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Good morning!

In today’s newsletter,

  1. The AI search gap nobody sees in their analytics

  2. How to get ChatGPT to recommend your brand

  3. Turn your price increase into a sale

  4. Your AI employee that writes creative briefs

  5. While You Were Building

This issue takes 2 minutes to read.

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Let’s dive into it👇

HubSpot AEO

Picture this. A buyer opens ChatGPT and asks for a recommendation in your category. Your competitor's name comes up. Yours doesn't. And that buyer never makes it to your website.

That's happening right now in markets everywhere. And most teams don't know it's happening because it never shows up in their analytics.

HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search, where competitors are getting recommended instead of you, and tells you specifically what to fix. No expertise needed.

Try it free for 28 days. Just $50 a month after.

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Building something? Here are a few ways we can help:

The Founder Community
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Need help with design, development, marketing, content, paid ads, growth, branding, or something else? Our community of 41,201 founders, operators, and builders gives us access to a strong network of trusted service providers across all budgets. Tell us what you need, and we’ll try to connect you with the right agency or freelancer.
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Founder Tech Stack
Explore our curated list of useful tools, software, and offers to help founders save time, launch faster, and grow smarter.
CTA: Explore the Founder Tech Stack

AI Visibility

How to get ChatGPT to recommend your brand

When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a product in your category, there's a 40% chance its answer comes from a Reddit thread.

That means Reddit is one of the highest-leverage places you can show up as a brand.

Find threads where buyers are already asking

Search your product category plus "recommendations" or "what should I buy" on Reddit. You're looking for threads where someone is actively asking for help, posted in the last few months, with real replies already in them. These threads are indexed by Google and scraped by AI.

Write a response that reads like a person, not a pitch

The accounts that get cited by ChatGPT don't sound like marketing copy. They sound like someone who actually uses the product:

  • Start with the problem, not the product. "I had the same issue with X..."

  • Name what you tried before and why it didn't work.

  • Mention your product once, with one concrete result. "Switched to [brand] about six months ago and my [metric] improved."

  • No links in the first comment. Add one only if someone asks.

A response like that reads as genuine. AI treats it as a real user recommendation and it stays on Reddit forever, getting cited every time someone asks that question.

Post in two to three threads per week

The more threads you show up in with helpful, specific answers, the more surface area you have for AI citations.

Action Summary:

  • Search Reddit for "[your product category] recommendations" and find three threads where buyers are asking for suggestions.

  • Post one response per thread: problem first, past attempt, product mention with a specific result, no link.

  • Repeat two to three times per week for 30 days.

  • After 30 days, ask ChatGPT "what's the best [your category] for [your use case]" and see if your brand shows up.

Credit: Steve Chou

Price Strategy

Turn your price increase into a sale

Most founders treat a price increase like something to hide.

A price increase email, sent before the change goes live, functions like a sale email in reverse.

Instead of offering a discount to create urgency, you're announcing a deadline after which the price goes up.

Customers who've been sitting on the fence now have an actual reason to buy today.

The email doesn't need to be complicated. Tell them the price is going up, tell them when, tell them what it is now, and give them a link to buy before it changes.

You can also give your best customers a heads-up a few days earlier than the general list.

Action Summary:

  • Pick a price increase date at least two weeks out.

  • Email your list one week before: price is going up, here's when, here's the link to buy now.

  • Send a reminder the day before the change goes live.

  • Optionally, email your VIP segment a few days before the general announcement as an early heads-up.

Your creative brief is due Friday. Viktor wrote it Tuesday.

Tell him the campaign. Viktor pulls last quarter's performance from Meta and TikTok, scrapes competitor ads, drafts the brief, posts it for review. You edit, he ships the creative requests to your designer. Inside Slack.

While You Were Building

1.Shopify links purchase orders to transfers

Receiving a PO now auto-creates a transfer, trackable in admin or POS. Partial shipments under one PO are now split into separately tracked deliveries.

via Shopify ChangelogRead more

2.Prime Day to drive $26.3B online

Amazon's summer sale, earlier than ever this year, is projected to spur $26.3B in US e-commerce as rivals scramble with counter-promotions.

via Retail DiveRead more

3.Glossier takes $45M in debt, not equity

Tiger Finance is backing the $45M facility. CEO Colin Walsh framed it as 'the next chapter' but disclosed no plan, no revenue figure, and no equity raise.

via Retail DiveRead more

Have questions or feedback? You can write to [email protected]

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