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.

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!

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.