as several major third-party payment providers. You can buy our stuff with Apple Pay now! The future!
• Due to gestures grandly, we have had to change the list of countries that we deliver our books, zines, and posters to. In short, if your country can’t accept international priority mail packages, or if delivery logistics have become too complex to reliably guarantee arrival, we aren’t going to be able to ship there for the time being. For those who still want to receive our shipments (as well as other shipments from the States), we suggest Earth Class Mail as an affordable way to accept & forward our books in the future.
• Finally, as we mentioned earlier, we’re going to be pausing sales of some of our older courses. Enroll in Ecommerce Email Mastery and Draft Analysis before 5pm CDT on Friday, April 22.

This week, for paid members

I’m deeply grateful to everyone for their interest in Draft Plan this past week. Before registration closes, I wanted to answer some questions that people have had:

What should I hope to get out of this?

Ideally, you will radically shift your work practice to embrace value-based design principles. If you’ve read our book but are stuck on the how, or you already have an existing practice but are curious how to take it to the next level, Draft Plan is for you.

What if I’m not DTC?

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Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Howdy! One last heads-up that teardown prices will be changing at 5pm CDT today.

As usual, we’re handling all teardowns first come, first served. Buy one now and you’ll lock in the current price.

And as always, reply to this email if you have any questions! Appreciate all of your support, now & always.

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Note: This week's letter was sent with last week's subject line. This one is fixed – sorry about the flub!

Let’s say you’re working with a store owner. Its conversion rate is, by everyone’s estimation, “bad.” So you want to improve it. What do you do?

You could read some blogs, find a roundup or two, and see what others are doing. You could find a list of “best practices.” You could rip off a competitor. You could take the advice of a trusted friend. You could look at Amazon. Amazon is full of smart people, right?

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

Our sponsor for this newsletter is Tradeswell!

Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.

Thank you for sponsoring our newsletter this week!

I hope you’ve had a good holiday and a peaceful start to the new year. I’m writing to you from another country, in an extended & necessary period of rest, ease, and grace, with a brief announcement: 10 years ago today, I walked out of a job for the final time.

Draft didn’t file its articles of incorporation today, but I still consider January 27 to be its official birthday, since it represents the shift in mindset that I needed to make to reject full-time work in the tech industry and move forward with my life’s real work.

Beyond independent work, I have no plan B. I probably have a couple of safety nets, but I refuse to acknowledge them. The practice is my only point of sustenance. For this reason, I wanted to pause to express gratitude to each and every one of you for your time, attention, and heartbeats as you’ve supported us over ten years.

Draft’s public work will continue to rest for another month, as we provide our time & attention exclusively to our paid members & consulting clients. Much is in the works, for which I am excited & grateful. As the days lengthen & the frost thaws, we send our kindest thoughts to you & yours, wishing you a restorative & peaceful February.

It might be my age, the Bad Times™, or the fact that I once co-hosted a whole podcast on self-care, but I think a lot about rest, and boundaries, and taking vacations. This is hilarious, because I have been completely lousy at rest! And so now it is time for a correction.

Shocking precisely nobody, I have barely taken any vacation over the past two years. Instead, I worked my tail off while hospitals were melting, society crumbled, and 900,000 people died.

So now, I am taking a vacation. I am taking a vacation like my ding dang life depends on it.

Draft is closed until January 03, at which point it will reopen and I will suddenly, somehow, be on a different continent. I will continue to be on that continent until January 26, doing client work and serving paid members.

Those of you who have been around here for a while know that I pack & ship every single order from my home. But for the first time in years, I’m going to be mostly out of town for a long while, celebrating a major round-number birthday & Draft’s 10th(!) anniversary. So I’ve decided to put shipments on pause while I seek much-needed rest.

As a result, today is your last day to buy our books before we pause shipments for a couple of months. If you’ve already bought our books and gotten something useful out of them, we’d always be grateful if you could spread the word.

Shipments will be paused at the end of today. We’ll be back in late February to ship anything that was ordered in the meantime. Thanks as always for your support!

Just as a gentle heads-up, you have until this Friday, December 17, at 5pm CST, to place book orders. After that, book orders will be paused until late February.

Draft will be closed for our annual holiday break from December 17 until January 03.

This week, for paid members

This should be the first letter you’re getting from our new mailing list provider. Hit reply & let us know if you’re running into any issues. Thanks!

I was lucky enough to grab a meal with Joel a few weeks ago. We chatted about how our businesses were going, and he did the very reasonable thing that people normally do all the time, which is to ask if I’m writing another book.

I said “no,” which at the time was true. I’ve already made three books. I still feel like there’s a lot to talk about in my latest. And I go years between books. This feels appropriate, since books are big questy things, something you should only write when you have something big and new to say.