Carlos Trujillo

DotDev, day one. Vibes on point.

Just made it to Toronto for my first DotDev experience. I've worked remotely for 10+ years and meeting the people I mostly know through a screen still feels a little surreal every time. Looking forward to this one!

In Toronto next week for @Shopify's DotDev 🇨🇦 Wednesday we're hosting the @Intelligems Lounge in Liberty Village: coffee, brunch, tarot readings, co-working, good people. No pitches. We're full, but DM me if you want on the waitlist.

@DaveDiederen has tested across hundreds of stores, but when it came time to build his own brand, all that knowledge froze him. He kept chasing perfect and felt like a newbie again. What unstuck him: done beats perfect. Ship it, let the data tell you the rest. Really enjoyed this one.

@JuliansDigital @JuliansDigital yo check your DMs!

@catrugo The amount of time this wastes in business... could be a separate service business on its own.

A live test is the most honest review a design can get. Don't let your design team go into endless feedback loops guessing what might be best and draining team resources. Most tests will get killed anyway, decide when it matters, data-backed.

Tomorrow I'm hosting @DaveDiederen, aka the king of the blue bars on here. He's tested across hundreds of stores running his agency, and now he's building his own brand. We get into what actually carries over when you make that jump. We go live 11am EST, streaming from @Intelligems. Catch it there.

@DaveDiederen I also had good results with this kind of execution in the past. Something else that worked was adding the origin state in the copy "Ships by Tomorrow from X" (obvs if local)

Tested adding a simple “Ships by Tomorrow” callout directly underneath the checkout CTA in the cart drawer, and it worked. At the point someone reaches the cart, they’ve already decided they like the product. The remaining friction is usually around everything that happens after they click checkout. “When will it arrive?” “Is shipping going to take forever?” “Should I just order this somewhere else?” A clear delivery promise answers one of those final objections immediately. And the placement matters. Putting “Ships by Tomorrow” directly underneath the CTA means the reassurance appears at the exact moment someone is deciding whether to continue. They don’t have to search through a shipping policy, FAQ, or product page to understand how quickly their order will move. It also makes the purchase feel more immediate. The customer isn’t just buying something that will eventually arrive, they’re buying something that is already about to be on its way. Such a tiny piece of copy, but a great example of how reducing uncertainty at the bottom of the funnel can have a surprisingly big impact on performance.

@AaronOrendorff @codyplof It's really cool @AaronOrendorff!

To be clear, despite @codyplof’s kind words, I didn’t build this. My team built this. Vibe-coded from the ground up by a mad (genius) woman! And I mean that in the best possible sense 😻 portal.9operators.com/dashboard

One of my favorite books on experimentation is around 300 pages long, and it spends only 4 of them on A/B testing. "Testing Business Ideas" by David Bland and @AlexOsterwalder. A good reminder that systematic experimentation is a much bigger idea than the tests we tend to argue about.

@Intelligems Game-changer 🔥

If you can prompt it, you can build it. If you can build it, you can test it. Our AI Visual Builder is now available on all plans. 💎

I admire those willing to test their ideas and product changes with statistical rigor. It's easier just to ship and hope for the best, living under the illusion that all you come up with is great. It takes courage to let the data speak over opinions and be open to the possibility that most of your new features might be irrelevant to the market.

@UbaldoHervas Es muy bueno!

Top-3 mejor libro de este año sin duda.

AI is great at telling you what generally works. Urgency banner, trust badges, punchier headline. The patterns it's seen a thousand times. But it was trained on everyone's store, not yours. Whether that change fits your customers, your margins, your catalog is still something you'd want to test to know for sure.

@DaveDiederen @conortrains Boom 💥

Ever since I started my own brand, a whole new world of what is possible opened up to me. Meeting absolute killers doing 6-7 figs profitably in just a matter of a few weeks. Completely shattered my believe of what I thought was possible. @conortrains was right all along

@ecommcowboy @kurtinc Spot on @kurtinc Nail down a narrative and you won't have to worry about the latest and shiniest scarcity UX component out there

"The difference between losers and winners: storytelling." Assuming you've already got product-market fit, @kurtinc says copywriting is what differentiates Shopify stores that scale from ones that don't. "Can you keep the story top-of-mind across everything you do?" PR barely gets talked about in ecommerce circles, but if you nail it, it informs every other strategy: • ads • creative • websites etc. "Without a good story, nothing sticks. Nothing's memorable." Kurt just launched some great Claude agent skills too. Grab them below.

Finding UX inspiration is easy. Knowing what's actually worth keeping is the hard part. @lindabustos joined the show today. She's cataloged 1,000+ of the boldest ideas in ecommerce, and the clever ones have a habit of quietly disappearing. The ones that stick aren't the cleverest. They're the ones that actually move the needle.

Torture your data long enough and it'll confess to anything. Slice by device, by country, by traffic source, keep cutting until some segment finally looks good. But the smaller the slice, the smaller the sample, and the more likely that "insight" is just noise.

One of the most underrated skills in experimentation is separating the test outcome from the business decision. A variant can win and still be wrong for the business. A variant can lose and give you exactly the signal you needed. The test tells you what happened. What you do next is still yours to decide.

Not long ago, I had a client ready to kill a test because conversions were flat. Not down. Flat. But Revenue per Visitor was up 5-6%, driven by an AOV spike that made total sense given what they changed. The variant was making them more money, yet they wanted to stop it. CR is the scoreboard people are biased to pay attention to. But it doesn't always tell the full story. If you're not tracking what actually lands in the bank, you'll make the wrong call more often than you think.