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Founder @abconvert Revolutinizing a/b testing in ecommerce.
Joined October 2013
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I paid $4000 for an iPhone Duo, and this is what happened after 24 hours of usage...fuming...
🤖 Made with AI
I love this
Yep. Except:
1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case.
2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here.
3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem.
4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄
the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose.
But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.
📈 How to Scale eCommerce Profits with Automated A/B Testing, Price Experiments & AI Agents | Jeffrey Lin - ABConvert | E724
Deets & Links
Guest: Jeffrey Lin, Founder of ABConvert
Website: abconvert.io
Episode Overview
In this episode of THE ECOMMERCE EDGE Podcast, host Jason Greenwood sits down with Jeffrey Lin, Founder of ABConvert.
Jeffrey shares his inspiring journey from a fresh graduate in Taipei experimenting with drop shipping to creating Shopify's leading A/B testing platform for price optimization, shipping rates, checkout experiences, and URL redirects.
Together, Jason and Jeffrey explore the art and science of conversion rate optimization (CRO) for eCommerce merchants. Jeffrey breaks down how to overcome hypothesis fatigue, how to avoid common testing traps like p-hacking and emotional early stops, and how AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and clean data schemas are turning A/B testing into an automated, hands-off infrastructure.
If you want to learn how to squeeze more profit out of your existing store traffic without overcomplicating your tech stack, this episode is packed with actionable insights.
Timestamps
[0:00:00] - Welcome Jeffrey Lin, Founder of ABConvert & late-night Taipei banter
[0:02:10] - From grad school freshman to SaaS founder: The origin story of ABConvert
[0:04:30] - Inspired by "Confessions of the Pricing Man": Building a Shopify price testing prototype
[0:07:16] - The core challenge of website testing: How to build actionable hypotheses
[0:10:48] - Studying Ron Kohavi and developing an operator's sense for CRO analytics
[0:14:44] - Bootstrapping data benchmarks, heatmaps, and building an internal idea bank
[0:19:15] - The future of hands-off A/B testing: Predictive analytics and automated experiment generation
[0:22:49] - Becoming invisible infrastructure: Connecting ABConvert with Claude, Sidekit, and MCP
[0:26:23] - Overcoming p-hacking: How autonomous AI prevents emotional and irrational testing stops
[0:30:55] - The evolution of SaaS: Transitioning from cluttered dashboards to clean data schemas
[0:33:56] - The product roadmap: Operator X autonomous agents, Shopify Sidekit, and Slack workflows
[0:36:43] - Off the clock: Culinary A/B testing and replicating restaurant dishes in a Taiwanese kitchen
[0:38:52] - Flipping the script: Jeffrey asks Jason about personalized, prompt-driven AI podcasts
THE ECOMMERCE EDGE Podcast Home - greenwoodconsulting.net/podc…
The best thing to do whenever there is a new model drop.
Fable 5.1 just came out, and in the past, what we did with the new model version was test old tasks that you think are still not perfect.
I have a habit of keeping a bank of task descriptions + material and re-running it every time
1. A new skill has come out (no one has talked about skills lately)
2. A new model launch
3. A new harness tool
There are several benefits to doing it
1. You will know whether it's a context problem or a model performance problem
2. The difference in quality or processing time will give you a grasp of what improvement this model is
3. It forces you to form a habit of building your internal test cases
After all, the most important task to do is still eval these days.
Ok enough of AI.
Some quick tips a brand can take with immediate value are to build your landing page test variants.
Send this to your Claude 👇
"
Can you build variations for this page
that is
1. listicle v.s. product page
2. listicle v.s advertorial
3. listicle v. long-form landing page
reference:
"
If your theme is connected with GitHub, make sure you add one sentence: "create new page(liquid) directly on , create a preview theme first", then you will have ready-to-test pages (use URL redirect test for it).
Give it a shot; you will be surprised :)
Bonus point: make sure you get Higgsfield connected
Jeff retweeted
I'll die on this hill...
There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing $5 to $10 million in revenue.
Learn how to create demand organically through content, partnerships, and outreach first. That's enough to take you to that 5-10M mark. Then once that engine is running, layer ads on top.
If you do it the other way around you risk getting eaten up by rising ad costs before your margins can absorb it.
"SaaS is dead" is for ppl who think a SaaS biz is just coding.
It's more than that; it's branding/onboarding optimization/pricing and packaging/customer experience optimization/UIUX etc.
Coding probably stands for no more than 15%. Still pretty optimistic about Saas. Public markets are opinion for hot money, not actual value.
Jeff retweeted
"They said AI would replace design. Instead it proved how much design matters."
That's @felixleezd's line, and he'd know. A VC told him at 20 that Singaporeans can't build companies. No design degree, rejected from the jobs he wanted.
Then he built @ADPList into the biggest free mentorship platform in the world instead. A million users, 40,000 mentors, 140 countries.
We got into:
•Why judgment, not pixels, is the real moat in design now
•Why "originality is dead," and why similar-looking apps can both win
•Why super-app clutter vs. Western minimalism is cultural, not a quality gap
•Splitting with a co-founder the right way
•The hiring mistakes he'd take back
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Oakland Ice Center Intro
(00:47) From Singapore's National Skating Team
(02:22) AI vs. Human Design
(04:53) Is Originality Dead?
(06:42) Designers vs. Engineers
(08:23) Minimalism and Culture
(10:55) Ethics and AI Trust
(12:57) What ADPList Is
(13:37) Closed Doors and Why He Built It
(17:42) Quitting to Go All In
(20:31) The Founder Outreach Playbook
(26:04) Don Norman Lessons
(28:56) Scaling Free Mentorship to a Million
(31:57) Designing With Claude
(33:59) Fable Workflows
(41:51) Audience vs. Community
(43:16) The PR Crisis
(52:31) What Sports Taught Him About Failure
(54:42) Splitting With a Co-Founder the Right Way
(59:33) Hiring Mistakes
(01:04:21) San Francisco Culture Shock
(01:11:25) Long-Term Games
Jeff retweeted
Hire extraordinary designers.
The most brilliant founding designers often don't have pretty portfolios — this is one of the best essays that breaks it down.
Here's everything you need to know on how to hire founding designers:
ALT Highlighted draft text defining ideal first designer: product-minded thinker who crafts detailed, rare design skill, with profile traits and hiring advice.
ALT Section titled "When to hire" with highlighted advice saying hire earlier than you think but later than designers suggest, weighing common and uncommon views.
Jeff retweeted
Being around ambitious people will change your life.
We broke the record with > 100 people at a single Taipei event ;) All brought together by @ADPList, @abconvert and Sparklabs Taiwan.
The premise was simple: @billionxdev and I wanted to gather the most driven builders in one room and see what happens.
As the night unfolded, I honestly lost track of how many new faces I met, how many candid stories we shared, and the number of times someone told me, "ADPList has changed my life.”
For me, this wasn’t just another event.
Since growing @ADPList from a spontaneous spreadsheet in 2021 to a movement supporting millions, I’ve learned the most pivotal breakthroughs aren’t about code or capital—they’re about who you surround yourself with.
I was once again reminded why we exist in the first place.
Thank you, Taipei. You’ve set a new bar for what’s possible when builders unite. Can’t wait for the next one.
So here’s to building bolder, together.
Bangkok is an awesome place, but not many Ecom meetups despite having many good Ecom bros.
Therefore, I decided to team up with @kevin_miguet to host an event lu.ma/m4i1579f to have pizza/beer/good conversation in Bkk.
Let's have fun this Friday?
RT @kevin_miguet: Bangkok has plenty of Ecom' bros, but no CRO meetup.
We're fixing that problem, on Friday. Join us for the first Bangkok…
Type 2: In-house playbook
Takeaway: This will maximize your content usage and jam your content calendar
A playbook can be broken down into 5 blog posts, which equal 5 newsletters, and each blog post can have 5 carousels.
One playbook = 15 assets
A case study = 3 assets = 1 blog post + 1 newsletter + 1 carousel
Put them on one content calendar, you will fill up all your calendar.
Free resource: share.hsforms.com/11107zqheQ…