Jacob Voytko

"How Amazon increases conversions with short circuits"

https://notmagic.tech/posts/0002-increase-conversions-with-short-circuits

Posted to IH + Hacker News + Medium + Twitter

Finished copywriting my latest issue of "It's Not Magic" (https://notmagic.tech). Will launch tomorrow

Wrote some simple modeling for funnels for my latest post. Ended up scaling my ambitions back a little due to time constraints

https://notmagic.tech/posts/0001-launch-your-damn-mvp

Delayed because I was sick for a week -.- thankfully not COVID, though my symptoms were all the same

I needed to write 1k lines of code for this issue. I need to find a way to reuse the tools for new purposes, or alternatively find a new version of this newsletter that takes less time. I don't think I could ever hire someone to write issues at the moment because you'd need to be a writer and a coder.

On https://notmagic.tech, I refactored the first post to be generated from a Post datatype comprising all data in the post, rather than just being a giant hard-coded file

This is going to allow me to do a few things

- Create a Post card that I can show across the site
- Homepage
- Similar posts
- A post page that shows all of the posts that have been published
- Refactor a Post shell that allows all posts to look uniform
- Create a dynamic route for posts

The feedback that I got from the IndieHackers community helped me realize that my landing page and my first post were tangentially related. Accordingly, I focused on good value propositions for my landing page.

- Wrote new copy
- Refactored React components
- Cut about 2/3 of the copy out
- Fixed the styling
- Deployed!

They have a "landing page feedback" forum, so I posted it in advance of mailing out my first newsletter issue tomorrow

This is the first draft of my newsletter! This is crazy simple - just a homepage and an interactive newsletter post. I'm going to try to get feedback on it on Monday from the IndieHackers community, and probably also from the /r/startups Discord.

Then I'm going to send out the first email on Tuesday

Scaled back my ambitions a little - stripped out all of the graphs that I was making, and did the bare minimum of interactivity that seems interesting

This was a huge pain, and I'm going to strip it out in favor of something like chart.js. But it got done

Refactor the large copy sections my newsletter demo has into a Markdown component

Make it a component as opposed to a page route (like in the next.js demo) so that the content can be embedded into pages that mix/match text and non-text regions

I've been copying and pasting these across pages, and I'm going to take the time to refactor them and run snapshot tests on them

http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html