Relievet has shut down. I was coming up on 2 years in this job. Less time than that as my sole source of income. When I first started I was working weekends as a bus boy at an Indian restaurant for minimum wage and the dregs of tips the waitresses were supposed to share with me. I worked Monday through Friday at Relievet and Friday through Sunday at the restaurant. My longest reprieves were Sunday mornings before happy hour, and Fridays lasted from when I showed up to Relievet at 9AM until I got home from the restaurant at 12AM.
Eventually Relievet was able to hire me on full-time, and I have been there since. I was initially hired to help with shipping and manufacturing. The owner very quickly realized I had high technical proficiency and extremely high writing proficiency. Very valuable assets when your primary mode of income is your online store. Especially when its visitors mostly arrive via Search Engine Optimized content. So I was tasked with whatever required technical expertise, knowledge, or the fundamentals which are so frequently necessary to even learn to do something.
A few of the things I was tasked with or made
Highlights
- Using an Arduino, I wrote the control software for an industrial strength dog chew shaping and chopping machine. I also wired the electronics for the machine1.
- Wholly responsible for email marketing campaigns, comprising a large percentage of our recurring revenue.
- Wrote a custom interactive dosage calculator with plain Javascript which made it easy to determine which product would work best for specific situations. It increased conversion rate by 15%.
Everything else
- Setting up handwriting machine to semi-automatically make handwritten custom notes for every order.
- Creating various custom Shopify theme components, including:
- An automatically generated table of contents for blog posts.
- Embedded recommended blog posts based on matching article tags.
- Hero slideshow.
- Brand carousel.
- Case study cards.
- Case study collection page.
- Double column element.
- Variant selector integrated with 3rd-party subscription app.
- Image with text element.
- Dosing table modal.
- Lab results page.
- Besides our Shopify storefront I was also tasked with making three additional websites. I had discretion over how to make them, and chose 11ty. They were:
- A simple static website with blog content, a contact page, and a few advertorials.
- A single page advertorial.
- A quiz-style advertorial.
- Migrated company email from Outlook to Gmail.
- Managed DNS settings and DMARC compliance.
- Automated sentiment analysis across all of our blog posts using Anthropic’s Haiku.
- Wrote a custom Shopify app to perform bulk backup and editing of our blog posts.
- Wrote a custom Shopify app to perform a refresh of our products by duplicating them and deleting the originals.
- Wrote 56 well researched blog posts on complex topics such as medication, ailments, and home remedies.
- Searched and found a realtime Google Analytics alternative: Matomo.
- Set up tracking for Key Performance Indicators.
- Performed A/B testing using multiple versions of the same page and javascript redirects.
- Implemented funnel tracking.
- Used Shopify Flow to automate repetitive tasks like fraud analysis and tracking acquisitions.
- Automated web scraping contact information for backlink proposals.
- Entire email customer service load, and some phone customer service.
- Converted the website from using the Pagefly page builder to Shopify’s own page builder.
- Managed our office network.
- Manufactured consumable products in a clean room following gram-precision recipes.
Reflecting on My Time at Relievet
I am very grateful for the time I got to spend working at Relievet. Although I was only initially hired to help clear a manufacturing backlog, the owner recognized my talents for things technical and literary, and employed those skills extensively to help the business. Asked why I think those skills were not enough to put off Relievet shutting down, I would say that they actually did prolong its existence. Unfortunately it was an uphill battle.
There are three main reasons I think that Relievet did not succeed:
- Too many competitors in a small niche where we did not have some sufficient competitive advantage to differentiate ourselves.
- A two-way stigma against our product. Our product was broad spectrum CBD (cannabidiol) for pets. The stigma existed from both directions: consumers who associate CBD with its origin of the Marijuana plant, and consumers who associate THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) with the beneficial effects of CBD, which our products lacked2.
- Our product being closely associated with a prohibited substance, despite CBD being shown in multiple studies to be extremely safe, especially in comparison with medications frequently prescribed to address the same ailments with which CBD can help.
The owner has frequently lamented starting a CBD business in the first place, and says he would never do so if he knew then what he knows now. I do not blame him. They are slim odds of success, and there is little evidence that anyone is hugely successful in the space.
Founder asked me to write the control software for a dog chew chopping machine (don't ask).
— Lucian (@LucianKnock) September 5, 2024
Turns out he did a terrible job wiring it and I had to re-wire it from scratch too. Anyways I got laid off.
So, what’s the plan now?
What it says in the title. Get a job.
What kind of job is kind of up in the air. During my time at Relievet I was able to work on a wide range of things and become a generalist on all things e-commerce. But selling things like manufactured goods or consumables does not really define my passion. I would rather say that I want to build things.
Not physical things, but systems. Systems to make people’s lives easier. To give them the one thing that is sought after by everyone and in short supply everywhere: time.
What people want most is time, and well-built systems give it to them. Frequently on đť•Ź I see people complaining that the most boring-to-build things such as B2B SaaS (Business to Business Software as a Service) are also the most profitable. I register no complaint about that, and see it as a given. Because a good SaaS offers time in exchange for money. Something priceless for a price. And frequently in bulk because of how many employees time will be saved by one service.
Practically speaking, though?
Plan A
Apply for jobs in my areas of interest in which my experience is most pertinent.
When I imagine the job that would fit me like a glove, it would be:
- Highly technical
- Something that requires a lot of high quality writing on different subjects
- A job that includes writing code and prose
- Something that saves a lot of people a lot of time
I would say that the above description most closely matches someone who writes technical blogs for a company that makes software that a lot of people use and rely on, or perhaps straight up documentation for massive projects that are lacking in that department (most of which are).
Plan B
Apply for freelance jobs on the following freelance sites:
- upwork
- twine
- weworkremotely
- workingnomads
- remotive
- remote
- remoteok
- jobspresso
- flexjobs
- dice
- authenticjobs
- angel
I hope to gain a breadth of experience by working on different projects for a wide range of people, while taking careful notes on how many of them share the same problems, and how many problems can be solved at once.
Applicant Tracking Systems for the Applicants
I have already noticed that at least one problem I have must be faced by many other people too. Namely that companies have the advantage in hiring because of something called applicant tracking systems (ATS). There are a lot of people online who claim that gaming this software is the key to even being considered when applying for positions, the logic being that resumes are fed into a machine and either considered or automatically rejected based on the presence or absence of certain keywords or phrases.
But what about the other things these ATSs do, beyond resume scanning? They help a company’s human resources department manage hiring by showing in what step of the hiring process any given candidate is in. This is exactly the same thing that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software does to great effect. The CRM’s objective is to generate sales. The ATS’s objective is to get new hires3.
So I would propose an ATS, but for candidates. Because right now hiring seems one sided. Add to this the fact that automation tools are just getting more and more sophisticated, such that candidates will be able to very effectively spam every company with applications, and it is obvious that something has to change:
Footnotes
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Funny story: I was originally tasked just with the programming of the machine. Upon trying to write its simple logic and running up against a wall several times, I finally realized that the wiring was not working at all. I had assumed that my boss, the founder of the company, who had wired up the previous incarnation of the machine, had wired this new version correctly. This basic assumption turned out to be wrong, and I had to redo the entire hardware side before the software started working correctly. From this I learned that for any task you must perform your ground truth test, no matter how simple, before proceeding. In this case I could have tested by simply getting an LED to turn on and off based on a laser detector, which is what I eventually did, but only after wasting time trying to make software work in an impossible way. I should have also applied the old adage to my boss’s assertion that he had wired the machine correctly: “trust, but verify.” ↩
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Broad spectrum CBD products come from broad spectrum hemp extract. Although hemp is the same species as a marijuana plant, Cannabis sativa, THC content of CBD products sold in the USA must be less than 0.3% by dry volume. Even this minuscule amount of THC is enough to trigger the psychoactive and harmful effects of THC, for which reason Relievet’s founder always put an emphasis on using only broad spectrum CBD except for end-of-life care. ↩
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Not good hires. Just hires. The ATS does not concern itself once a candidate is outside of its system, which either means they were hired or rejected. ↩