Tom

building a solo business in personalized children's books

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

I've spent tens of thousands of $$$ with @gelato and mostly it's been great

But now they've delayed 100+ orders

There's no indication anything will arrive by Christmas

They quietly shorted the shipping window by a week w/ no announcement

And I'm stuck in "ai support bot hell"

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@jordienr @supabase Yeah idk what happened, it worked again shortly after! Weird, soz for the noise! 🙏

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@supabase did y'all just make the table editor sidebar super wide? too wide for me! 🙏

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@IMJustinBrooke gcp

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

storybrand X hero's journey

- a character the customer can relate to
- put them in a hole "it hurts"
- make it worse "in fact it was killing me"
- get them out of the hole "this product/service saved me"
- happily ever after
- cta: if you're in that hole, get this

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@rqobela 304 Stop Hassling Me

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@DavidGouge @rqobela The “yeah nah” of http codes

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

ngl, windsurf is awesome, but somehow i still love the og copy-paste into chatgpt workflow

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

Picked a good week to consolidate on us-east-1

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

also created a lil shell helper called `did()` which adds annotations to my posthog analytics

easy/dumb way to see what happened near interesting moments in the charts

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

i've broken my checkout too many times

so i've just rolled out playwright

every time i deploy, it runs a test purchase using the airwallex demo card in my shiny new staging env

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

gpt5 on @replicate
nice but lacking self-awareness

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@prisma @vercel @supabase I'd love to, but I'm pretty happy with supabase... and the todo list is looooooong :)

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

db latency from @vercel to @prisma accelerate to @supabase, before and after localising

vercel in us-east-1

prisma is everywhere (cf anycast)

before: supabase in ap-southeast-2
p50 = 1.2s, p99 = 4.4s

after: supabase in us-east-1
p50 = .23s, p99 = 1.9s

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

Dark patterns for dealing with meta - a brainstorm

1. Send conversion values reduced by 50% to pixel and capi. See if meta’s skimming algorithm adjusts

2. Every time I get a sale, increase ad budget by 10% immediately. Any hour without a sale, decrease it

What else?

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

@SamMendelsohnW6 I have had thoughts like these and dismissed them as sour grapes.

But maybe I’ll change my pixel & capi to send meta conversion values of 50% the real value and see if my CPA goes down 😅

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

Results of my headlines & desires test

Looking primarily at CTR, side-eye on CPC

✅got a shortlist for further testing

Interesting to see the low-CPC & low-CPM outlier top the charts 👀

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

- cbo with 'autoshutoff' in name
- automated rule to kill any ad with >$3 spent and campaign name contains 'autoshutoff'
- one adset, usual audience suggestion (no restrictions)
- one ad per image
- daily budget $150

all ads should be done in a couple days, ready to analyze

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

today i'm probing market desires... figuring out what do ppl click on most

running $3 each in ad spend to 55 ugly AF ads

only diff is the headline

using traffic goal instead of sales 😳🤯

bc i want fast signal about interests & desires

don't care about readiness to buy rn

[Tom @TomFromRealLife]

2/2
- export images
- create bulk import csv with same headline and primary text for all rows
- use facebook ads 'bulk import ads' tool in new cbo campaign

next: campaign setup