Some business announcements this week, and then a brief note on fiat plays:

• Our repositioning is more-or-less complete. If you find anything on our site that looks off or requires a rewrite, please let us know.
• We’re kicking off a major summerlong project on the topic of onboarding, and I’m doing a small literature review for it. I’m already intimately aware of Hulick’s work, but if you have any other books or resources for me to review, hit reply and point me to ‘em.
• For the first time in five years, we’re going to be changing our fees for new work in a few weeks. Since we could change it all right now, that means a lot of things are on sale as of the conclusion of this sentence. Now would be a very good time to book a roadmap, call, or retainer, if you feel so called. Thanks for your support of us, now & always.
• Lastly, one brief question: what would you like me to write about next?

In last week’s paid lesson, we defined the seam and discussed what you can do to address it. We’re building on that lesson by talking about why a style guide is important, and what makes it different from a design system.

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here.If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

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Financially, we have something here called the breakeven point, where we know we’ll be able to live comfortably, meet our expenses, and do what we want to do for the year. This typically comes around late August, when a lot of businesses lock in their strategies for the rest of the year and have chosen to get us involved. A couple of years, it didn’t happen at all. One year, it happened in early June because everybody suddenly invested in our work in response to a global pandemic.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but it’s nonzero likely that we’ll reach the breakeven point soon. Our existing client portfolio has not changed since last September, and a couple of them have chosen to hire us for more expansive work. With one more renewal, we’ll be good for the year.

Have you ever signed up for software that had a lovely-looking marketing page, and the product itself was… lacking? We call the transition between marketing & product the seam, and we think it’s of profound importance for your business.

A prominent seam results in lower retention and higher churn, plain & simple. Competitors can take advantage of it. And it’s just not a good look.

That’s because your marketing page promises something, and so your customers expect the quality of your design to translate, in some form, to the product. When someone goes through a well-designed conversion funnel, joins, pays you, and encounters something that looks like it was built ten years ago, they feel deceived.

In this paid lesson, we’ll discuss what the seam is, where it typically occurs, why it occurs, and what you can do about it.

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, June 10 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

I’m currently writing this in my garden, which is the sort of place that causes people to go slack-jawed and slow down as they walk through. I garden a lot. I pull weeds on my way inside and throw them in a little basket next to the door. I harvest plants from my raised bed and make lunches from them.

I pause for lunch every day. I make lunch every other Thursday for anybody who wants to show up. I’m sitting under a 12-foot-tall serviceberry bush right now, and in a couple of weeks its fruit will start to ripen, at which point I’ll be swatting squirrels & birds away as I pick the thing clean. Then I’ll make jam with it, jar it for my close people, and hand the jars out exclusively at my biggest party of the year, which is on the second Saturday of July.

Incorrect people have recently been declaring the death of design. This is weird, because we see design everywhere. We see design in places where we don’t expect to find design. We can only conclude, in this moment, that design has won.

So what now?

One more about repositioning.

We often speak here about new positioning being easy to adopt, technically speaking. You change your home page, spin up a landing page, ask people if they’re interested. You put on new positioning like it’s a new outfit.

The real challenge is when you reposition after a decade of a previous positioning. That’s a fourth of your career! You’re kind of flushing it! Suddenly you’ve been boiling-frog’d into one of the most load-bearing decisions of your life.

There are ways to slow-pedal this and soften the impact. If you keep your existing portfolio of clients, and even your existing messaging and educational initiatives, you can test the new market without burning any bridges.

Expanding on our recent universally correct lesson about pricing, we’d like to talk about pricing tiers: namely, what goes into the strategies behind establishing each price, and what you can do to move into a correct space for pricing.

Thanks for your patience while we were out in sunny, profoundly warm Mexico. I watched a thunderstorm roll in while drinking coffee on my balcony, overlooking the Caribbean, and I felt really grateful to be alive, doing what I do for all of you.

A few small announcements:

1. I’ll be doing teardowns at MicroConf Remote tomorrow, May 21, in the morning. MicroConf is one of those extended-family things that I’ve been honored to attend over the past few years, and I’m really grateful to be on some form of stage for them. Please come through & heckle!
2. I was quoted on the App Collective’s latest episode on the topic of how we vet trusted partners. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
3. Not a Draft-y thing, but we enjoyed this A/B test. Not a very high sample size, but you’re dividing by zero, so.

Okay, actual letter time.

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today!

Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here.

If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is below. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

One of my favorite things about software is how there are so many bespoke cases that people end up with these roiling debates about how to do a thing. “Don’t charge less than $50 a month,” one says, forgetting that this is literally how dozens of thriving businesses work. “Never have a free plan,” they say, even though many businesses, including one I work for, use free plans as ways to cleanly ladder people into revenue generation.

And so there are still quite a few open questions. These are “myths,” I guess, to some, but for us they’re rules that just happen to get broken a lot. Let’s go through some of them, and outline some exceptions and contingencies.

As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.

We’re aware that our positioning towards software is the most important technological event of the past century, and as a result, some people have questions about how we did it. We’ve undertaken a few initiatives, some done, some still in progress:

• Rework our website to reflect our new focus on software, which we wrapped up last week.

• Start from basics. Paid members have already received a couple of lessons on pricing & onboarding, with more to come.

• Outline a few years of new lessons on increasingly granular topics. Hoping to do this on the plane in a couple of days.

• Relationship building. Figure out where to speak next, who to talk to, etc.

Let’s talk about lesson planning. Content ideas are shockingly easy to brainstorm; you just need to make the writing prompts to get you going when you’re in front of a blank screen. I got this idea from Naomi Dunford at IttyBiz and have adapted it for our use.

First, come up with a few primary topics that fit your positioning. For us, that involves:

First, our monthly office hours for paid members is coming up! Join us on Tuesday, May 13 to ask me anything about value-based design & getting an impact with your work. These vary in attendance from 1 to 10 people, and they’re always helpful for you and for me. Signup link after the jump!

Onboarding is massively important, but it usually doesn’t lend itself well to specific design patterns, since the goal is to create a specific outcome that is specific to your product’s value. In this lesson, then, we’ll talk about some of the principles that onboarding should follow, and dive into some examples.

They say that a pilot earns their paycheck every tenth landing. The theory: the plane mostly flies itself when everything goes well*. When you need to do something more complex – like, say, fly into ORD mid-derecho, as I’ve had the unfortunate fate of experiencing – then that’s where your expertise kicks in.

I have had the good fortune of earning my paycheck this past month, for all of my clients, for reasons both obvious and not obvious. One client watched a vendor turn usurious with a day to go in the contract; another lost a key staff member; a third shared with me a big, intractable problem around onboarding. In each of these, we flew into the storm, stuck the landing.

The common thread is advisory, brought about through establishing the expert position ahead of time. Expertise can be publicized in the form of whitepapers, process documents, surveys, books, and reports. Most of you know we’re experts in what we do, but many others, including some who hire us(!), need a little budging.

Because what we do is value-based design, but how we create value is through advisory. It doesn’t take long for people to start asking us bigger strategic questions that, on face, have nothing to do with the actual practice. But they have everything to do with the way the business works, and there’s always something deeper to explore.

Now that we’re focused on software, it’s time to turn our attention back toward a big topic: pricing pages. In this lesson, we’ll outline the baseline anatomy of a pricing page, so you can make sure yours is doing as well as possible before you start to break rules or make improvements.

Why did we put a light bulb there? What is the point of a light bulb? Where are we attempting to put light, exactly? Are people really asking for light here in the first place? Could this be more easily solved by simply cutting a hole in the ceiling and putting a skylight in there? Do we need light when it’s dark out?

Why did the light bulb fail? Don’t we have LED lighting now? You can just buy a light that lasts for 15,000 hours and be done with it, so if the light failed and it is LED, why? Faulty wiring? A power spike? Do we need to make a warranty claim? Do we need to open up the ceiling and figure out what happened? If the light isn’t LED, why do we have incandescent or CFL bulbs in the first place?

What was the temperature of the light? Why? What is the function of the space? Are we talking a nice cozy home, or an office, or a hospital? Or maybe it’s a design consultancy where we need fully neutral 5000K daylight bulbs everywhere, so people can make sure their colors render properly?

What is our prior knowledge of this light? What value are people getting from this light? Have we talked to anyone? Why not?

Oh lawd, we’re talking about tariffs.

Our monthly office hours for paid members is today! Join us at 1p Central Time to chat about all things value-based design. Happy to answer any questions or pressing issues you may currently have. Find out what 1p Central Time is in your time zone here. If you’re a paid member, our meeting link is at the end of this email. If you sign up between now and 1p, we’ll send the meeting link your way.

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New event alert! I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be doing live teardowns at MicroConf Remote in May. Come through! Submit your site! I promise to be firm but kind as I lovingly rip your work to shreds.

In our previous lesson, we defined & discussed process design. In this week’s paid lesson, we’ll connect that lesson with our evergreen piece on sources of truth go in depth about how we can connect sources of truth to yield deeper insight.

Many wild events have happened in Draft’s history, and you could conceivably pick a few to qualify as the wildest. My consistent pick for the wildest happened in 2023, when design began the deepest winter in the industry’s whole history while we also had our second-best year ever.

Four things happened all at once:

1. We came to a global consciousness that design is a form of leveraged power, and those in power took it from us.
2. People in power wanted everything to happen faster, and since design frequently slows things down, design got cut.
3. Other tools appeared that appeared to make design more efficient to those in power. Whether or not this is true remains an open debate, but I think nobody is debating that people in power think the tools make design more efficient.
4. Global fascism, which has caused numerous tech workers to go on strike from the industry.

None of which are great! But again, we also had our second-best year ever – because prospective clients recognized the value of our work, and decided to take a chance on us.