I want your help!

I'm working on a book. Working title is Big Tech Breakup. It's a how-to guide paired with inspirational stories that will help people cut their ties to big techThink Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, as well as venture capital-funded companies..

I'd like to hear your inspirational story. More specifically, I'd like to hear it on a video call, record the audio, lightly edit it, and share it as a podcast episode.

You can be named, pseudonymous, or anonymous. The episodes will be short, so the interview will be 20 minutes at most.

What I'm after is a single anecdote about a single product you once used, then decided to replace. Maybe you switched from Google Calendar to a paper planner. Maybe you dropped Instagram and started reading ebooks on your phone. Maybe your favorite Todo app got acquired, raised their prices, and forced you to find a better solution.

Whatever your experience, I want to hear it and share it. You don't have to be a technological purist who lives in a server room and only uses open source command line software all day. This is an ongoing process for all of us, and your story will help inspire others.

If you're open to this, please send an email to bdh at yepmail.net with the subject line "Big tech breakup". I'm excited to chat.

I've re-read my oldest "personal website as guy who does conversion optimization" blog post ever, and found it migration-worthy.

It's from 2019 and it's on the extremely hot topic of "Dealing with pressure to call tests early."

It's on a technical topic, but really it's all about empathy. I'm proud of it.

"Migration" consists of:

1. Copying the .md file from my old website repository into the appropriate folder
2. Updating the front matter

On point #2–the "before" looks like this:

---
layout: post
title: "Dealing with pressure to call tests early (1/3)"
date: "2019-05-06"
categories: ["Web strategy"]
---

and the "after" looks like this:

{:title "Dealing with pressure to call tests early (1/3)"
 :layout :post}

I don't think I'll be using categories on this blog, so no need to carry that over. And Cryogen pulls the date from the filename, so that's redundant.

Therefore, the total effort involved is about 12 keystrokes. I'm in no hurry to automate this; instead I'll just treat migrating the next several posts as Vimgolf practice.

If I spend any time on technical stuff in the near future, it'll be on blog styling. This out-of-the-box Cryogen theme uses Bootstrap, which I'd love to kill. And I set the font to monospace in an effort to be a hipster minimalist, but I have to say the default monospace font in Chrome/Firefox/Vivaldi ("Menlo-Regular") looks kinda terrible. So I'll be working on that, a bit at a time.

I quit blogging in December 2024 because the hype around large language models made the entire internet feel stupid. It now seems that the hype is fading; it's even socially acceptable to acknowledge the existence of a thing called the "AI bubble." So I'm back.

For the next few months, I'll chronicle rebuilding my blog using a Clojure tool called Cryogen. This will involve migrating my old posts, which I'm planning to do one at a time, and with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia for the days when I didn't yet know that all my online writing would eventually be sucked into a machine that spits out possibly-psychosis-provoking drivel.

I have never used, and will not use large language model technology to generate text, audio, or video. Everything on this site was hand-typed by a human, always will be. Same goes for my books and emails.

If you're curious to know why, the post linked above tells part of the story. But I wrote that in January 2023, and these days I have ... more thoughts. Feel free to reach out!

(This page was inspired by the /ai manifesto by Damola Morenikeji. Worth a read! And check out the footnotes.)

Here's an illustration from my book:

You've probably clicked on a search result and landed on a page with this sort of mindless babble. It's annoying to read, but it wasn't written for you. It was written for a robot.

Nobody asked for an internet full of "SEO-optimized" content that dulls the mind without informing. But we got it anyway.

Now we've got exciting overhyped new technology that allows a computer program to generate similar (maybe even better) prose from a simple prompt. We're suddenly able to produce low-value, mind-numbing content at an exponentially greater scale.

Which nobody asked for. But it looks like it's coming.

My best guess is that we'll very soon find ourselves expending more and more energy trying to distinguish machine babble from the actual opinions of real humans with (literal) skin in the game.

(Nobody asked to spend time worrying about that, either.)

So I won't use AI. Everything you read on this site will be artisanally hand-typed and fussed over by a real person with real emotions. I promise.

You might object: "Wait, don't you use a search engine? Closed captions on YouTube? Both of those are powered by AI."

Touché. The ability to find information on the internet, and to create good-enough transcriptions of human speech—these are things people actually asked for. They're fine. So to clarify, I won't use AI to generate text, images, or video. (Saying it that way just didn't make a snappy enough title.)

But still ... why not use AI as a tool for creativity?

I've seen lots of takes and advice about this. "If you're stuck, the robot can generate fifty topic sentences to get you started!"

This is the wrong approach. Don't take technological innovations as inevitable, and inevitably good. They aren't. Don't try to make the best of them, and in so doing resign yourself to their proliferation.

We didn't ask for this. The glut of mindless content, the displacement of creative work. If you just shrug your shoulders and say "Well, that's how the world works," you are a coward.

The world can work in any number of ways, and your vision can be part of that. But you have to craft that vision yourself. Because if you don't, it's not yours.

You already know that calling a test too early is a Bad Thing. It can lead to Type I and Type II errors, leaving your conversion rates worse than they could've been, or even worse than where they started. But not everyone around you sees it the same way, and sometimes well-meaning people on your team will lean on you to call a test and move on. So how do you change their minds?

The first step is to understand where they're coming from. Do they just need a stats lesson? Or do they have information you lack? Maybe you should call the test this time.

Here's a quick list of some of the likely offenders, their possible motivations, and what you need to learn about them in order to have a productive conversation about test stopping criteria (and greater matters).

Management / Executives

It's likely that you have more statistical training than the exec asking why you don't just call that test now, but they care about numbers just as much as you. At a minimum, they're trying to hit quarterly targets; maybe monthly, possibly even weekly.

Do you know what those targets are? Is the team on track, or close, or way off course? Find a way to have a conversation about numbers with these folks. "How are you measuring success?" is usually all you need to say. Then listen actively, ask clarifying questions, take some notes. Show you care. When it comes time for them to listen to you talk about experimentation, you'll have a more agreeable audience.

Clients

The conversation with a client is similar to with an executive ("How are you measuring success?") but with the additional caveat that you have way less perspective on all that's going on with them. There may be an internal initiative that conflicts with a currently-running test; they may be receiving downward pressure to "test aggressively" - meaning someone is insisting that they launch 10 tests this quarter. (A terrible metric, but let's save it for another day.)

Media Buyers

If you're testing on paid search landing pages, the situation is even more complicated and the pressure is more intense. Media buyers are pouring money into a hole and watching it disappear - if they think you've got a winning landing page, of course they want to drive all their traffic there, starting yesterday.

So you can empathize with them, but you still don't want to call a test after 5 days and 43% statistical significance. What can you do?

For now, find an opportunity to learn more about how they make decisions with data. How many campaigns are they running for a given audience? How do they test out new ad copy? What's been their biggest win in the last few months? What was an ad they thought would do well that just tanked? What were the numbers there?

You likely have a lot to learn from each other, and it may be up to you to initiate that exchange. See what you can find out about their process, their day-to-day view on data, and how they make decisions. For now, just listen.

What you can do today

Figure out what meeting you need to drop in on, what 1-to-1 you need to schedule, what questions you need to ask, or where you need to sit at lunch in order to learn more about your team and collaborators' point of view on making decisions with data. Can you do a working session with a media buyer? Does the VP of Marketing have 10 minutes to walk you through the metrics behind this quarter's OKRs? Can you lead off your next client calls asking about their internal success metrics? People generally love to be asked about this stuff; don't be shy.

Tomorrow we'll look at some tools and evidence you can use to support the case for running tests to completion, and the following day we'll put it together into a story and talking points. Happy testing!