Most shoppers won't hunt for the connection

Advertise to 40,622 E-Commerce Businesses

Promote your tool, service or upcoming event - Reach Founders

Good morning!

In today’s newsletter,

This issue takes 2 minutes to read.

Check out our DTC tool stack here

Let’s dive into it👇

In a given week, members here are asking who to hire as a fractional lead across TikTok, Amazon and national retail, whether pre-order velocity tells you anything real about long-term channel economics, and which broker can run a competitive process on a mid-eight-figure sale.

Same operators you read about every morning, a few years further along, working out what the balance sheet looks like when it isn't all one company.

Long Angle is a private, vetted community of 9,000+ founders and executives at that stage.

No membership fees, no soliciting, and net worth is verified before admission. Members compare notes on diversifying out of the business, exit timing and tax structure, and invest alongside each other in private markets.

You don't need five product pages if you can fit the whole lineup in one click. 

We're doing a 100 days of stealing strategies from brands that are already winning.

For day 8, we have Branch Basics.

Scroll down their site and you'll see this one image with all their essential products laid out together.

Click on any single product in that image and its details and how to use it show up right there.

Bottle number 1 is their concentrate.

Bottle number 2 is their foaming wash bottle.

This matters because their products work together as a system. If a shopper has to hunt across the site to understand how the pieces connect, most won't bother. 

Here's what you should do today: if you sell products that are meant to be used together, stop listing them separately with no connection between them. Build one visual with all of them in it, and let a click reveal the details instead of sending them to a new place.

Last year, security researchers found a bug in ChatGPT's Gmail connector. They called it ShadowLeak.

Here's how it worked. An attacker sent a normal-looking email. Hidden in the text was an instruction, invisible to a human reading it.

The AI connected to that inbox read the email, saw the hidden instruction, and followed it. It pulled data out of the account and sent it to the attacker.

This is called prompt injection. The AI can't tell the difference between an instruction you gave it and one hidden inside something it's reading, like an email or a document.

If you've connected any AI tool to your store admin, your email, or an app you built yourself, you're exposed the same way.

You don't need to stop using AI. You just need to be careful about what you connect it to.

Here's the simple version: the more places one AI tool can reach, the more damage a single hidden instruction can do.

A tool that only talks to your store's product data is low risk. If something goes wrong, it can only touch that one thing.

An AI tool connected to your inbox, your store admin, and your bank account at the same time is high risk. One bad email could give an attacker a path into all three.

Action Summary:

Credit: Steve Chou

Hearth Display makes a touchscreen family calendar. When they launched their calendar feature, it shipped with a daily view only. No monthly view.

Almost immediately, every single customer asked for the same thing: a monthly view.

The team hadn't planned to build it next. But the request was coming from everyone who touched the feature.

Here's why that mattered enough to change the plan. Their customers were replacing a whiteboard, and a whiteboard shows a month at a glance. Customers weren't asking for a new feature. They were asking Hearth to match something they already understood. That's a much stronger signal than a single feature request.

A repeated request, from customers who don't know each other and aren't talking to each other, isn't a suggestion. It's confirmation that you built the wrong version of the right thing.

The fix is to notice when a request is a pattern instead of a one-off, and move that one thing to the front.

Action Summary:

Credit: Shopify Masters

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free