We shipped a site with no cookie banner
Add the usual analytics + a consent banner, like everyone
Set no cookies at all — so there's nothing to consent to
Rule 2 of the House Rules is honest by design. It’s easy to write and annoying to keep, because the honest choice is usually the one that costs you a metric.
Here’s a small one we kept. This site sets zero cookies. No analytics that follow you, no third-party scripts phoning home, no “we value your privacy” modal that exists mainly to make tracking legal. The fonts are self-hosted. The only JavaScript is first-party and tiny — a theme toggle and the home-page demo — and it all runs in your browser, never on anyone else’s server.
So there’s no cookie banner, because there’s nothing to consent to. That’s not a clever growth hack; it’s just what Rule 2 looks like when you actually apply it.
We still want to know if the site works — whether people reach the shelf, whether the demo lands. When we add measurement, it’ll be the cookieless, IP-anonymising kind, and we’ll say exactly what we collect on the audit page. If we ever can’t measure something honestly, we’ll measure less. That’s the deal.