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In today’s newsletter,
Your Best Unpaid Sales Channel Is 11 Million People
What’s killing your Google deep links
The simplest high-performing ad you can film today
HubSpot's ex-head of paid shares his 2026 playbook
AI Launch Codes: Your AI Is a Yes-Man
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Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
Growth & Acquisition
Your Best Unpaid Sales Channel Is 11 Million People
Your next best-performing channel is not another ad platform - it is real people talking about your product.
Stack Influence connects DTC and e-commerce brands with 11M+ vetted micro-influencers. No upfront creator fees. Our AI matches your product with creators who align with your brand, they purchase and try it, then create authentic UGC and share it organically.
The result: genuine social proof that converts, content you can repurpose across channels, and if you sell on Amazon, a direct boost to your sales rank.
Brands see an average 5X return. You pay per creator - not per impression - so budget drives performance, not vanity metrics.
Stop renting attention. Start building brand advocacy.
Tech Talk Tuesday
What’s killing your Google deep links
Google just updated its snippet documentation with rules for "Read more" deep links.
One of the biggest killers: content hidden behind accordions, tabs, or collapsed sections.
If a user has to click to expand something, Google won't deep link to it.
The content needs to be visible the moment the page loads, i.e. no interaction required.
So if your product pages hide specs behind a "Details" tab, or your FAQs use expand/collapse patterns, those sections are invisible to deep links.
The fix: make that content visible by default.
If you're worried about page length, use anchor navigation instead of hiding content, so users can still jump to sections, and Google can still link to them.
Google also listed two other things that can kill deep links.
Action Summary:
Audit your key pages for any content that requires a click to reveal (tabs, accordions, collapsed FAQs)
Make that content visible on load by default
Replace hide/show patterns with anchor-based navigation if page length is a concern
Credit: Search Engine Journal
Organic Social
The simplest high-performing ad you can film today
Dara Denney has spent over $100M on Meta ads and spent the last 10 years scaling some of the biggest DTC brands. Her take: if she had to pick one ad format to run on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, or TV, it's the founder ad.
Not an actor or a UGC creator. You, the person who built it, knows every flaw, and can answer any question about it in their sleep.
The product demo is the simplest format to start with.
Here's the structure:
Open with your name and title. "I'm [name], founder of [brand]." Sounds basic but Denney tested this against jumping straight into the demo. The intro version wins.
Then show the product doing the thing.
If it saves time, show the before and after.
If it solves a physical problem, demonstrate the problem first, then the fix.
Close with a soft CTA. Something like "try it for yourself"
For filming: your iPhone on 4K/30fps with natural light from a window is enough
Action Summary:
Pick one feature or use case to demo
Film yourself saying your name, title, and brand, then go straight into the demo
Shoot in 4K/30fps near a window, no studio needed
End with a soft CTA and post it
Credit: Dara Denney
HubSpot's ex-Head of Paid shares his 2026 playbook
Rex Gelb spent a decade building HubSpot's paid engine. Now he's showing founders exactly how to do it.
On April 27th, get the framework to structure, launch, and scale paid media that drives pipeline, not just traffic. 20 minutes. Live Q&A. Free.
Your AI Is a Yes-Man. And It’s Quietly Ruining Your Decisions.
If Claude always tells you what you want to hear, you can’t trust it.
Because if you ask if your idea is good, it builds a case for why it’s good:
But ask why the same idea is bad, it builds a case for that too:
You've probably noticed this too.
You ask a question, get a smart-sounding answer, feel validated, and move on but the response is shaped by your assumptions, framing, and bias, so Claude ends up telling you what you want to hear.
Here’s what’s actually happening:
The response isn’t objective.
It’s shaped by your framing, assumptions, and bias.
And the model is trained to be helpful, which often means agreeable.
It has learned that:
Agreement feels helpful
Pushback feels risky
Confident users expect reinforcement
So it leans toward making your position sound right, even when it could argue the opposite just as well.
So what’s the solution?
A free SKILL that fixes it.
Install it with one command, type “council this”
5 advisors spin up, argue, review each other's blind spots, and hand you a verdict. All inside one session.
The 5 advisors:
The Contrarian stress-tests your idea by hunting for fatal flaws
The First Principles thinker strips assumptions and rebuilds the problem from scratch
The Expansionist looks for overlooked upside and adjacent opportunities
The Outsider removes your bias and evaluates it with fresh eyes
The Executor focuses on clear, actionable next steps to make it real
What separates the council from just asking Claude 5 times?
After all 5 advisors respond, the skill anonymizes everything. Shuffles which advisor maps to which letter. The reviewers don't know who said what.
Then 5 reviewers read all the responses and answer 3 questions:
Which response is strongest and why?
Which has the biggest blind spot?
What did all five miss?
Once you have it installed, here are a few screenshots of how the output looks:
How to set it up:
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