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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!

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.