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Fishbone Talk · 12 posts

Opinions and post-mortems.

What broke, what we learned, and what we would tell a client. Written when there is something to say, which is why the count is small and honest.

Latest · how-to · · 8 min

how to set up woocommerce quantity discounts (bulk pricing tiers)

Buy 5, save 5%. Buy 10, save 10%. Add quantity discount tiers to WooCommerce with a few hooks, show them on the product page, and check they still make money.

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opinion · · 6 min

give away the whole fix. charge for what comes after

Most free tiers are crippled on purpose, built to annoy you into paying. That's a trap for you and for them. Free should completely solve one problem, and you charge when someone outgrows it. Here's why that sells better, and where it doesn't work.

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opinion · · 9 min

"hard work pays off" is a lie. here's what actually pays

Hard work pays off for whoever owns what the work builds. If that isn't you, it's paying someone else. Smart work is deciding what the effort should build and who keeps it, and the payoff comes from ownership.

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opinion · · 5 min

nobody cares about your brand. they care about their tuesday

Most marketing talks about the company: our mission, our team, our values. Customers don't buy that. They buy the moment where their problem goes away. Here's how to build every piece of marketing around one real moment in your customer's day.

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opinion · · 6 min

your followers aren't yours. stop renting your audience

A follower count is a number a platform lets you look at. It can shrink overnight because of a rule you never voted on. The marketing that actually stacks up is the stuff you own: your site, your search traffic, your email list. Use social for reach and own where people end up.

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opinion · · 5 min

build a free tool instead of another ad

An ad works while you pay for it. A small free tool that solves a real problem keeps bringing people in for years. Why useful beats loud, what makes a good free tool, and when it's the wrong call.

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opinion · · 5 min

the most persuasive line on your sales page is what you don't do

Every sales page claims everything, so readers believe none of it. Saying plainly what your product doesn't do is the fastest way to be believed about what it does. Why honest limits sell, and how to write them without scaring anyone off.

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field notes · · 5 min

you don't need more content. you need to ship what you already made

Making more is the hard-work lie of marketing. Most businesses have a pile of finished work that never reached a customer: drafts, approved posts, half-launched pages. Shipping that pile beats making a new one. Here's how to spot it and clear it.

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how-to · · 8 min

how to add a custom input field to a woocommerce product page

Add a text field to a WooCommerce product page (engraving, a gift message) that is checked, shown in the cart and saved on the order. Five hooks, no plugin.

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how-to · · 7 min

how to work out profit per order in woocommerce (and the four costs your report is probably missing)

WooCommerce shows what an order took in, not what it made. Here is the per-order profit formula, a worked example, the four costs most reports leave out, and how to set your store up so the number is honest.

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field notes · · 9 min

your prerender says it worked. here's how to tell if it actually did

How to check if a page was really prerendered: why a 200 and a byte count both lie, and a free check you can run on any site, with or without a terminal.

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opinion · · 6 min

stop screaming "ai" at your customers

Leading every ad and pitch with your tech stack makes the tech the product instead of the customer's outcome. We watched it happen with blockchain. It's happening again with AI. Here's how to talk about your tech without repelling the people you're trying to sell to.

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