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In today’s newsletter,

  1. Expensive and exhausting product photoshoot?

  2. AI Launch Codes: Stop Using AI For Everything

  3. Why you should add a review summary to your page

  4. While You Were Building

    1.Shopify stops logging bot-abandoned checkouts

    2.Bark distances itself from the box model

    3.Brands raise free-shipping thresholds as fuel climbs

  5. Attio - the AI CRM for modern businesses.

  6. AI Launch Codes (paid version): A complete AI Adoption Guide

This issue takes 2 minutes to read.

Check out our DTC tool stack here

Let’s dive into it👇

Creatives

Expensive and exhausting product photoshoot?

Kittl does it in minutes, and for a fraction of the price.

A professional shoot day yields around 30 finished images. That's about $67 per image before retouching even starts.*

Kittl does it in minutes. Turn one plain product photo into a full set of studio-grade lifestyle shots - in a single workflow. Studio-quality imagery for your listings, social, and ads. Without booking a single shoot.

EXCLUSIVE: Use code DTCDAILY for 25% off any subscription.

Sources: Nightjar, Razor Creative Labs

AI Launch Code

Stop Using AI For Everything

This is going to sound dramatic. Especially from me.

I charge you money to teach you how to use AI. I tell you to use it for everything.

So hear me out.

AI is killing human judgement. And without human judgement, AI only produces confident, expensive crap.

It's wrong constantly, and it's wrong in a voice that sounds completely right. The only thing standing between that and your business is a human who knows the job well enough to catch it. Remove the person who could do the work without AI, and nobody catches anything. They just ship it.

It gets worse with your team.

Be honest about it. Half the messages they send you are already written by AI. The replies to customers. The reorder math. The campaign notes. They've stopped doing the thinking, so they've lost the ability to tell when the thinking is wrong. The muscle is gone. And you don't find out until something they trusted blindly goes out with your name on it.

If you think this only happens to careless people, look at who got caught this year.

EY, one of the four biggest accounting firms on earth, pulled an entire study after someone found the citations were AI hallucinations. Invented. They're still trying to work out how it got approved.

Deloitte handed the Australian government a $440,000 report and had to refund part of it. Fake quotes. References to research that doesn't exist.

And it kept going. KPMG published a report praising AI, then took it down when an audit found 40 of its 45 citations were fabricated. A report about AI, killed for being written by AI. A federal prosecutor with 30 years in got fired for filing a brief full of fake cases he never checked.

Every one of these had reviewers. Editors. Senior partners signing off. People paid specifically to catch this. They missed it anyway, because you can't catch an error in work you couldn't have done yourself.

These are a few of many. AI is costing brands millions right now.

But these are billion-dollar companies. A $440,000 refund is a rounding error to them. A retracted report is a bad week. They absorb it and move on.

You don't have that cushion.

When your employee trusts a number the AI invented and you pour ad spend behind it, that isn't a rounding error. That's your money. The limited pile of capital you actually get to work with, burning down behind a decision nobody verified.

So no. I'm not telling you to stop using AI.

I use it for almost everything. So should you.

I'm telling you to stop using it blindly. The difference between the two is a system, and most people never build one.

So I built mine. Every task in the business, sorted: what stays fully human, what AI drafts and a human checks, what runs on autopilot, and the one test you run before you let any AI output near real money.

It's a complete AI Adoption Guide. You'll find it at the bottom of this issue, for AILC subscribers only.

Optimization

Why you should add a review summary to your page

Kate Assaraf, founder of DIP Hair Care, has 241 product reviews at a 4.9 rating. That's already a strong trust signal on its own.

She still paid for the highest tier of her reviews apps specifically to add one more thing on top of it: an AI-generated review summary that collapses all 241 reviews into a single line a shopper can read with one click.

Why?

Kate said she wanted customers to feel safe purchasing from her store, and a pile of reviews doesn't do that work by itself.

A shopper sees the 4.9 and the 241, registers that the number is good, and still has to decide whether to trust it. A summary removes that gap. It tells them, in plain language, what the reviews actually say, so they don't have to dig for it themselves.

Several reviews apps now offer some version of this, usually as a feature on a higher pricing tier rather than a separate purchase.

Some tools like Yotpo, Judge.me and Okendo offer this feature.

If you're already running one of these apps, check what tier unlocks the feature before assuming you need to switch platforms.

Action Summary:

  • Check whether your current reviews app already has an AI summary feature, or what tier unlocks one

  • If it doesn't, look at what your app's higher tier costs versus switching to one that includes it

  • If your review volume is strong enough to summarize, turn the feature on this week

Credit: Ethercycle

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Founder Tech Stack
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While You Were Building

1.Shopify stops logging bot-abandoned checkouts

Bots testing stolen cards no longer create abandoned-checkout sessions. Recovery lists now drop the fake sessions that were quietly inflating abandonment rates and recovery-flow audiences.

via Shopify ChangelogRead more

2.Bark distances itself from the box model

Sales fell and subscribers dropped, and CEO Matt Meeker now says “BarkBox is not a box.” The original subscription-box DTC playbook is being walked back at scale.

via Retail DiveRead more

3.Brands raise free-shipping thresholds as fuel climbs

Higher fuel costs are pushing brands to lift free-shipping minimums, add delivery fees and test paid shipping. The free-shipping subsidy is being repriced across the category.

via Modern RetailRead more

Attio - the AI CRM for modern businesses.

Attio is the AI CRM that keeps you ten steps ahead.

Ask Attio anything. Where should I focus? What deals are at risk? Search, update, and create across your customer data.

Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.

The AI Adoption Ladder

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