Cal Short

today i launch Blox: autonomous landing pages for marketers landing pages are a growth bottleneck, every change needs dev time or a clunky builder so we fixed it - build on-brand landers with words - personalize copy to every audience - run a/b tests without code try it free

@1ajaay Sent you a DM - would love to show you Blox

Spent the morning trying out a few of those 'Create a landing page in 5 mins with my app' softwares It's literally just replo or gempages with a hint of chatGPT You prompt them and they don't give you back your page with specific copy, imagery, design like the examples the guys shilling them are showing They just give you back pretty generic sections like you'll find in any page builder app out there.. Custom design & custom code always the way We're looking at using ai to help speed up development, but even there we're seeing a human touch is still needed to ensure the pages match the quality of what we produce without ai

@itsolelehmann This will be a thing by the end of the decade I bet

I need a personal bank account with api access to i can do simple banking tasks using my agent

@THArrowOfApollo CODE

We were Clay's largest user at one point in time, hitting their platform 17.3 million times per week. Last month we replaced them entirely with a $200/mo Claude Code subscription. I can't write code. Neither can James, my VP of Growth who built the replacement. Here's the full story. Clay is a GREAT product and I TRULY think most people should use it. But we hit their ceiling. 50,000 row limit per table. 12.5 million row cap per workspace. Tables that take days to actually delete. Clicking "run all" thousands of times and waiting days for things to clear out. So When you're processing millions of leads, all the above become the bottleneck of your entire business. James had never touched Claude Code before. Three weeks after learning it, he built our entire core system. With Clay, processing 1 million leads took 27 hours. And it would error out often enough that we would always have to plan on hitting the “run all rows” button again on 20+ clay tables. IYKYK but Our new system waterfall enriches 1 million leads in 5 seconds. 272,000 leads PER SECOND. AND On top of the core engine, we vibe coded a Google Maps scraper that pulls leads zip code by zip code across all 32,000 US zip codes. AND An AI lead finder that hits 95% contact match rates where Apollo gives you about 30%. AND Ad library scrapers for Google and LinkedIn. AND An AI campaign analysis system. AND An auto-refill system so clients never run out of leads mid-campaign. One we started building with Claude, we just couldn’t stop Now we have the data ready for clients sending 5 million emails a month within 1 week of signing the contract. I put together the full system blueprint -- every tool, the tech stack, a Clay vs custom comparison, and a 6-step playbook for building your own. Plus a video walkthrough where I show you the live system and how each tool actually works. Retweet or Reply CODE below and I'll DM it to you.

@ashvinmelwani @iamwesleymoore genuine question - how are you building the quiz funnels?

@iamwesleymoore it's performing like dog shit. stay away from quizzes!!!!!!

Everyone needs to stop talking about quiz funnels. They suck. Don't use them. Send your traffic to a PDP. Meta loves that.

@jack @blocks this is just the beginning - smaller companies will win long-term

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

anybody else forget perplexity existed?

@forgebitz there are loads of products that are ripe to be unbundled - think of any generic tool that would of took serious effort to build, think of a specific use case for it and build for that audience

ai is going to make a lot of business ideas viable some niche products just never made sense and you needed scale, 10+ devs etc. now you can have a team of 2-3 build a niche product and thrive

@VivienMahe It’s changed massively, took a year out and came back, it’s like a completely different site

I'm starting to get tired of X. - Too much effort to grow for low ROI - Slowly turning into Instagram/TikTok - Too much flexing, engagement bait but not enough real stuff, numbers Kinda miss the 2023 Build in Public vibe 🥲

@real_Ivn full books, chases me for clarification putting together the books is basically classification + research for unknowns, then human clarification if there's no clear match it's the perfect task for AI imo

replacing my $10k/year accountant with openclaw not even a joke yes this may age terrible

you can train an agent to code your brands landing pages for free btw withblox.com

before: $10k and a week waiting on devs after: 10 prompts in Blox

@tibo_maker im surprised it took them this long tbh

it's done X removed the ability to reply through the API so tell me: are you seeing a huge reduction in AI replies today?

i started using google ads 10 yrs ago back then, manual cpc got you results now, doing nothing and letting the algo figure it out gets you results optimisation keeps getting pushed down the funnel in a few years time, the only thing that will matter is your offer

@toddsaunders genuinely one of the highest ROI things you can do, I tried this in the past with small biz customers and straight up cash for feedback very dependent on who your customers are though

I had coffee with a founder who sends every churned customer a $50 Amex gift card and a handwritten note. The note says: "Thanks for giving us a shot. Would you be willing to spend 15 minutes telling us what we got wrong?" 68% of churned customers take the call (they get the gift card whether they take the call or not) More than 2/3 of the customers who left his product voluntarily get on the phone to explain why... pretty crazy when you think about it. He records every call (with permission) and tags the reasons into a database. After two years, the he used that data to completely change the business and reduce his churn by 20%. The top reason for churn wasn't what he expected either. It was "we couldn't get our team to use it." An adoption problem, not a product problem. So he rebuilt onboarding from scratch. Added a mandatory training session. Built an adoption dashboard that flags accounts where usage drops below a threshold within the first 60 days. Churn dropped by 40%! The $50 gift card costs him ~$6,600/year but the are worth exponentially more to him long term. Most companies survey churned customers with an automated email that gets a 4% response rate and congratulate themselves like they did a good job. This founder treats every lost customer like a consulting engagement. The difference in data quality is unbelievable.

dogfooding is how you build great products we've been using Blox to build all of our landing pages, span up 30 ad pages in about half an hour you'd have to drag me back to framer kicking and screaming

@real_Ivn honestly im not sure, but its way worse at emulating existing brand guidelines have been testing it all day

Gemini models are supreme for landing pages But, I think 3.1 was a regression Take this example, both are one-shot prompts using Blox editor What do we think?

real marketers use claude code to do their audits for them

@kevinyun agree only variable is that they are both trained on the ag1 website by Blox and there can be a small variance in how they are trained but i did test it a few times, it's possible its better at coming up with new designs but not adhering to existing guidelines

@calshort 3.0 definitely looks better here. No other factors involved? Lot more finesse in 3.0