Draft Revise: Growing your business, one month at a time.
What happens after you finish a great design? You make it even better. Introducing Draft Revise, a monthly service that optimizes your site and adapts it to the future.
It’s a lot easier, cheaper, and more beneficial to improve your site on the fly than to redesign it wholesale every few years. I’ll keep making these changes so you can get back to running your business.
Redesigns are expensive; Optimization is cheap
Taking many small steps to revise an existing site is so much easier than a wholesale redesign. Small steps are faster, cheaper, and they result in less internal conflict. Small steps allow you to test the effects of your changes precisely. On the other hand, full-scale reworks change so many things that you don’t know what, if anything, might have contributed to your success or failure.
And most importantly, small steps can have a huge impact on your business. People have changed single words in their copy and doubled sales overnight. People have changed single buttons and made $300,000,000 annually. You absolutely need to optimize every detail of your site, no matter whether it’s just launched.
Actual expert advice
But how do you know what to change? And where? What would you change it to? And how can you measure whether those changes were effective? You hired an agency who helped with the redesign, but now they’re nowhere to be found. You could do it internally, but you’ve got your own work to do.
I want to improve your site every single month. Sometimes a change will do well, sometimes it might fare poorly – but no matter the result of a test, that is knowledge you’ll keep for the foreseeable future, making you smarter about what to do on the web.
Most top-tier UX talent is booked several months out – and they rarely take on new clients. I’m making myself available to do this because I know the job is not done when I finish a site’s wireframes, and I want to follow through on everything, making my work the best it can possibly be.
I’m looking for people who have great businesses and are interested in long-term success on the web. I’ll collect data, write up reports for you, propose changes we could potentially make, launch them, and collect their short-term effects in real time. All it takes is a small bit of tracking code on all of the pages that you want to test.
Who this is for
Draft Revise isn’t for everyone, but you might want to apply at the bottom of this page if any of this sounds like you:
- You’re a small-to-mid-sized business who knows that a great internet presence is core to your goals.
- You have enough traffic to support A/B testing. Generally, A/B tests only work well if you get at least 3,000 unique visitors and 250 conversions per month – and the more the better.
- You’re capable of funding and sustaining a web presence, but you might not have a large in-house team to support it.
- You can make changes quickly. I work best when we can rapidly and efficiently deploy changes. If you give me access to your GitHub repository (which you have, right?), I can implement successful tests and move the testing process forward without your having to worry about it.
- You have the courage to try big changes in how you represent yourself online, so you can better meet your customers’ needs.
What you get
Draft Revise is a high-touch UX consulting service for websites, billed monthly. It’s run by a real person who has a lot of experience doing this.
You’ll get:
- A free ($49/month retail) account on Visual Website Optimizer. If we ever decide to part ways, I’ll transfer this account over to your control. And if you get more than 100,000 hits per month to your home page, I’ll ask you to set up your own account for me to run.
- Heat tracking and click maps, providing valuable information about what changes we should make.
- A hypothesis and A/B test for the following month. I’ll roll this out to a certain percentage of your users, and measure how effective it happened to be. (If this sounds like the scientific method, you’re right.)
- A monthly report summarizing the most important points of your site’s user experience. What was the impact of the previous test, and what test will we be doing in the future? Where are people going, and what are they doing once there? What can we learn from these behaviors? For more about how this will look, here’s an example.
Who are you?
Are you any good at what you do?
I’ve been told so. In the long run, Draft Revise has worked out really well for my clients. Here’s one example:
DNSimple is a DNS provider and domain registrar. Anthony Eden took me on to improve their marketing pages. DNSimple was my first Draft Revise customer, and they have stayed on since the beginning.
In the first month alone, I improved new account signups by 18 percent. Now I’m working with another designer on a large-scale redesign of DNSimple’s site. In Anthony’s words:
When I heard about Draft Revise, I was excited but skeptical. It turns out that Nick really knows his craft and was able to do significant incremental improvements, constantly testing, validating and improving our conversion rates. I look forward to continuing to work with him to make DNSimple even better.
In case you’re not convinced yet, here’s another:
A/B testing can happen everywhere, not just SaaS businesses or ecommerce sites. I’ve worked with tech review sites The Wirecutter and The Sweethome for over a year – slowly improving the design of their reviews, home page, and landing pages. Their challenges have been so fun – and it’s been a fruitful collaboration with their team, often delivering results that majorly improve their revenue. In the words of Christopher Mascari, their general manager:
Nick is seriously a wizard. I can give him a half-evolved idea I want to test, and he interprets it perfectly. He'll do all the work, analyze the findings, and send us a simplified report.
And Thomas Fuchs of Freckle:
We hired Nick to work on A/B testing our marketing pages, but over the course of our work together it evolved into much more than that. Nick was instrumental in redesigning our onboarding flow, tutorials, and exit intents – and revenue and customer happiness have both improved as a result.
I have over eight years of experience in the design industry, and I wrote one of the most important texts about it. People have called it “a must read” and “beautiful and thoughtful”. Others have praised its versatility. Having sold over 3,000 copies, it’s now in its second edition.
I work independently, with hellbent specialization in what I do, and I want to keep my business around for a very long time.
How much is this?
Glad you asked! I tailor Draft Revise’s pricing to each one of my clients, so you’ll have to apply first. That said, I’d like to work with you for an initial three-month engagement, in order to gauge whether we’d be a good fit.
I’ll spend a day every month analyzing all your data, writing up the report, and meeting with you to discuss changes as necessary. This is much cheaper than my usual day rate, but I think this service is vitally important and I’m willing to provide a discount for it.
And if you’re unsatisfied with Draft Revise for any reason after three months, I’ll provide you with a full refund. I stake my business on improving the world and making people happy, and I stand behind all of the work that I do.
Sold out
All of Draft Revise’s slots are full right now. In the meantime, if you’re willing to improve your business’s ability to communicate with your customers, you can always apply here. I’ll follow up with a few questions about what you’re looking to accomplish, and we can figure out a time to kick off that works best for both of us. If you apply early, you’ll get first crack at slots as they open.
If you’re curious, you can take a look at Draft Revise’s terms and conditions, which I’ve tried to make as readable and sensible as possible.
Do you still have any questions? That is reasonable! I would love to hear from you; I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
Thanks so much for reading, and I hope you have a great day.
PS: If Draft Revise isn’t a good fit for you right now, you can always read my weekly newsletter for free. I provide a lot of great advice, and you can subscribe right here. Or, if you're looking less for A/B testing, and more for a plan for testing…
PPS: A lot of independent business owners come to this page to examine how it works. If you’re interested in running a similarly durable, stable business practice, coaching may be up your alley.
PPPS: That was a lot of text. Thank you for reading all of it. Here is a gif. Also, that link is the most-clicked thing on this entire page, largely because people tend to read “PS” sections more thoroughly than body copy – especially if they have a friendly tone. And now you learned something!