_{Day 82/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

“Tim, can you come into the meeting room?”

The door was already closed.
Never a good sign.

Boss is sitting across the table, hands steepled.
No intro. Just this:

He flips his laptop around.
And there it is.

The test email.
No images. Placeholder text. Blank sections.
Subject line:

TEST — ignore me lol

I nod.
He blinks.

I shake my head.
He says it slowly:

Let’s rewind a bit...

This was back in my agency days.
Junior Growth Hacker era.
A job title that basically meant:
“Can you fix this random thing before next week?”

It’s Friday.
We're in a WeWork.
And if you’ve ever worked from a WeWork on a Friday…

You know the deal.

The beer tap opens at 4pm

By 4:30, everyone’s “working”
But also sipping their second pint.

And I’m trying to figure out a brand-new email platform.
Because we’d just moved the client’s list over manually.
No integrations. No safety nets.

Just me, a 47MB CSV, and a dream.

“Hey Tim, can you draft the campaign before you go?”

That was the brief.

Just shouted at me by someone halfway out the door.
I’m piecing it together best I can:

• Placeholder text

• Placeholder images

• Dummy subject line

• TEST segment selected (or so I thought)

I hit Send Test.
Close my laptop.
Hit the bar.

Monday comes. And so does the fallout.

Turns out the “test” segment wasn’t testy at all.
It was the entire list.
40,000 humans.
Each now in possession of a beautifully broken email.

Did I get a bollocking?
You bet I did.
My heart is pounding the entire meeting.

But then something weird happens...

It worked better than it should have

We panic-send a follow-up email:

That email?
Highest open rate of the month.

A few more sales than usual.
No one unsubscribed in rage.
In fact, the client said:

What I learned

• Always triple-check your segment.

• Always send tests to yourself.

• Accidents make you human - and people connect with that.

• Sometimes the best-performing campaign is your biggest screw-up.

Turns out I haven’t learnt sh!t

So, I sent an email a few weeks back that went out at entirely the wrong time.

And the next day I sent this…

I’ve been doing this for ten years and I’m still making mistakes…

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "A/B Test? More Like IPA Test" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. No, I never got to finish my pint that day. It still haunts me.

Penfriend.ai
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