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In today’s newsletter,
The Future of AI in Marketing
The number most ecommerce founders never look at
How Wander Beauty built a $1M+ brand with education
Why efficiency isn't enough: the importance of loyalty-driven CX
AI Launch Codes: Part 3 of Claude Cowork Series: Turn Claude from an AI assistant to an Expert
This issue takes 3 minutes to read.
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Let’s dive into it👇
The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.
Unlock a focused set of AI strategies built to streamline your work and maximize impact. This guide delivers the practical tactics and tools marketers need to start seeing results right away:
7 high-impact AI strategies to accelerate your marketing performance
Practical use cases for content creation, lead gen, and personalization
Expert insights into how top marketers are using AI today
A framework to evaluate and implement AI tools efficiently
Stay ahead of the curve with these top strategies AI helped develop for marketers, built for real-world results.
Operations
The number most ecommerce founders never look at
Revenue is up. Ads are working. Orders are coming in.
And somehow you're still not profitable.
Andrew Faris, who has held every seat in ecommerce, from media buyer to CEO, says the answer is almost always in your opex (operating expenses), not your ads.
Here's his rule: as you scale, your total fixed costs as a percentage of revenue should be under 15%.
Salaries, software, rent, all of it. Ideally under 10%.
That means at $1M revenue, your total headcount and overhead should be $150K or less.
At $5M, that same $150K structure should still be running most of the business.
Most brands aren't there. They're hiring linearly with revenue, adding a person every time revenue goes up.
That's an agency model.
Ecommerce is supposed to work differently. The email you send to 1,000 people costs the same to design as the one you send to 1,000,000. The operating leverage is built in — but only if you're disciplined about headcount.
He points to Ben Perkins from Ann Call: $15M in revenue, drowning in debt. He cut half his labor. The business didn't change. In some ways, it got smoother.
His fix: a personal (profit and loss) P&L for every employee.
One question — is this person generating incremental value, and how do we measure it?
The people who wouldn't participate took severance. The ones who did turned out to be driving real results.
Action Summary:
Pull your total opex as a % of revenue right now — target under 15%, best in class under 10%
List every person and every software subscription. For each one: what incremental value does this generate?
As you forecast growth, your opex line should grow slower than revenue — if it doesn't, you have a structure problem
Ask An Expert
What’s the biggest challenge in your business right now?
Let us know by simply replying to this email, and we’ll have an expert reach out to you and answer that, and you can also expect to receive some helpful resources.
Pssst…by upgrading to AI Launch Codes, you can unlock $195 worth of Magicals for free
Pod Bites
How Wander Beauty built a $1M+ brand with education
In this podcast episode, Divya, founder of Wander Beauty, shared the inspiring journey behind her brand, which was born out of a personal struggle.
She highlights the importance of replicating the in-store experience online.
As a digitally native brand, Wander Beauty worked hard to create a digital experience that mimics the hands-on approach of trying products in-store.
Their product pages included multi-skin-tone swatches, ingredient details, and user-generated content (UGC) testimonials.
They also engaged customers through Instagram Stories, using quizzes and polls to let followers vote on shades.
Actionable step:
Enhance your product pages by including ingredient breakdowns and user-generated content (UGC) testimonials.
Engage your audience on social media by using polls and quizzes to involve them in decisions, creating a more interactive and personalized experience.
🎧 Watch the full episode
88% resolved. 22% loyal. Your stack has a problem.
Those numbers aren't a CX issue — they're a design issue. Gladly's 2026 Customer Expectations Report breaks down exactly where AI-powered service loses customers, and what the architecture of loyalty-driven CX actually looks like.
Part 3 of Claude Cowork Series: Turn Claude from an AI assistant to an Expert
This is Part 3 of a 4-part series on Claude Cowork.
Part 1 — Folders → [LINK]
Part 2 — Connectors → [LINK]
Quick recap of where we are:
In Part 1, we set up Folders — the filing system that keeps Claude's workspace organized so it can find the right information at the right time. No folders means Claude treats every job the same way. Folders mean it knows where to look.
In Part 2, we added Connectors — linking your Shopify store, Meta Ads, and Google Ads so Claude can pull live data from your business instead of working from whatever you paste in.
Skills are the third layer. Folders organize. Connectors connect. Skills specialize.
What Are Skills?
Every time you open a new Claude conversation, you start from scratch. You explain your process. You re-teach Claude what you need. You get a generalist every single time.
Skills fix that.
A Skill is a saved playbook — a set of instructions Claude loads automatically whenever it's relevant. You write it once. Claude follows it every time, across every conversation, without repeating yourself.
The result: Claude stops being a smart assistant who needs direction and starts being a specialist who already knows the job.
A Skill for handling customer refunds knows your policy, your tone, and your escalation rules. A Skill for building product listings knows your format, your structure, and your requirements. A Skill for pulling weekly ad reports knows exactly which numbers to pull and how to present them.
Here's a real example of what a Skill looks like:
This Ad Creative Skill turns Claude into a performance creative specialist. When you activate it, Claude doesn't just write ads, it follows a defined process.
First, it asks the right questions: What platform? What format? What's the offer? Who's the audience? Do you have performance data from existing ads?
If you give it data — CTR, ROAS, conversion rates by creative — it analyzes what's working, identifies the patterns in your top performers, and generates new variations that build on what's winning while testing new angles.
It also knows the platform specs by heart. Google RSA headlines: 30 characters, up to 15. Meta primary text: hook in the first 125 characters. LinkedIn intro text: 150 characters recommended. Every piece of copy it writes is validated against those limits before it hands anything back to you.
This is just a snippet of the entire skill, which is 4 pages long with very specific instructions. The complete skill is in the paid section of the newsletter.
Once this skill runs, you do not have a chatbot answering a question. That's a specialist running a repeatable process every single time you need ad creative, without setting it up again.
One build. Runs forever.
Want to understand how they work before you build? Anthropic published the official guide, it's short and worth reading:
25 Skills To Get You Started
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