Skip to content

Part 3 · Operate

Discovery

Claims other people made about what works, with the link they made them in, and three minutes a week to rule on them.

01What it is

A queue of specific tactics pulled out of things people published. Each row is one claim, the number they gave if they gave one, the source and date, and what testing it would actually cost you. You do one of three things with each: try it, reject it, or leave it for later.

02Why it exists

Every other screen in this product improves what you are already doing. The allocator moves budget toward the message that is working, the scoreboard tells you whether a lane is worth another week, the experiment engine kills an arm that has had its forty sends. All of that is search inside a space you defined when you set the venture up.

None of it can find a tactic nobody here thought of. A system that only optimises converges on a local maximum and then stays there, looking healthy the whole time, because every number it watches is improving. The only way out is to go and read what other people claim worked and try the ones worth trying.

That is why this screen shows claims rather than conclusions. We have not run any of these. We cannot tell you whether the person who wrote one was right, whether they measured it properly, or whether it only worked because of something about their market that is not true of yours. Judging that is the part you are good at and the system is not, so the system does the reading and the deduplication and hands you the shortlist.

The design constraint that matters most is that it stays cheap. Three minutes a week, keyboard-driven. A queue that takes longer gets opened once, and a discovery loop whose queue nobody opens is worse than not building one, because the miner keeps filling it and you get a growing pile of unread homework instead of a habit.

03How to use it

  1. 01Open it once a week. The keys are j and k to move, a to try it, x to reject, l for later.
  2. 02Read the claim and the credibility badge together. Somebody who ran it and gave a number is worth more than somebody repeating advice, and the badge says which.
  3. 03Check the cost line before accepting. It tells you how many sends and roughly how many weeks before the result means anything, which is the real price of the decision.
  4. 04When you reject, give a reason if you have one. The reason is read back by the miner to stop showing you that class of claim.
  5. 05Open the source when the claim sounds too good. The original text is on the row, and the link is on it too.

04What good looks like

You give it
A post where somebody wrote "we moved the ask to the second message instead of the first and replies went from 2% to 6%".
You get
One row: dimension follow-up, claimed number "from 2% to 6%", credibility "ran it, gave a number", with the post linked and the sentence quoted underneath.
Why
The sentence contains a first-person past-tense report and a stated before-and-after, which is what separates a measured claim from advice. The number is stored as the person wrote it rather than parsed into a rate, because "from 2% to 6%" and "6%" are different claims and rounding one into the other would misrepresent the source.

Derived from the rules in the code

05What weak looks like, and what it costs

You give it
A thread of eleven posts all saying some version of "shorter subject lines get more opens".
You get
One row, not eleven.
Why
Claims are compared on their meaningful words rather than hashed, so restatements collapse into one. Numbers count double in that comparison: two claims that both say 6am are very probably the same claim, and two that say three touches and seven touches are very probably not.

Derived from the rules in the code

06Read next

Discovery · InstinctGTM