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Why we stopped using our own performance numbers

Our own measurement was faster, cheaper and entirely under our control. It was also unverifiable by the person we were showing it to, which made it worthless for the only job it had.

September 2026 · 2 min read

Part of what the prospecting agent does is assess whether a business's website is slow enough to be worth talking to them about.

We measured that ourselves to begin with. It was fast, it cost nothing, it ran at whatever volume we wanted, and it was entirely under our control.

It was also unverifiable by the only person who mattered.

The number has a job

The number is not for us. It goes in front of a business owner who has never heard of us, in a message they did not ask for, telling them something unflattering about their own website. In that context a figure we generated ourselves is indistinguishable from a figure we made up, and a reasonable person treats it accordingly.

So the agent uses public tooling now. It is slower, it is rate-limited, and it was more work to wire up. Every number it quotes belongs to somebody else.

What that buysThe owner can paste their own address into a public tool and reproduce the figure in about thirty seconds, without taking our word for anything. That turns the claim from trust us into go and check, and those two are not the same message even when the number is identical. The rule generalises: where a measurement will be shown to somebody with an interest in disagreeing with it, use an instrument they already trust rather than one you built.
Read nextWe fixed the same bug twice, two commits apartOne commit says measure the problem instead of guessing at it. The one after says measure with somebody else's instrument, because our own timing was wrong. Same error, one layer down.All writing