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?

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!

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.