Viewing design like a tech company🤑
Today's guest is Nick Disabato, a conversion rate optimization consultant who believes "Ecommerce isn’t a video game. It’s relationships with real people, at scale." In this episode, we'll learn how his customer-focused mindset has helped in improve conversion rates and shift company cultures at the same time for his clients.
You'll hear:
Through his consultancy, Draft, Nick Disabato conducts research-driven optimizations of online stores, so they can grow without needing to increase their ad spend. Rather than running the usual marketing playbook, Nick uses design research as the fundamental tool for optimization. He also wrote design best-sellers Cadence & Slang and Value-Based Design.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/30/2022
Kurt Elster: You’re listening to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast and our guest today thinks you are thinking wrong. Thinking wrong about store design, which is a thing I know merchants, brand owners, entrepreneurs think a lot about because it’s the fun fiddly stuff. But our guest is frustrated. He thinks we could be doing better with design and how it relates to conversion rate optimization. Because if we could dial this in right, in theory the attraction is like, “Yeah, our site looks good,” but it unlocks a lot more revenue, a smoother path to conversion so more of our visitors become customers, which is all we ever wanted. That’s what we want, right?
Like yeah, it’s pretty, but I want it to make money. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: And I am joined today by recurring guest, brilliant mind, Nick Disabato from Draft, a design consultancy, and author of several books on the topic. Nick, thank you for joining us.
Nick Disabato: Thank you so much for having me. Thrilled to be here again today.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. This is like the eighth episode you’ve been on. I could have looked it up. It’s a few. It’s several. You were an early guest because we grew up in the same town, went to high school together, and then later reconnected by chance in a Slack group about consulting businesses.
Nick Disabato: It makes complete sense and is totally normal. This is a normal thing that normal people do is they’ve just known each other since they were 12 and now they’re talking on this podcast together.
Kurt Elster: And now they’re podcasting. All right, so give me the rundown. Who is Nick? What’s he do and why do I care?
Nick Disabato: Nick is a designer and writer from the city of Chicago. I run Draft. We’re a consultancy that listens to your customers, makes small changes on your store that have a big impact, and hopefully makes the numbers go up in a way that’s not gross. That’s pretty much it. We generally create outsize ROI by doing the very unsexy work of researching your customers, listening to what they want, listening to what they say they want, what they’re actually doing, and improving your store slowly but surely over time.
We’ve been doing a lot of really great work to shift cultures inside of organizations to really, really pay attention to customers, because we find stores when they start working with us, like they say they want to pay attention to their customers, or they do, but it’s in maybe only a customer support way, or like an anecdotal evidence sort of way, and so we end up getting pretty big wins by implementing more formal research methods that really rigorously understand what people are doing. And then we run A/B tests which are the cool, sexy part, which I think is what you’ve been talking about there, so…
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The A/B test, the conversion rate optimization, that’s the thing that especially on social media that’s catnip, right? People love it. But it’s really… It’s informative. It’s fun. But as part of the larger process, it can be superficial, like you are looking at a later stage here. So, that’s the exciting part. Give me some of your catnip. I want to hear what some of your biggest split testing wins have been.
Nick Disabato: Oh, my God. We ran a test… So, the two biggest ones we did in this calendar year were both kind of deeper reworks of pricing models and structures, so that shouldn’t be too surprising, but it took effort to get to that point and figure out how to do it, right? So, there’s one client, and everybody is gonna take this insight and steal it and not think about all the work that went into it, which is fine. I’ll talk about the work that went into it too. Basically, we increased all the prices and turned on free shipping and the conversion rate went up by 2.5X and AOV went down by 9%.
Ultimately, the client made a lot more customers and a lot more money because they did what the customer’s been asking for, and customers… I did another round of interviews afterwards and none of them noticed. One person noticed and thought it was because the world is on fire now and we hadn’t increased prices in three years and it was fine, right? Now, you’re gonna listen to this and be like, “I’m gonna increase my prices and do free shipping.” How much do you increase them by? How much do you do that per product? How do you telegraph that you have free shipping? In what way do you turn on that messaging? And those are the questions, right?
And then how do you comfort a team after a year of gathering evidence around all of this and say, “You know, you don’t have to be afraid about this. We can do this and it’s possible.” That’s a lot harder.
The other big one was we switched from basically a flat pricing model, so it was a keychain gifting company, and you bought a keychain for like 40 bucks and then you put tokens on this keychain that each had-
Kurt Elster: A keychain is 40 bucks?
Nick Disabato: Yeah, it was like a fancy Horween Leather everyday carry type keychain.
Kurt Elster: All right, well, if it’s Horween Leather, I take it back.
Nick Disabato: Yeah. It’s a fancy pants keychain and you put these tokens on and each one of them has like a state, or a country, or a body of water printed on it to show all the places that you’ve traveled, so it’s really cool, right? And in customer research we realized people were kind of feeling like they were getting penalized for traveling a lot of places. And I told even the CEO of this on our very first call, like, “I’ve been to 25 countries and 48 states, and I feel like I would become bankrupted by buying all the tokens necessary to do this. What do you think about that?” Crickets on the line, right?
So, we did a tiered price. We switched from a flat pricing model to a tiered pricing model where the more that you bought, the deeper the discount you got was, and it’s super high margin, so the tokens themselves don’t cost a whole lot of money. It didn’t cost a whole lot of money to pick them and ship them from a labor standpoint. But we wanted to make sure that people were valuing appropriately kind of the product that we were putting together.
And I forget the exact number on it. You would have to take a look at our case studies. I wrote this all up on case studies but I’m pretty sure it was a high enough number… I do remember how I felt. And I was in Mexico at the time, and I looked up the results and I’m like, “This is preposterously high. We’re gonna give it another three or four days.” And I gave it another three or four days just to gather some more data and get well past minimum sample size, and the numbers were even better that time, and I remember it was the first thing I did in the morning, and I made myself coffee and I just walked to a park and looked at a pond. I just stared at some birds on a pond, like it was that kind of test where I was like, “When I write this up, it’s going to permanently change this person’s business.” He ended up hiring six people. He’s launching new product lines. He’s having his best year ever because of this test.
And I’m just so grateful for it. It was another like double your conversion rate, double your revenue sort of situation. It was very, very good.
Kurt Elster: How often do you run into those?
Nick Disabato: Oh, God. Three or four times a year. The really big ones, right? But most of it, systematically, how often do we get wins? What’s the win rate look like? What’s the average increase per test, right? Our win rate is around I think 62% for all of the A/B tests we have ever run in our history as of press time, and that number is increasing. The industrywide win rate is somewhere between 17 and 19%, so one out of every six. We get two out of every three because we do the research.
The giant ones, they’re not quite as frequent as you would want. I generally get one per client. If you work with me for long enough, and we work for usually nine months to a year, it’s not uncommon to get them. And they’re the ones that really cause us to step back and be like, “All right, there’s some power to this. How can we get more swing for the fences tests like this?” But it takes a lot of time and effort to kind of get trust with the rest of the team to really seek those sorts of swing for the fences situations. Does that answer the question?
Kurt Elster: It does and then some. The hard part here with split testing, with conversion rate optimization, is mindset and trust. And so, having… I’ve had situations where I will test radically different templates. If you’re looking at it through the eyes of the brand owner, for me, like I’ve been there, done that, it does not spook me to have a homepage that does not have an image carousel at the top. But for a lot of people that’s like the most terrifying thing you could propose. So, A, you have to convince someone to be like, “Let’s just try this and see what it does.” And then when we do, of course you discover, “Oh, that actually was not… This was not doing us any favors and we could use this extremely valuable real estate for something that actually sells product and gets people shopping.”
And then they resist that too. They’re like, “I want to make data-driven decisions.” And then you have the data and they’re like, “Yeah, that’s too scary.” And so, you’re right. Trust and mindset in that design process and a data-driven design process, harder to adopt and accept than one might think. Until you’re in that position and it like… Your website, if you’re an eCom operator, your website is your baby, and someone’s like, “Hey, I want to rearrange your baby’s face.” That’s how they’re gonna hear it.
Nick Disabato: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: And so, it’s easy for me. It’s not my website. I’m like, “Hell yeah. Let’s just rip that off of there and see what happens.” I just want to poke at stuff and see what happens and they are naturally hesitant. So, all right, I have to approach it with some empathy. Have you had similar experiences?
Nick Disabato: No, I’m so grateful that you brought this up, actually. I feel in many ways that you can learn everything you need to do about my job in a maximum of one year. Like if you went to school for it and sat down and did everything and made it your full-time job, you could learn absolutely everything about my expertise within one year, right? What makes someone with 18 years of experience in this industry different is the fact that I can sit there and hold space for all of the people problems, right? Because we don’t call ourselves a design agency or a design shop. We call ourselves a consultancy for a reason. We work directly with people in charge to create deep cultural shifts, and that does not happen overnight, right?
It's something that you have to be thinking about on a daily basis of like why are we making these decisions? What smart person put the masthead carousel there and what did they come up with around it? In what ways are we suffering from cognitive biases, right? Like confirmation bias. Or what ways are we thinking about just what cool fancy people are doing on the internet? And you know, part of why I hesitate around trotting out A/B test results, it’s something I really only do in the context of case studies that are strongly backed by the research, is because I know people are going to take those, and rip them off, and be like, “Well, it didn’t work for me. Nick D is incompetent.” And no, it just didn’t work for you in that context or maybe you rolled it out in a really weird and busted way, or maybe you didn’t telegraph it properly to your customers, or maybe you just don’t have that kind of business, right?
You sell furniture. You turn on free shipping. It’s not gonna work.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The same results that you get with a store selling graphic t-shirts will be very different from a store that sells power tools, than a store that sells furniture, than a store that sells $40 Horween Leather bracelets.
Nick Disabato: Right, right. Yeah. And that’s why I tell people like, “Oh, I could position to a certain industry or certain type of client,” but even within food, which I’ve been doing most of my work in in the past two years, they’re all so radically different. They have different kinds of customers. Who is the customer? It’s not what you think. You are not the customer and I think people just don’t understand that. CEOs want to believe that a carbon copy of themself is pressing the checkout button with the same values, hopes, and dreams, and nothing could be further from the truth. So, how do you-
Kurt Elster: Earlier, you mentioned that a pitfall, a stumbling block for a lot of people and teams is cognitive biases, which if you understand cognitive biases it really opens up your world and thinking and decision making. You mentioned they think, “Ah. I set up the site. This is how I shop, therefore that is how we make decisions.” And I believe that’s spotlight effect, you just assume that like your view… Maybe not spotlight effect but something similar.
Nick Disabato: Yeah. Spotlight effect, or it could be some form of confirmation bias because you created your own world view, and you’re trying to backfill. That would be what happens if you take research and you just use it to confirm your previous existing world view, right? But you know, people… I think also they just want design to be a great deal easier than it actually is, and they think it’s a veneer on something, or a series of tools and hacks that they can rip off, and I view it as a process and a perspective, and something far more deeply functional and communicative than what your branding is or what your layout even is.
And I’ve come to realize that over, again, decades of being in this industry. It’s never just the typography. It’s always something further.
Kurt Elster: And so, without a doubt you are a designer with a capital D, and a thing I’ve heard you say, I saw you tweet it; I saw it in your newsletter, design as a practice is incorrectly perceived in DTC. DTC being direct-to-consumer eCommerce.
Nick Disabato: Yes, yes. I wrote a big angry Twitter thread recently, which hopefully will be linked in the show notes, where I basically talked about some of the things that are kind of structurally busted in DTC, at least in the terms of the way that they perceive design. But I come from a very foreign planet called the tech industry. They think about design I think in a very different way than a lot of direct-to-consumer companies do. When they think of design, they’re thinking of usually the process and the systems by which they can make confident decisions that make things easier to use and make things more pleasurable for people and create value for people, right?
So, that could involve graphic design, but it’s usually like 1/50th of the actual process. What actually happens is they get customers on the phone and ask them how they use the technology, or they gather analytics on their products and then it gets pinged back to the company, right? So, all of those forms of evidence gathering are coming to bear on their decisions, and Shopify to be clear, as a tech company, is also doing this, right?
The people making your apps are also doing this. They’re all thinking about this like it’s a tech company. And then you, dear store owner listening to this, turn around and you have a store, it’s made of code, it’s made of software, and they think they can get away from the fact that they can use code, so they install apps and it’s a hack, right? Or they just set up a default team and they kind of let it go as much as they need. And I think that is at best kind of a lazy way of approaching the way that you treat your customers, right? I think it assumes that customers will be able to just kind of make do with whatever you throw at them and that your products will be brilliant enough that they’ll soldier through.
And what ends up happening is they get frustrated and go to Amazon. And Amazon are a company who’ve spent two decades trying to listen to customers and do what they need, and the biggest manifestation of that is customers telling them they want free two-day shipping and then Amazon Prime happens, and they build a whole delivery network around it. That’s a case of customer research. That’s design.
Kurt Elster: The result of that is that Amazon ate the world because Amazon thinks of itself… Your premise here is Amazon considers itself a tech company. That is their view. And so, they approach systems and processes and design using that tech company lens, which is we gather evidence-based research to back up the severe amount of capital, human labor, and time, and cash, that we are going to put into developing features that potentially make or break us.
It is high stakes and it’s fast paced, and so I get why that tech company approach to design benefits someone like a website retailer like Amazon so well.
Nick Disabato: Yeah. So, in this thread… You don’t have to read it after I just give you the summary right now, but you can read it if you want. I talk about three main problems in DTC. And the first one is sort of what we’re talking about here, which is that there’s no structured process for listening to your customers, right? When you listen to your customers, you get customer support inquiries or stories from your friends and family, and that’s not really listening to your customers. It's like having customers come in and yell at you and letting it wash over you and only getting a certain subset of the actual evidence that’s going on, right?
If you, listening to this, are calling your customers and asking them what motivated them to buy and what can motivate them to buy again, congratulations. You are in the 1%, right? This is why people hire us. The second reason-
Kurt Elster: So, you’ll call my customers for me?
Nick Disabato: Oh yeah. I will call your customers for you.
Kurt Elster: See, that’s worth the price of admission, because no one wants to pick up the phone and do the most valuable thing you could do, which is fire up phone.app and place a call.
Nick Disabato: I, a millennial, get your customers on the phone and ask them non-leading questions. And it’s also… I mean, it’s hard to ask customers the right questions because once they’re in front of you, what do you ask? How do you get the right sort of information out of them? And that is I don’t think I’m even as good at it… That is again because it’s a human problem, I’m gonna be thinking about this for the rest of my career. I think I’m good at it, but I think I could always be better at it, and I always come off of interviews being like, “God, I wish I had asked him that.”
Kurt Elster: All right, I want to go deeper on this. How do you get these people on the phone? If my phone rang and I didn’t recognize the number, I’m locking my phone in the closet and then hiding.
Nick Disabato: Yeah. I don’t just-
Kurt Elster: That’s just like the millennial response to hearing a phone.
Nick Disabato: I do not just call them. So, I export the last N days of orders from Shopify, usually like 30, up to like 5 days prior, so you want to make sure their product arrived, right? Make sure it’s for stuff that’s delivered. They’re starting to get some value out of it. They have a clear sense of what the product actually does, because it may be their first time ordering something like that. And then make sure it wasn’t charged back or canceled or anything like that. Then you email them all and I literally write an email to my assistant in the to field and like 500 emails in the BCC field because I’m insane and terrible, and I ask them, “Do you want a $50 gift card from us? If you do, shoot back a thumbs up.”
And I used to just give them my Calendly link, but I’ve sometimes found myself with 400 thumbs ups with products that have really passionate customer bases, so then I wait a day and then I send a handful of them, like a dozen usually, my Calendly link. So, if you have Calendly, or Fantastical, or any sort of thing that shows your scheduling real time-
Kurt Elster: Your scheduling tool of choice.
Nick Disabato: Your scheduling school of choice. Everybody’s got one. We’re all cool. And then I write down a list of questions that I’m going to be asking them on the interview and I follow up the day beforehand and ask if they’re still on for the call, and at the end of the call I give them a $50 gift card either to the store, sometimes I offer an Amazon gift card, and people are very 50/50 on it. It really depends. And you just give them a discount code for $50 off their next order at the store if you need to. They’re super easy to build in Shopify.
So, you ask permission. You get them on. And then if you want, you can even email them a week later and be like, “Hey, how are things going with this product?” Right? Now, the actual questions could be a whole separate podcast episode. I have a whole thing on my blog about what kinds of scripts you can be using to talk with people about this. But ultimately you want to know what’s broken on the store and what you can do to improve, and people will tell you. Most of the time, you’ll be able to keep it on the rails pretty easily. I spend a lot of time reflecting responses back and then gaining more insight from them, but it’s a half hour, and I tell you, like that free shipping test that I told you about, it came because customer told me nine months into the work that I was doing with them.
Everybody was asking for free shipping, but he told me, “I don’t think I want free shipping.” He’s like, “I want the perception of free shipping.” I’m like, “There it is.” You just want to pay three more dollars for your order and not have the extra ding at the end of the order happen, and then I started talking with other people about this and was like, “Does this feel fair to you?” And everybody just shrugged. They’re like, “I get free shipping.” It’s not a calculus for this client.
Kurt Elster: I think we all know what’s going on and they have a preference. I don’t blame them.
Nick Disabato: I think everybody knows. I mean, shipping costs money, right? Everybody has to know what’s going on, but we’ve all been conditioned by Amazon to demand free two-day shipping and so therefore this, right? So, it makes sense in hindsight, but you have to reflect that back to the customer and just kind of be a channel for the customer’s intent. Does that make sense?
Kurt Elster: Yes. So, the magic here is I’m no longer making best guesses and assumptions about how people are shopping based on my own limited world view, and instead talking to customers, getting their feedback, and then using that to inform test ideas.
Nick Disabato: Yes.
Kurt Elster: I got their feedback, they gave me the ideas, but now we’re gonna go and try and put those into split tests where we can… Then that becomes our data-driven thing. Where a lot of split testing is I have no idea. Everything here is a best guess. I have no idea what does and doesn’t work. Based on what we know, let’s come up with a hypothesis and test some things. We’re throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks versus talk to customers. The hard part’s coming up with the test. You completely shortcut that part by just spending the time and talking to people. And now you’ve got a way more valuable test to run.
But it’s that first part, the customer research part, that everybody, myself included, often skips.
Nick Disabato: Right. Right. Yeah. And so, you’re looking at this thinking, “Well, researched tests have a 66% win rate and unresearched tests have an 18% win rate.” Now, research takes time and money. Is it worth doing that? And the answer I think is yes because you end up doing more thoughtful test ideas that treat your customers better, right? And then sometimes you get a doubling of your conversion rate. That’s crazy, right?
So, I think that ultimately, and really it’s what you want to settle on. Yeah, you could just throw spaghetti at the wall and figure it out. I think that’s lazy and not a good use of company resources. It’s the kind of thing that breeds a sort of cynicism around CRO. People get really burned on it because they… Well, they think they know how to do it. Anybody can run a test in Google Optimize.
Kurt Elster: It’s so easy!
Nick Disabato: It’s so easy. I guarantee you you can figure out how to change your headline in Google Optimize if you have no computing experience in an hour, tops, and then measure your key metrics and be done with it, and then you have an A/B test. Congratulations.
But for me, I view testing, and I think this is a very key point. I view testing as a way of validating research ideas. It is in itself a form of research. I often take winning or losing test ideas and use it to feed the research queue because then I have some clarity on what the actual metric shifts are going to look like. And that itself is a form of evidence gathering, right?
When I got that free shipping test done, I think I ran like eight more tests after that on where the banner goes, how it’s treated, what it’s worded like, whether or not I needed to exclude certain products from the shipping threshold, where I needed to tell somebody congratulations, they get free shipping. There were just a lot of other opportunities that opened themselves up because I ran a winning test. So, I think that if you view testing as a way of validating design rather than a tool unto itself, everything changes, right? And it becomes I think far more interesting because it’s so much more empathic for the customer experience and I love that. I love getting the impact and feeling like I’m doing a good job with communicating with other people by the end of the day.
Kurt Elster: So, we talk to our customers. We figure out their needs. We use that to run tests to make data-driven decisions about our design. And then we repeat that process because now when we go back to talk to customers, we know with some degree of certainty the things that move the needle. And then if you… How many times can I repeat this cycle?
Nick Disabato: So, you can kind of get diminishing returns if you’ve been extensively testing every element and you kind of get the biggest parts locked in. My average client engagements are about a year, year and a half, and so that’s usually… Oh, gosh, like 60 tests, discrete tests across every type of page, so that would probably be like 20 rounds of tests on your homepage, PDP. At that point I’ve run out of ideas. Happens, right?
Kurt Elster: It does. Yeah.
Nick Disabato: Sometimes you need to get out of your head and talk to other people. Maybe you can talk to another copywriter. Maybe you have reached what’s called a local maximum where you kind of reach the top of this hump but there’s a far larger hump over to the side. Maybe that’s a retheme. Maybe you are talking in a more consultative capacity about what kind of market you want to expand into. Do you want to start attacking other competitors? That’s fun. Do you want to start thinking about widening the tent a little bit, doing something less specialty? Those are questions that I end up having usually about a year in with my clients, so you could do this a lot.
And if you’re doing it kind of on the side… If you hire us, we’ll finish it within a year or so. But if you’re doing it on the side, I mean, there’s effectively no end to it because different things are gonna be happening in your business all the time, and I think almost there’s a benefit to doing it a little bit more slowly, but I’ve never done that, so I wouldn’t know.
Kurt Elster: So, if we talk to these people, we run our tests, our tests are successful two out of three times, we end up with a site that meets customer needs in a way that they told us they needed needs met.
Nick Disabato: Yes.
Kurt Elster: And that ideally… So, it makes it easier for them to buy. Buy more stuff more often, so our conversion rate goes up. Potentially our average order value goes up, and then we see our revenue really start to move up without having to acquire more traffic. Except an interesting thing happens. In these scenarios, happy customers are the ones that engage in word of mouth, and there’s nothing more valuable than that even if it’s tough to attribute, and so then you see… Ah, now we’re acquiring new customers and now our revenue is really going up and to the right.
Nick Disabato: I know I’m doing a good job with my job when on the third or fourth quarter of interviews, like nine months in, I start to get… I’m like, “How’d you hear of us?” I always ask people, “How’d you hear of us? This is your first time ordering?” They’re like, “Yeah, it is my first time ordering.” I’m like, “Where’d you hear from us?” “One of my friends won’t shut up about you.” And that’s when I know I’m doing my job well because all of a sudden, and yeah, you can’t attribute that, right? But also, aren’t you trying to decrease your reliance on paid ad spend and decrease CAC? Well, you’re gonna do that if you make your customers happy and enthusiastic about recommending your business.
Kurt Elster: So, we’ve painted a picture in which we call a customer up and they go, “All right, you want to make some more money? Here’s what you need to do.” And then we go verify that, implement it, bam. More money. This assumes that we agree with what the customer says. What happens and has it happened where a customer says something nobody wants to hear?
Nick Disabato: That’s a harder one and it does happen often, actually, right? So, I worked for a client, actually the one where I doubled the conversion rate with the free shipping. They were also one of those clients that they were simultaneously trying to increase the tent, and increase the overall market, but whenever I would get very casual customers on the phone and I would tell them this is what they’re doing, people would come to me and try to confirm it, but they were still a little… They kind of circled it like a lone wolf. They were like, “What do we do with this thing in front of us?” And I’m like, “Well, this, this, this, and this.”
And it turned out well in terms of how we positioned ourselves on email around education for new customers and stuff, like that turned out really well. I feel like we could have done better around reducing objections on the overall store and improving the branding to be a little bit more generalist. And there was a lot of resistance, right? And just sometimes that takes time. It took time on the free shipping test because everybody was afraid. It took time on… I did one for a major usability change and it was threatening, not because people disagreed that it was the right thing to do, but because it was expensive from a development standpoint. So, you can have research supporting high risk, high reward tests, right? And then you have to get the capital inside there to really pursue it.
And what I find works well is that two thirds side of things. Most of those tests make the conversion rate go up by 5% relative, so it goes from 2 to 2.1, right? And when you keep doing that you gain more money, obviously, but you also gain more capital to continue testing. And really scrapping those small wins over time, like operationally, that’s what I’m doing, and that gives me the overhead to recommend some bigger tests. It should not surprise anyone listening to this that all of my main swing for the fence tests have happened at least six months into my engagements. It takes two quarters of renewal and trust to gain. And people can have their world views threatened and that can be scary, so it's a lot of space holding and a lot of just like telling people like, “Yeah, no. Your business is evolving. It’s evolving in a way that changes your identity and what you’re identifying with.”
And I don’t know. That’s scary. That would be scary to me. I run a business. You run a business. What would happen if it weren’t Kurt’s business anymore, right? What would happen if you hired like 60 people and all of a sudden you were just the public face of it?
Kurt Elster: Change is scary.
Nick Disabato: Change is so scary.
Kurt Elster: I mean, I had to warm up for a long time to the idea of hiring a W2 employee. And then I did it and I was like, “Well, that was the best thing I ever did. I should have done that sooner.” But until you do it and you see like, “Oh, this did not bite me.” Then yeah, it’s frightening. Especially when like as an entrepreneur, this is your livelihood. And so, I absolutely understand why people are resistant to change. It’s like, “Well, I’m already making enough money to survive. What am I risking?” And again, to your point, risk reward. And I think realistically the tests aren’t running that long. They’re not showing to everybody. And if they don’t work out, that’s the whole point of the split test is you can see if it was worthwhile or not. You can undo it.
Nick Disabato: Yeah. It’s almost like… I don’t know why I’m making this very tortured, terrible analogy, but it would be like almost like your house burns down and you’re not inside, and everyone is fine. No one’s hurt but you don’t have a house anymore.
Kurt Elster: But my stuff.
Nick Disabato: It’s like okay, but my stuff. But also, this thing I spent years investing time and effort into, right? You just got an insurance payout. You get to buy a new house. Now you’re living in a house. You’re still going to be traumatized by your house burning down. That is a threat to you and your safety. People don’t instantly recover from something like that, right? And when I come in and tell you like, “Hey, your customer actually isn’t who you thought it was and it could be this.” Now, maybe you’re moving into a better house, right? In a nicer neighborhood with cooler stuff because you just got a giant payout. You were able to use that money better. You are still going to keep thinking about what happened to you before, right?
And it’s very… It can threaten your world view like we were talking about. You establish this way that things are and it’s a form of death in some way and rebirth into a new way of existing in the business. And that is scary. I get it. I get it.
Kurt Elster: So, you have some books.
Nick Disabato: The rumors are true.
Kurt Elster: And these books lay out a process for store design?
Nick Disabato: The big book that I wrote a couple years ago, and I think it was why I was on the podcast last in like 2019, is called Value-Based Design, and it’s generally speaking the process of how you listen to your customers like this and make the numbers go up. That can apply to a software business. That can apply to a tech startup. That can apply to a store, right? But it’s on you to take the principles in that book and kind of specify what you’re gonna be doing. I am in the midst of writing a new book called Store Design and I’m sort of serializing out some of the big topics in zine form.
As of this recording, I only have two copies of the main statement of purpose remaining, so they’ll probably be sold out. Then I made one that’s specifically just the heat and scroll maps chapter and it’s called “You installed a heat and scroll mapping tool on your store, signed up for a paid plan, and then never used it for some reason.” We have a bunch of copies of that one left and we’re gonna be doing one on interviews probably later this week, and hopefully, knock on wood, bringing it out sometime next week. So, around the time that this drops.
But we’re gonna be putting out a handful more and then putting up preorders for the main thing in the beginning of January-February probably, and then get it finished and printed and shipped by the end of 2023. So, if you want to get on the ground floor and offer feedback, it’s gonna be coming out pretty shortly, so yeah. That’s what I’m doing.
Kurt Elster: What’s the purpose of this thing? This sounds like digestible quick wins, like I like the idea, snack-sized book content.
Nick Disabato: I mean, I want to give people quick wins in the process, right? I can’t just say, “Turn on upsells and you’ll make more AOV.” I can. I think that’s fairly obvious to most people listening to this, right? But also, the title of the heat and scroll mapping book is not a joke. So many people install heat and scroll mapping tools and then never use them, right? And I want to get past that shame, because they know they want to use it, and help them really feel empowered to listen to their customers.
And heat and scroll mapping is a very powerful way to observe quantitatively what’s happening on your store today. What people say and what people do are often very different, so you want to see what people are doing. And so, I give people a way to very quickly look at their heat and scroll maps and find things to be fixing from a usability standpoint, from a layout standpoint, and hopefully get the conversion rate to a decent baseline so that they can start doing later more qualitative research around interviews, usability testing, that sort of stuff.
Kurt Elster: Is my store ever good enough? At what point can I stop?
Nick Disabato: You can stop… The world keeps changing, right? So, I can say you can stop when your win rate decreases on A/B testing, you start to level off a little bit, right? But then you still have other things happening in the world, other competitors. You’re launching new products. I think again it’s kind of an eternal process of listening to what’s happening more broadly in the market. If you have something that constantly sells a fixed number of things every month until the end of linear time and you never have to throw a sale and your competitors will never actually threaten you, then yeah, there will definitely be an endpoint. It’ll probably be about a year.
But I can’t imagine a dimension in which that happens for anyone listening to this, you know? The instant you have a competitor people will be thinking about your company differently. The instant you have press, or your traffic volumes change. How much has happened in the world in the past two years that has radically changed your business? You want to figure out what’s going on, right? And gain a sense of identity within that and confidence within that. And so, research has never been more important to understand why people maybe aren’t buying or are buying less, and how you can meet those needs going forward.
Kurt Elster: So, where do I start? What do I do first?
Nick Disabato: So, in this zine, Store Design, that I put together, I basically told people get a cheap account on Hotjar, run heatmaps for three weeks, print them out for your home and product pages. I like actually physically printing them out like I’m a boomer or something. I get a pen and put my devices in another room, and I sit down with them for 20 minutes and I mark up what I see. Just you’re a journalist. You’re reporting. Where are people going? Where are people not going? And what do you think that tells you about how people are typically using your store?
I already told you how to call a customer and I record the call, ask for brutal feedback, give them a $50 Amazon gift card for their time. I ask them how they found out about us, what value they got out of us, what other companies they looked for, how they researched for our product, if that research process took a really long time or not, and then I look at all the evidence I just gathered and I sit down, I find at least five things to fix on the store. That can be one-off fixes, like this is busted, let’s correct it. There’s a bug, right? Or if it’s something around the pitch, or it’s something around reducing objections, making the customer feel comfortable buying from you, run an A/B test on Google Optimize.
And in either case, you’re mining the evidence to create a to-do list that focuses on the customer’s real needs. And I firmly believe that whatever time you spend doing this, money for Hotjar, or the gift card, you will make that back within probably a month on whatever things you fix. No matter what.
Kurt Elster: I could teach myself to do this.
Nick Disabato: Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster: I could go through this effort. Or I could just pay you to do it. How do I do that? Will you do this for me? Can I just pay you to do this?
Nick Disabato: I would be honored. Do you have a store, Kurt? I would be honored. If you go to draft.nu, I do teardowns, which is literally just me yelling at a camera for a little bit. If you go to draft.nu-
Kurt Elster: Those are a crowd favorite.
Nick Disabato: They’re a crowd favorite. They’re a good way to test the waters to see if I actually have good ideas or not. They don’t involve a whole lot of evidence gathering. It’s literally I gathered evidence for hundreds of other stores and now I’m sitting in front of you and that’s what you’re paying for, right? But if you go to draft.nu/revise, that is how you hire me to work with you on a quarterly basis to improve things.
And you know, it’s slow, patient work, but again, it’s proven in what we do. If you go to draft.nu/helped, that is all of our case studies, some of which I’ve worked with Kurt on, and I’m really proud of it. People think those numbers are too good to be true. They’re not. The end.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. A few of those, those were our client’s stores that we worked together on, and so no, those numbers are very much true. Once you hear the explanation of the research then it should start to make more sense and sound plausible. Nick, it sounds like I have to go call some customers.
Nick Disabato: You have to go right now.
Kurt Elster: I have to go right now.
Nick Disabato: Hang up the phone.
Kurt Elster: I’m gonna pick up the phone and start calling people. And after that, I’m gonna sit down and read your book, and then I’m gonna hire you, and then… Nick Disabato, draft.nu, check it out. He’s got a lot of great info there. And at the very least, sign up for his newsletter. It makes for good reading. I always check it out. Nick, thank you so much.
Nick Disabato: Thank you again. It’s always a pleasure to chat with you and just really grateful. Appreciate it.
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