Advertise to 40,769 E-Commerce Businesses
Promote your tool, service or upcoming event - Reach Founders
Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
How one CEO turned a single treatment room into a market leader
Turn lapsed customers into repeat buyers on autopilot
Why your Instagram followers aren't engaging and how to fix it
Shopify brands have a new problem: Your products may be invisible to ChatGPT.
What happens when you throw out the GTM playbook
While You Were Building
1.Sleep Number files for bankruptcy
2.Quince hits $10B valuation, adds furniture and caviar
3.Rolex raises gold watch prices again
AI Launch Codes: Stop Fraud Orders Before They Leave the Warehouse
This issue takes 2 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
Business Growth
How one CEO turned a single treatment room into a market leader
What does it take to turn a small startup into an industry-leading company?
In this inspiring member story, Dan Rootenberg shares how he transformed Spear Physical Therapy from a single treatment room into New York’s leading physical therapy brand.
Along the way, he learned that sustainable growth requires more than hard work. It requires the right structure, culture and leadership.
Discover how Vistage peer advisory helped Dan navigate pivotal business decisions, lead through uncertainty and build a company that achieved 50x growth while staying true to its values. His journey offers valuable lessons for CEOs looking to scale their business, strengthen their leadership and create lasting success.
Founder Resources
Building something? Here are a few ways we can help:
The Founder Community
We’re building an exclusive paid community for like-minded founders, operators, and builders to connect, help each other, bounce ideas, share learnings, and grow together. The first 50 people on the waitlist will get to join for free as founding members and help shape what the community becomes.
CTA: Join the Founder Waitlist
Agency Partner Match
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.
CTA: Get Matched With an Agency
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
Retention
Turn lapsed customers into repeat buyers on autopilot
Shopify Plus merchants have a way to bring back customers who stopped buying, without setting up a single email flow.
The feature is part of Shop Campaigns, the program that finds net new customers through the Shop app, Meta, and Google. You set a customer acquisition cost, a target return on ad spend, and a daily budget, and Shopify runs ads to people who'd never bought from your store before.
A separate piece targets the opposite group: "lapsed customers," people who bought once and went quiet. Shopify identifies them automatically and runs win-back offers, the same way it runs acquisition campaigns.
The incentive is different from a typical win-back email too. Instead of a discount code, Shopify leans on shop cash, store credit customers can spend at any Shopify store inside the Shop app.
Merchants set their own lapse window, whether that's 6 months or 12. Once it's set, Shopify handles the targeting and the offer.
Why it matters: most merchants treat acquisition and retention as separate problems with separate tools. This puts both on the same dashboard. No new flow to build, no new copy to write.
Action Summary:
Go to the Shop channel in your Shopify admin
Check whether Shop Campaigns is running net new customer campaigns for your store
Set up lapsed customer targeting with a lapse window based on your repurchase cycle
Set a daily budget you're comfortable testing for win-back offers
Credit: Ethercycle
Organic Content
Why your Instagram followers aren't engaging and how to fix it
You have followers. They just don't do anything. No comments. No shares. No sales. Just a number that sits there.
Carousels drive 12% more engagement than any other format, according to Buffer's analysis of 52 million posts. If you've been posting mostly Reels and statics chasing reach, you've been feeding the algorithm at the expense of your actual audience.
Reels find new people but carousels make existing followers care.
So what can you do about this?
Take one idea and turn that into 4 formats:
A 60-second Reel for reach.
A carousel breaking it into steps for engagement.
A single image quote for shares.
A story poll to start a conversation.
Action summary:
Check your last 10 posts and count how many are carousels
If it's under 3, that's why engagement is flat
Take one idea this week and turn it into a carousel plus a Reel
Track saves and shares, not just likes, those tell you if people actually found it useful
Credit: Buffer
AEO
Shopify brands have a new problem: Your products may be invisible to ChatGPT.
Right now, buyers are asking AI:
“What’s the best collagen powder for women over 40?”
“What’s a good non-toxic candle brand that actually smells strong?”
“Best dog harness for small dogs that pull?”
And AI is deciding which brands get recommended.
The problem here is this: most ecommerce stores are still optimized for traditional SEO…. not AI recommendation engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Google Shopping, and Bing.
So even if you have a great product, strong reviews, and proven sales…AI may never recommend your brand.
Which means competitors who optimize early can quietly dominate the next wave of organic ecommerce traffic while everyone else keeps fighting over paid ads.
That’s why we created the 90-Day AI Visibility Sprint™.
We help Shopify brands optimize 1 product so AI can actually understand, trust, and recommend it organically.
Here’s what’s included:
• AI Visibility Audit showing how your product currently performs in AI search
• Full optimization for 1 product page
• Store-wide metadata + schema cleanup
• AI recommendation positioning
• At least 1 third-party brand mention to strengthen AI trust signals
Built for Shopify stores with at least one product already generating $1k+/month.
$497.
90-day guarantee:
If your product doesn’t meet AI visibility standards within 90 days, we keep working for free until it does.
What happens when you throw out the GTM playbook
That investor was wrong. Gamma is now worth $2B, with 50M users and more than half their growth driven by word of mouth.
They're one of 6 AI-native startups in HubSpot for Startups' free Bold Bets Playbook. Replit grew revenue 50x after half the team pushed back on the strategy. Ramp generated 100M+ views from a single stunt. Clay's co-founder wouldn't hang up a sales call until the prospect DMed him in Slack.
Each one took a GTM risk most founders would never greenlight. Each one paid off.
While You Were Building
1.Sleep Number files for bankruptcy
The 40-year-old adjustable-mattress maker filed for bankruptcy with Sleep Country Canada lined up as stalking-horse bidder. High-ticket durables keep collapsing into distressed strategic sales.
via Retail Dive • Read more
2.Quince hits $10B valuation, adds furniture and caviar
The direct-from-manufacturer retailer is testing pop-ups and stretching from furniture to caviar. The factory-direct model is scaling while branded DTC fights for margin.
via Glossy • Read more
3.Rolex raises gold watch prices again
Super-rich buyers keep paying while middle-class luxury spend stalls. Pricing power is concentrating at the very top as the middle of the market drops out.
via Business of Fashion • Read more
Stop Fraud Orders Before They Leave the Warehouse
A fraud order never costs you just the order.
US merchants now lose $4.61 for every $1 of fraud, up 32% since 2022 (LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud, 2025). The fee, the lost product, the time spent fighting it. A $50 fraud order doesn't cost you $50. It costs you around $120.
And you find out six weeks later, when the chargeback lands.
Shopify already flagged it. Fraud analysis scores every card order on address checks, CVV, IP, and purchase patterns, then marks it low, medium, or high risk. The high-risk one sat in your admin with a warning on it.
It shipped anyway, same day, because nobody opened it in time.
Now Claude opens every order for you.
It reads the risk level on every new order, tags the high-risk ones, and places a real hold on the fulfillment so the package cannot ship until you approve it. A lock on the warehouse door.
Then it scans two years of orders and tags every customer who has ever charged you back.
I call it the Pre-Ship Fraud Gate.
The skill, the exact prompts, the dry-run safety steps, and the rule that auto-holds repeat offenders are below.
The Pre-Ship Fraud Gate
This post is for paid subscribers
We built AI Launch Codes to help you scale smarter. We test AI tools, build workflows, and write prompts—so you don’t have to. But testing takes time, money, and effort. This paid upgrade helps us keep experimenting, while you get the winning playbooks delivered straight to your inbox.
UpgradeWhy You’ll Want It:
- Use AI to scale faster, cut costs, and boost efficiency
- Ready to use workflows, automations and prompts
- Real world use cases, no theory