u/orbitalNest

I have been posting short product explainer clips since February and until about two months ago my TikTok Shop commissions were basically noise. One month was forty dollars, one month was eleven, one month there was nothing at all. Views weren't really the problem. A normal clip does three to fifteen thousand and a couple have gone past a hundred thousand. People just were not staying long enough to reach the part where I say what the product actually does.

The presenter in my videos is an AI character. I put that in the caption on every post and I keep a pinned comment about it, mostly because I got tired of having the same argument in the replies twice a week. That's been the setup since the first video, so it's not the variable here.

The variable was captions. I'd been leaning on TikTok's auto captions, which are free and fine, but they sit where they want and I wanted text that was bigger, locked in one place, and timed tight to the words. What pushed me to change it was a friend who is hard of hearing telling me she scrolls past anything she has to guess at. So I started burning the subtitles into the video itself. Then I actually sat down with my retention graphs and saw that most of my drop off was in the first three or four seconds, which is exactly the window where someone watching with the sound off decides whether there's anything on screen worth reading.

Average watch time on the recaptioned clips went from around nine seconds to somewhere in the mid teens. That's not a transformation, but on a sixteen second video it is the difference between someone leaving before the product name and someone getting the whole thing. June commissions came to roughly two hundred and ten dollars. Still small, but it's the first month that felt like a result instead of luck.

The stack behind it is boring. I write the script in my notes app, generate the talking presenter with lip sync in APOB AI, run the clip through Submagic so the subtitles are burned on and timed to the words, then cut it together with the product footage in VN. One thing worth knowing before you try it: the lip sync holds up for maybe fifteen or twenty seconds and after that the mouth starts sliding off the audio, so I shoot everything as short takes and stitch them together. That constraint annoyed me for about a week until I noticed the short takes were performing better than the long ones anyway.

If you're doing shop affiliate content, the thing I would take from this is to treat sound off as the default rather than the edge case. A lot of the people deciding whether to buy from you never hear a word of it.

Not sure if this is a Germany thing or my building is just cursed. I'm in a 7 flat building, live alone, and our front door never really closes because the latch misses unless you slam it. Packages get left in the Hausflur by the mailboxes and stairs.

In about a month I've had three go missing. One just never appeared. One was torn open and dumped on the stairs. Yesterday DHL marked toilet paper and cleaning stuff delivered while I was at work, and when I got home around half past six there was nothing. Hermes has also been treating the hallway like Fort Knox, apparently.

I grabbed a video doorbell off tiktok when it had a price drop but then a coworker reminded me shared hallway filming can be a DSGVO headache, so it's still sitting in the box on my kitchen table. Great purchase.

Packstation or Paketshop would help, but the nearest one is several km away and I don't drive. I emailed the Hausverwaltung about the broken latch or a parcel box. Silence. Knocked on two doors. Nobody home. Online Polizei report filed, for whatever that's worth.

Any workaround that isn't a whole side quest?

I'm 3 months pp with my second. The baby is doing great, my toddler is adjusting, and my body is... getting there. But there's one thing nobody warned me about and it's the bathroom situation.

I had a second-degree tear this time. The peri bottle, the witch hazel pads, the whole production. I felt like I needed an instruction manual just to pee. The first few weeks I'd go in there and come out 15 minutes later looking like I'd been through something.

My husband has been great honestly. He took over all the toddler bedtime stuff so I could focus on the baby and recovery. He even restocked the changing table, grabbed a couple packs of wipes at the store, they're fine. But the other night he walked into the bathroom while I was mid-routine and the look on his face, he didn't say anything, just backed out slowly like he'd walked into a crime scene. Which, to be fair, it kind of looked like one.

The other thing that's been driving me crazy is that my toddler has decided she's terrified of the baby monitor. Not the baby, not the crying, specifically the monitor. She points at it and says "no no no" and we have no idea why. We tried covering it with a cloth, she pulls it off. We tried turning it off, then she gets upset because she can't see the baby. There is no winning.

Anyway this is mostly a ramble. I'm just tired and my bathroom looks like a pharmacy and my toddler is beefing with a piece of plastic.

I used to think wipes were one of those things where cheaper just wins, no real thought required. It is a wipe, it gets used, it gets thrown away. Then I had a kid and now wipes are somehow up there with snacks and socks that disappear into nowhere as the most used stuff in this house. 

What I keep going back and forth on is whether the thin ones are actually cheaper once you count how many you use at once. Some of the cheap thin packs, I am pulling two or three without thinking, especially after meals or a diaper change that went badly. The thicker ones cost more per pack but one is usually enough. So now I guess I do math about wipes. 

We grabbed some wipes a couple weeks ago when our usual brand was out, and I noticed I was not grabbing a second one as much. Not sure if that actually saves money once you do the math on price per pack, but it was a noticeable enough difference that I started paying attention to it again. 

Anyone tracked this for real. Curious if thicker actually comes out cheaper long term or if it is a wash, and if people bother splitting thin for hands and thick for diaper changes or if that falls apart the second a toddler shows up. 

I've already failed with three WFH chairs in the last year, a dining chair with a cushion, a cheap Amazon 'ergonomic' chair that went flat in two months, and a hand-me-down that creaked like a horror movie prop. Now I'm trying to buy something that won't fail in six months.

Currently sitting on that hand-me-down. Every time I lean back it sounds like a haunted house door. I'm at the point where my desk setup is “good enough” except for the chair, and now I understand why people say the chair should have been the first upgrade.

I don't need anything fancy. The basics for me are lower-back support that actually does something, materials that don't trap heat, a seat that doesn't go completely flat in three months, height and tilt I can actually adjust without a manual, wheels that don't sound like a squeaky toy, and something that won't look ridiculous when I'm on a video call. I've been comparing basic ergonomic office chairs, a few mesh-back models, and some hybrid options that look normal enough for work. I keep seeing GTRACING come up when people ask about budget chairs, but not sure if it holds up past the first year. I don't mind spending more if it actually matters, but honestly I'd rather know what to avoid before I drop money on the wrong thing.

Tell me what you missed the first time you bought a WFH chair. Trying to avoid repeating your mistake.

Fed my designs into Midjourney to make lifestyle product photos instead of using the same Printful templates. Ten scenes from one file in an afternoon: mug on a desk, tee on a person outdoors.

Logo warped around the curved mug on the first render. Had to regenerate that one.

Listings look distinct now. Clicks seem slightly better but it's like 30 orders so who knows.

$340k total comp, tech, 55% equity. Four separate RSU grants with different vest schedules and cost bases. NW about $1.6M.

Between modeling which lots to sell, cross referencing vest confirmation PDFs, and reconciling Schwab's 1099 against my own tracking sheet, I was spending about 5 hours a month on this. Felt like a second job except the pay was just avoiding my own mistakes.

Last Q4 I needed to sell some for a down payment. Schwab's UI shows everything in one pile and I couldn't tell which lots were long term without digging through the PDFs. Picked the wrong lots, realized after settlement, and ended up owing an extra $3,800 in short term capital gains.

After that I set up a cloud job to track lot dates for me so I stop losing money on my own laziness. Gets it wrong sometimes but beats doing it manually.

Maybe I should just hire a CPA who does equity comp. The $3,800 mistake would've covered two years of fees. Keep picturing the CPA's face when I open the spreadsheet. Four grants, six tabs, a VLOOKUP I don't fully trust.