Welcome back friend!
Nobody Cares Like You Do
A friend I’ll call Carmen was complaining to me about her employees to me last week. "My team just doesn't care the way I do,” she said. I can relate. I don’t think I’ve ever found an employee that wants it as bad as me.
As business owners, we’ve tried everything. Sharper interview questions. Core values. Bonuses. And still, people phone it in. Why?
That conversation sent me down a research rabbit hole: what creates real buy-in from real employees? (I'm aware I once wrote to you about automating my own team's work. The irony isn't lost on me.)
Owners don't care because of the money. This study tracked thousands of self-employed Americans and found that after ten years, the median founder earns about 35% LESS than they would have made as an employee. They’d be richer with a job. And yet they stayed anyway.
It turns out they stay and care theirs. Their name, their decisions, their upside, their fault.
This means we can't hire caring, and we can't pep-talk it into anyone. What made you care is the same thing that makes them care: ownership. Real pieces of it, handed over on purpose.
When the Ritz-Carlton gave every employee, housekeepers included, authority to spend up to $2,000 fixing a guest's problem without asking a manager, franchise owners threatened to sue. Nobody has ever needed the full amount. A plate of cookies usually does it. The rule exists to tell employees: we trust you.
Jack Stack saved a dying engine factory by teaching every worker to read the P&L and handing them a stake. The company that grew out of it does $600 million a year now.
So that's the answer I landed on: A number that’s theirs and a domain they run without asking. A visible slice of whatever the company makes. Sized to whatever you can afford, but real.
They don't need to care about the whole thing. Just their piece.
The IVS
SFTB friend Daniela Anavitarte Bolzmann is in the IVS streets this week. Thank you Daniela! Daniela is the founder the founder of Mindful Goods, a boutique Amazon creative studio. Daniela is a digital nomad who lives between Peru & Chicago & launched a puzzle line called the “Lost Walls Project.”
Everyone optimizes the main image. The sale is won after the click, and here's the Claude prompt to fix it.
First some context, last month, I went full nerd and did something I’d been wanting to do for years. I used Claude to analyze 900+ PickFu split testing polls from 34,000 respondents across the 850+ eCommerce brands we’ve worked with. The result was a database that lets me look up trends, spot patterns, and answer almost any question about a client’s creative before we even start designing. This has reframed how my team and I make every creative decision and I’m sharing all of it on Substack at Design Proof. This hack is published here first for the Selling From The Beach community.
Rightly so, many Amazon sellers focus on their main image, and then treat their A+ content like a formality they fill in at the end. I get why. The click. But the click just gets the shopper in the door. Next, sellers think the product image stack is the top are to focus on. This also makes sense because it’s the first potential visuals the shopper sees.
BUT, and this is a big BUT, in our experience working with 850+ brands, the A+ content, is where they actually decide to buy or bounce. We've put hundreds of real shoppers in front of dozens of A+ layouts on PickFu, and the gap between a good one and a lazy one is not small.
In our database of 1000+ split tests, there are 15 A+ tests across supplements, pet, lighting, honey, and dental, all where one-single-element decided the result more than any other: the hero headline.
And most brands waste it by restating what the product is, which Amazon already told the shopper up top. Here's the reframe that changes everything: your A+ headline should NOT answer "what is this," it should answer "why should I keep scrolling."
In our tests, "Natural" beat "Dietary." "Craveworthy" beat "delicious." A specific "the perfect bedtime hot cocoa ritual" beat a generic "works in any drink." In all cases, it was the same product, with a different headline, causing a real swing in votes.
Two more moves showed up in winner after winner…
First, your strongest number has to be huge. Social proof stats like "14 Million sold" or "84% saw results" only work when they're rendered at display size, big enough to register without stopping to squint. When those same numbers sit at body-text size, shoppers scan right past them, and you get zero credit for your best proof.
Rule of thumb: if a number is your strongest claim, render it at least 3x your body text.
Second, your credentials belong in the headline, not buried in a paragraph. "Built by Dental Experts" and "By Birdwatchers For Birdwatchers" drove votes when they were the headline. The exact same claims, sitting in body copy, got ignored.
Think of your A+ content like a newspaper: people read the headlines and look at the photos, and almost nobody reads the fine print. So put your best punch in the headline. Keep the fine print minimal and digestible.
Here's the AI hack to make this easy on you.
Hand your A+ content to Claude and have it audit these exact levers before you spend a dollar building a new version. Yes AI can design for you, but IMO it shouldn't.
AI is genuinely good at catching the lazy headline, the buried stat, and the credential you hid in a paragraph. Below is a condensed version of the prompt we run internally, built from those 15 tests.
Screenshot your A+ content, paste the prompt here in, attach the image, and run it.
The one thing I'll leave you with: the shopper is scanning, not studying. Your A+ content has about the same odds of being read word-for-word as Amazon’s terms and conditions. So win it the way a newspaper wins it, with the headline and the photos, and put your best proof where a skimmer can't miss it. The prompt above just makes sure you didn't leave any of that on the table.
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The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
Every Employee, AI-Powered, on Your Amazon Account
If you have employees or contractors and you want them making quick changes at scale, you need this one-pager. Inside is the safe way to give your team real API access to your Amazon account without handing anyone your password or your keys: each person gets their own three strings, limited to the permission boxes you tick, revoked with one delete the day they leave. They don't need to code.
They plug the strings into the AI desktop app (Claude/GPT/Gemini) and make changes in plain English: listings, images, prices, inventory…
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On The Hometown Road - Saint John, NB
Street Party!
The Local Lowdown is on the road this week. I'm writing from Saint John, New Brunswick, the city where I was born and raised, back visiting my parents.
If you've ever moved away and then gone back to your hometown, you know the feeling. Half of it is exactly how you left it, and the other half makes you do a double take. But the thing that gets me every time is the friendliness. Out east, everyone is polite and just about itching to strike up a conversation. You forget how much you miss that until a stranger in line wants to hear your whole life story.
Outside of family visits, the week has been mini golf, arcades, and even a street party under a fake full moon. We also tried a chess meetup at the public library, but it was a bust. Honestly, the whole library was quieter than I ever remember it being, and it made me wonder how much longer places like that will be around :) We salvaged the afternoon with a family puzzle instead.
Coming home always brings the nostalgia with it. Catching up with old friends (great seeing you Angus), retelling the old stories, figuring out where everybody ended up. At the street party I kept scanning the crowd for a face I might recognize. Then again, it's been 25 years, and some days I barely recognize myself.
The Category Switch to gain a BSR Badge
Last week I posted about how to get a BSR badge. Read here if you missed it. It worked well, almost too well. Sometimes the easiest and most impactful stuff is right in front of you. I have heard some people say that switching your category can hurt your organic rankings. That is true, if the category you switch to is markedly different from your current one. Changing categories is always a risky proposition. But I say why not test it? If it doesn't work or move the needle for you, just change it back. It’s the same as a main image test, as far as i’m concerned.
A friend tried this and got the BSR badge in 24 hours.
Since that post, I learned something the hard way that I have to pass along: not every category actually gives out the badge.
I had another switch lined up last week. Went to pull the trigger and did one last check. The category I was moving into turned out to be a dead one. Amazon has a pile of older categories that still keep a ranked Best Sellers list behind the scenes, but never show the badge on the product page (no idea why these exist, but they do). You can hit #1 in one of those and nothing changes. No orange badge. Nothing a customer will ever see.
So before you switch, do this 2-minute check:
- Open the Best Sellers list for the category you're eyeing and click into the current #1.
- Look at their product page. Are they wearing the orange Best Seller badge? Does the category show up in their Best Sellers Rank section?
- If you see neither, the category is a dud. Pick a different one.
While you're on that #1 listing, look for the "X+ bought in past month" line. That's the floor of what they sell every month. If you can't beat that number, you won't take the badge from them anyway.
One more thing: the switch isn't always instant. If your new category still hasn't shown up after 3 or 4 days, it's stuck. Open a case with Seller Support and ask them to set the category on their end. That's what it took for me.
Now go get your badge.
Is The Flight Going to be Bumpy?
Every flight has that moment. The seatbelt light dings, the plane shudders, and everyone in row 23 becomes briefly religious. 🙏
Turbli.com fixes the not-knowing part. Free site: enter your two airports and travel day within 36 hours of takeoff, pick your flight, and it gives you a turbulence forecast for your exact route, adjusted for the actual aircraft flying it. For US flights it uses the route and altitude the pilots filed, about 90 minutes before departure. Under the hood it is NOAA turbulence data, recalibrated every day against real measurements from Delta and United planes. So you are reading the same data your pilots brief with, except in your pajamas the night before. Built by a computational fluid dynamics PhD (the exact guy you want on this), used by 200,000 people a month.
To be clear, the forecast does not smooth the air. It converts "what if it is bad" into "light chop for 40 minutes over Colorado," and your brain treats those as two completely different flights.
Enjoy.
Increase the friction associated with bad behaviours. When friction is high, habits are difficult. For example take the batteries out of your remote or unplug the TV.
James Clear
NACHOS! Now that I have your attention… you probably would like the Facebook community.
This week in the Facebook group: Aaron asks whether or not we should disclose that our images are AI.
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