This text-only ad keeps outperforming

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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👇

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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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

Dara Denney calls this her number one must-test for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. She's used it across multiple brands and the results have been, in her words, absolutely wild.

No video. No creative. No designer. Just text.

The founder's letter format.

It is exactly what it sounds like. The founder of the brand writes directly to the customer. 

They explain why they built the product, what problem they were trying to solve, and why they believe in it enough to stake their name on it.

It works because it's the one ad format that can't be faked easily. A lifestyle image can be stock. A UGC video can be scripted. 

But a letter from a founder that sounds like a real person writing to another real person is hard to manufacture if you don't actually believe what you're saying.

It also works because it's different. Most feeds are full of video, graphics, and motion. A wall of honest text from a real human stops the scroll because it's unexpected.

If you have a sale coming up, this is the one to test first.

Action Summary:

Credit: Dara Denney

Start with your customer reviews.

Go through your product reviews and pick 10 of the longer ones, the kind where someone explains what convinced them or what they were worried about before buying.

Read through them and write down every specific worry, comparison, or use case mentioned in the customer's own words.

Now turn each phrase into a question. If a review says "I was worried this wouldn't work on color-treated hair," that becomes "does [product] work on color-treated hair."

If someone wrote "I almost bought the cheaper version instead," that becomes "is [product] worth it compared to [competitor]." 

Once you have your 10 questions, run them in ChatGPT or Claude and see what comes back.

Does your brand show up? Do competitors? This tells you something a vendor's modeled prompt list can't, since these are the actual questions your customers are asking, not a guess at what's popular.

If AI recommends your brand when real customer concerns are entered, you're on the right track. If it doesn't, you've just uncovered exactly where your content, reviews, and positioning need work.

Action Summary:

Credit: Neil Patel

Will Evans is the co-founder of Flowcandy, a seven-figure Klaviyo email and CRM agency trusted by brands like Kabacha, Bachans, and Proactive.

In this podcast, he shared his Black Friday email playbook for DTC founders.

Audit before you plan

Look back at what worked last year in Shopify, Klaviyo, and Google Analytics before building this year's plan. Brands that skip this, often when a new team or agency comes in, end up throwing out lessons that already worked.

Your discount code isn't your only lever

A site wide discount converts well but is harder to control for margins and stacking. A discount code feels familiar to shoppers, which can lower conversion unless the deal is strong. Premium brands that don't want to discount often use a free gift with purchase instead.

Segment instead of blasting your whole list

Emailing your full list or just the 90-day engaged segment leaves revenue on the table. Klaviyo's AI segment builder can turn a plain language prompt into a working segment in under a minute.

Build a calendar and a QC checklist

Map every send into a shared calendar with the date, offer, and segment. Run a quality control check on dark mode, UTMs, and rendering across Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail before sending, since this is what quietly wrecks an otherwise well planned Black Friday.

Action Summary:

🎧 Watch the full episode
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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.

Smart delivery in Shopify Messaging auto-filters customers who ignored recent emails out of your next campaign. Engagement-based suppression, once a Klaviyo flow, is now native.

via Shopify Changelog • Read more

WPP and Madison & Wall both project AI search ads as advertising's fastest-growing channel, with overall search spend still rising despite a pressured ad economy.

via Digiday • Read more

Taboola is expanding DeeperDive into an ad network running across AI apps and agents. Paid inventory inside conversational AI experiences is starting to get built and sold.

via Digiday • Read more

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