Fulfil is an ERP designed for DTC brands like Ridge, HexClad, and Grüns. Manage orders, inventory, accounting, purchasing, fulfillment, EDI and manufacturing in one place. Native integrations with Shopify, Amazon and 400+ 3PLs (no middleware required). Go live in 8–12 weeks with fixed-price implementation (no third-party consultants).
Get a Demo“We’re not hiring less because of AI. We just expect each hire to be more productive.” Is AI shrinking your marketing team, or just changing who belongs on it? Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) and Cody Plofker (CEO, Jones Road Beauty) get into how two of the most operator-driven brands in ecommerce are rethinking their AI marketing team structure heading into the second half of 2026. They cover which roles are compressing, which are expanding, and what it actually looks like to build a leaner growth team that outputs more. Cody breaks down the CRO program he runs with one person that used to require six. Connor explains why HexClad hired more people after building an AI-powered seeding system, not fewer. And both share how they think about headcount requests now, and what they make teams prove before saying yes. Powered By Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-pulse/creative-benchmarks-2026?utm_campaign=marketing-operators&utm_medium=sponsor&utm_content=creative-benchmarks-2026&utm_source=marketing-operators-podcast Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Haus https://www.haus.io/operators Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Peter Rahal’s Brand Take 00:07:19 State of the Team 00:08:00 Going International 00:09:44 AI Changes the Hire Math 00:16:30 Everyone Is an Analyst 00:24:06 Five for Five on CRO 00:28:02 Product Page Big Swing 00:33:27 The Media Buyer’s New Job 00:39:32 Lovable Built the Seeder 00:43:07 Prove It Before You Hire 00:50:06 The Director of AI Role 00:51:55 Which Tools Are Cooked
Sign in to save notes on this episode.
Welcome to episode 115 of Marketing Operators. We got me and Connor Rolain here sipping coffee, excited to chat about protein, what we're drinking on, and of course marketing. Uh, but excited, excited to chat today, episode 115. As always, thank you so much to our sponsors, Motion, Aftersell, Haus, and Richpanel. Let's get into it. How you doing? We're a little bit late to start the show. I heard you spilled some hot sauce. Did you get that cleaned up?
We got the hot sauce cleaned up.
Yeah.
Had a little, had a little cat trouble this morning. Knocked over the hot sauce all over the new, the new sneakers, but That's all right. We threw everything in the wash. We'll see, we'll see how stained it is when we get, when we get home tonight. But hey, we made it. We made it back to another episode of The Marketing Operator, so all is good in the world. We—
what, what's your hot sauce of choice?
Uh, so Daniel Pearson sent me this hot sauce like for Christmas last year from this like local farmer. He gets it from, I think, in Seattle, and I forget the name of it off the top of my head, but it's so good. It's like this it's like kind of like a smoky red sauce. I'll have to, I'll have to go back and I'll take a picture and send it to you. It's unbelievable. I've ordered it like 3 times since he sent it to me.
Nice. Yeah, I think Connor said on the last pod that people like the banter and the, the protein talk, which is good. It's, it's more fun than some of the marketing stuff. So, you know, what are you drinking today? I got this, I got this Starbucks protein cold foam as like my breakfast today.
Wait, so hold on, hold on, hold on. What? Hold on. Where's the—
have you not seen it? No, no, no, I haven't.
Where's the, where's the protein?
Well, cause you know, like every beverage, every CPG has to have some protein max, you know, version equivalent. And so like, I would always just get like, you know, black cold brew or like, you know, a little bit of like a little bit of milk. Um, so like I never get any of the fancy drinks and they have this protein cold foam, which it has calories, but it has like, like, I don't think it has any sugar or much sugar and it's got, um, It's got like 100, you know, 200 calories. It's got like 20 to 30 grams of protein. I don't know how much. So it's like pretty good and it actually fills me up. So it's like, all right, cool. That's my breakfast.
Nice. Yeah. That's not too, that's not too different than the, uh, than the raw protein drink into the cold brew that I've been doing in the mornings.
Yeah. It's not, yeah. Yeah. Cause I think some of them have like Javi and a few others. They have like the protein coffee, which are like pretty good to do that. Actually, I used to do that back in the day.
I'm just excited to try David's new protein ice cream. That's what I'm—
dude, when is that dropping? Do you know?
It's gotta be soon. I mean, they've been, they've been like really, really teasing it. I'm very curious to see what like the, the D2C pricing is on that. 'Cause I'm imagining they're trying to ship it cold. I, I don't, I doubt that that'll have as much of a D2C presence as, as their bars. 'Cause I'm, I'm assuming it's gonna be super expensive to ship. But yeah, it's, it was really interesting listening to that podcast with, what's the guy's, it's Mark, I forget. Yeah, Peter, but the guy that hosts it, I forget.
Oh yeah, Open Residency.
Yeah. What's his last name? Mark?
I don't know his name.
I don't know Mark's name, but yeah, Peter had a big, long, like, complicated last name. But yeah, it was, it was interesting to hear Peter talk about like, because he kind of, he kind of alluded to like future products as well as like, well, what are, what are all the, all of like the products that, you know, this like, what is it called? Effigy or E?
Yeah, actually, you know better than me. I was going to say it's like EPG or something like that.
Yeah. So like fat in the protein bar, replacing it with that, with that ingredient, fat in the ice cream, replacing it with that ingredient. I think he even mentioned like fried foods as well. Yeah. EPG. Yeah. So it sounds like they're— it's just, it's just very interesting to hear their approach.
Dude, I'm like, yeah, I'm probably like 70% of the way done with that podcast. And my main takeaway, especially when I got to that part, is like, this is going to be like a multi, multi-billion dollar company. Like with like, A, how great of an operator he is. It's obviously his second time doing it. The capital they have behind it, like, and then the vision of doing this, because I think what they're going to do is like a Gruen thing and spin up different brands. It seems like, you know, now that they own the manufacturing, it's like they can just, 'cause like, you know, David will appeal to one cohort of people and that could probably be a billion-dollar brand. And then the other one, it just feels like this is gonna be like the new Mars or something like that, you know? But just like, I think they're gonna be huge and giant. 'Cause yeah, if they crack it and they do, you know, EPG chicken nuggets or stuff like that, like—
Sounds like they have the opportunity to take the, almost like the Meijer approach or the, I forget, like the sleep, Um, God, what's the guy we had on like in one of the first episodes from the mattress company where they have like, they own 10 brands, right? Yeah. Resident, right? They own like 10 brands, but they have different price points, different value props across all those brands. It sounds like, it sounds like, like they could do the same thing here with this, with this, uh, EPG, which is really interesting. Um, yeah, I'm super excited to try the, try the, uh, the ice cream. And I, that episode was super cool just to hear You know, he's like the opposite end of the spectrum as us where we're like obviously talking a lot about performance marketing, but he's like, just to hear his thoughts on brand marketing and how he thinks about brand marketing and how he thinks about like paid media and its role in the, in the performance marketing and like the overall marketing stack was so interesting. I thought that was a really, a really well done episode and, and super good point of views. Yeah.
And I think he's right about it all too. Like as a, as a recovered growth guy, I think he's right about it. He's like, he had a good take. He's like, it does matter. It clearly does matter. You shouldn't be just relying on that. I just don't want to talk about it. He's just like, and I obviously do love talking about it, but he's kind of like, he's not like saying it doesn't do anything. Like there are some people like that. It's more of like, you don't want to be relying on it. And there's a lot better things to do. And especially as the business grows, it was actually a very rational take, especially as the business grows, we might be 70/30 performance to brand now. As we grow and have mass distribution, we're gonna be, you know, flipped other way. So like, yeah.
And I think he would, I think he'd be the first to tell you that, like, you know, he was obviously taking kind of a polarizing take cuz he thinks brand marketing's more important. But I think he, I think Peter would be the first to say that like all your performance stuff works better when you have amazing brand marketing peppered in. And I just loved his framework. I thought his framework was super cool on how to develop good brand marketing events. It was like, It has to, it can't be obvious, but it also has to be true.
That's my biggest takeaway. The non-obvious. Yeah.
Yeah. The non, it's like non-obvious and true, which is, which is so cool. Like the COD, I mean, the COD exam, like makes so much more sense now that, uh, I, I, I have kind of peeked under the hood and have his framework.
Yeah. No, they're masters of getting attention. I'm, I'm so impressed with their, their brand and, and them getting attention.
Um, also the briefing. I thought the briefing stuff was super cool that he, that like he's super detailed on briefing and making sure he's giving the, you know, designers the right inputs. Like I thought that was awesome to hear his approach for that as well. And I'm also only like, I'm probably like halfway, three-quarters of the way through, but I'm also, I think there's a big like document to, to dive in that they put a lot of the information in. I'm excited to like really chew on that and absorb it. Cool.
Yeah, no, it's a great pod. Um, so should we, that's a good segue to talk about performance marketing, huh?
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Start off with protein and then we're into growth marketing.
He might not like talking about it. Somebody needs to. That's funny. No, I'm just kidding. Um, all right, cool. So what, what I want to chat about today, we haven't talked about like team in a while, structures, stuff like that. So I, I want to hear where you guys are at, uh, what roles you're hiring for. Obviously we got to talk about AI, how that's evolving, you know, if, if and how you're thinking about, you know, your team and hiring, um, and, and the expectations and just go from there. So yeah, like what are, what's going through your head on the recruitment side? I actually haven't, you know, even though we were in person last week, we haven't really chatted about that and like team and like, are there any roles you're hiring for? Are there any like big, big things that you guys are really focused on that you're building out a team for?
Yeah. So we really early on this year, we really beefed up our paid media team. Like we, we just didn't have enough paid media managers overseeing all of our markets. So that was a, that was one area that we beefed up in the first part of this year. We added on 2 paid media managers. And they're really overseeing the paid media stack for entire markets. So like, you know, we hired an international paid media manager that's overseeing all of UK, all of EU, managing the entire paid media budget, media mix measurement, really all of it.
Also, these, these are buyers. These are in the account.
No, these are not buyers. They have been buyers in a past life, but now they are really managing like the entire stack. So like also daily forecasting, they're managing the buyers basically. Um, and then, and then another one, same thing. Uh, also she's helping with some more like specific initiatives, like channels within the US. So she's doing a little bit more like buying. Um, I'd say now it's international. That's where we're really trying to beef up the team. We're, we're, we're putting a lot of focus on international this year. We just launched the, in the UAE, which has been really good and really, really awesome start. So for us, and if you know anyone, if you're listening and you know anyone that fits the bill for these, please reach out, but we're hiring a director of growth. For the EMEA hub. So a director of growth to really like kind of be my counterpart internationally, someone that I can, you know, align on what the strategies are and how we need to do these, like implement these strategies, and then they can go be the person to like really execute them with the team. So that's role number 1. And then role number 2 is a creative strategist for the EMEA hub. Those are the 2 big ones right now. Like tying this into AI, I'd say that we are just hiring less because of, like, we're not slowing down on hiring, but we just expect each hire to be more productive with AI. So like, for example, this creative strategist hire, I think a year ago we might have been hiring 2 creative strategists for this role. But right now we're like, hey, we think that like with the power of Claude and what Claude can do in terms of briefing and scripting and VO and all that, that we can probably start with one and they can maybe do the, the same amount of work as like one and a half or two people a year or a year and a half ago. So I think it's just, we're, we're definitely not coming from this place of, hey, we're not hiring now because of AI. We're just saying, hey, we think that the productivity that a single person can have is much greater because of AI. So maybe we don't need to hire as many folks in that world, um, at least not until we've like taken swings with, with some of the, um, the tooling that's out there. I'd say the wor— the, the roles that we are slowing down on are more of the analyst type roles because now like you don't really need a human to go and like manually pull all those reports. Like you have the right connector set up and you have the right prompt set up. Like you can just kind of prompt it and get that data quickly. So I think you have this note, like more in leverage roles, less in ops roles. Like I would fully agree with that. Like I think any of the, any of the straight up kind of like, I always, I always like break down roles between like thinking and doing, you know, you have like, you know, a CMO, which is probably 90% thinking, 10% doing, and then you have like an entry-level role, which is like 100% doing. I think the roles that are leaning more doing, those are the roles that we're thinking about, how can we like, you know, automate some of this stuff with, with AI tooling and, and that, that's kind of where we're, we're changing, but like not, not slowing down on those high leverage roles.
[Sponsor Content] Motion just dropped their 2026 Creative Benchmarks report, and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same 4 questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate? And which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over $1 billion in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings. Like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their Runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you.
I agree with you. Kind of jumped ahead and said a lot, so I really, I really like it. Agree with it. Yeah, I think, hey, just like non-AI related for your guys' maturity and stage of business, like totally makes sense to invest in, you know, the new markets where we're definitely not there yet. I think we got a lot, you know, domestically to do. So I think that totally makes sense.
But yeah, well, I think on that note, like a lot of— especially in Canada and Australia, like our playbooks that we've established in the US have, have continued to work really well in those markets. Like we're seeing great growth in Australia and Canada this year. And I don't want to say that we're not doing local things there. We totally are. Like we're doing local events. We are working with Canadian creators, Australian creators, but I'd say generally like strategically from how we're deploying media, how we're doing retention marketing, how we're thinking about our offer calendar, our new product go-to-market, like those things are drafting really well off our US business and we're still seeing really good growth in those markets because of that. It's the, It's the EU, UK where we're realizing we need to have a lot more local strategies and the UK is looking really good. We're having a strong year there, but it's a lot easier to localize there versus the EU is not. The EU is growing, but like we're just seeing diminishing returns in our, in our like English speaking ads targeting the EU. So that's where we're like, and that goes back to my first point on like why we're hiring more high leverage local people for those markets. Cause those are where we're seeing data points that suggest we need to like launch all these local language funnels and it's just, it's a tricky thing to do.
The role, tell me the title of the role, like outside of creative strategy, it's like paid media manager, is that what you call it?
Director of growth.
Director of growth. Okay, got it.
Okay.
Sorry. I thought you were saying you hired like a paid media manager. Like what are your expectations for them, you know, inside the ad account versus outside of the ad account, like for your growth team. And then again, like, is that changing? Like to me, we're not doing really any localization yet. I mean, we're doing like we're not doing like language localization yet. We're doing obviously like currency and stuff like that. But that seems like that is an obvious one where AI could give a lot of leverage to.
Yep. Yeah, I think it's, it's, um, and we are using a, like we use this tool called, um, um, blanking, it's blanking off the top of my head, but like we are using a tool to do all of the translations and then we'll run it through a copywriter. So we're using an AI tool for that. Um, you know, we have a great paid media manager overseeing the, the EU and UK markets now. So this person's going to be really just like driving forward all of our, all of our strategies, highlight, like, like overall with the team. Like we have a retention manager for those markets. We have a paid media manager. We have media buyers. We just hired an affiliate manager. So all of the individual contributors are in place. We just need someone that's really. Establishing and like fine-tuning that local strategy and then like pushing that forward with the team. So I don't necessarily need this person in the, in the ad account, you know, buying media, but I do need them to, to be pushing forward like, hey, how should we bring Italy to market? Like, what are the ads? What are the messages? How should that flow throughout ads to email to website? Um, and then like being really good with the data, right? Like, all right, now we've been live in Italy and for, for 30 days, like, How's it looking? What should we do next because of this? Like someone that can really be across the entire marketing stack. Um, but they don't necessarily need to be technical in any specific channel because we already have those individual contributors. But like we don't have that person right now that's kind of like overseeing the entire strategy and like weaving all of the channels together. It's like, I think we're doing probably a, a 5 out of 10 strategically, but I think if we have this like on person boots on the ground. Our strategy can just be a lot more, uh, pinpointed to a point where, you know, I'm never going to be able to know exactly what to do in Italy because I don't live in the EU. So that's, that's what we're, we're hoping to get out of this person.
Yeah, totally. That— no, that makes sense. Yeah, I, I think it's an area where, like, I could totally see AI doing. And personally, so for us, for our growth team, like, even internally, we're definitely starting to shift the— like, I think there's the number of roles, and you can talk about, like, you know, you mentioned you might need one less creative strategist than you used to. Part of the thing for us is like, we're so lean, like we have one data analyst. Like I can't not have a data analyst, but we've been able to do, and I, I just put this tweet in the episode notes, we put it in like the show notes is like, um, you know, of like what people's role are, like, because you can get so much leverage now. So one of my, one of my data analyst goals for the year, and we kind of, we accomplished it in Q1, is like, get everybody the ability to get data themselves, you know, essentially get our data warehouse. We're using, you know, Polar 4, but like getting our data warehouse in the cloud so like anyone can access it. So the stuff that used to take 2 weeks or a week just if he has a backlog, now anybody can do, you know. And so he's like taking his, his knowledge and his skill set and infrastructure and like enabling that with everybody else. So it— the reason I say that is like Maybe I would've needed a second data analyst, so maybe I only need one, you know, but like you can't not have one. Like we need a copywriter, but now, right, with Claude and skills, like she can take her knowledge and, and past work and then like use that as leverage so everybody else can get access to that. So it's, it's challenging because we're pretty lean that it's not like I can't, like you can't have none. Um, at least in, in certain roles. So I think that's one is like getting more leverage and kind of like trying to make people like 10x employees, you know, and I do think it'll go to like higher compensated smaller teams, probably. Like I was talking to, I was, it was really funny actually flying out to the, the Performance Summit. I've never had this happen before. I sat next to like a good family friend who works in venture capital on the plane. Like, so the Wi-Fi wasn't working, so we just chatted like AI for, you know, the majority of the flight. But what he's saying is like, they're not hiring analysts anymore, you know, and that's not happening a lot. Like they're they have agents that scan inboxes that do analysis, kind of like you said, you know, so a lot of the doing is gone. The, and so instead they just have, they're still hiring, you know, partners or whatever it is, or they have partners, they're just not hiring the analysts underneath them, the junior people. And now a partner is able to use AI to do analysis that used to be a junior person. So I do think those junior level jobs are happening, but then I think the other thing that we're really seeing is, as I'm trying to like move here early, is like not even the numbers of the roles, but like what the roles are. Like, um, you, we've seen it so much of, we've talked a ton about how media buyer roles are changing. Like I just think it's so much going in that direction where it's like there's only so much impact you can now have in the, in the account. And it still matters, don't get me wrong, but like day-to-day manual stuff, it doesn't, you know? And so I do think like creative, Maybe at this little hot take, not everyone's gonna agree. Like, I do think a certain level of creative, even production, needs to be done by like a growth manager or media buyer. I, I do think so. And I, I think that, that a year ago, I don't know that I thought so. I thought it was more analysis and creating feedback loops. Like, you know, there's all these AI tools coming out. Like, yes, like Icon and, you know, some other one came out yesterday. Like, where they're not all there yet, you know what I mean? They're not there yet, but like, there is these, this world in the future where like you can have AI, like the Motion MCP is really, really good. I don't know if you guys have played around with it. Like you can get all of that reporting that would normally take you a day, you know, that most people are doing. I think Connor mentioned this on like, you know, our live pod, like now that, now they get it Monday morning. It's like you can get all your analysis, train on what you want from that creative strategist, and then it's like, boom, you can now go and produce assets that day, you know? And maybe, maybe the AI statics are not like perfectly there yet, but they're, they're getting better and better by the minute. And so I think that's like, again, that's like my main goal is like time to funnel completion. And what I've noticed, I don't know about you, more people slows things down, right? Because you have to go and a media buyer has an idea, they have to go and brief a creative strategist, creative strategist has to go put that in Asana or whatever you're using. And then a designer does that and a copywriter does it. It's like, Or I'm just gonna go and do it. Like you could just go and do it yourself. Like that's what I've, yeah. So I, I think that speed is so important for social and I think the more you can compress it. So we've seen it happen in like, you know, in tech where those roles have converged and, you know, manager roles no really don't exist anymore. Like, you know, that's, that's everybody's doing a flatter org and then people are expected to do more and a PM is expected to code and You know, and, and design as well. Um, I, I just think that's starting to happen here. So where I started with it was CRO. I just thought that was like the first one that was gonna happen because, um, it's code, you know, where like the creative stuff, it's not really there yet. Like I really don't even know how much AI is helping like brand, you know what I mean? Like, like it's not great at creative stuff like that.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think, I think once you have the idea, it's helpful. But I think get like, you know, people say ideas are cheap. Everyone has good ideas. I don't agree with that actually. I think not everyone has good ideas and I think good ideas are incredibly valuable. I think once you have the idea, I think that's where AI helps. Like, all right, here's the overall idea. Like how can this, how can that, you can use AI to develop a channel strategy or messaging. I think the point that you hit on that I want to like just really double-click on, because I think this is I mean, there's levels to this stuff, obviously, and, and like a lot of nuance to the levels, but I think like kind of where what's happening at Hexclad and what I see as being like just table stakes now is that everyone has to be an analyst. Like if you can't, if you are still unable, like that's where you should start. If you are a marketer in an org, I don't care whether you're on the growth team, on the brand team, I don't care which team within growth you're on. You should figure out how to use Claude or, you know, Shopify Sidekick or whatever it is, like whatever you have at your company to like try to answer your data questions first. Because if you can, there's so much. I remember thinking this at the, at the agency when I was, when I was doing the agency stuff back in the day and like sometimes giving the insight was more valuable than actually shipping a new ad or a new landing page. Like sometimes just like uncovering something that the brand didn't know. Um, was like, they're like, they would look at you and like, it was like the biggest aha moment. You didn't ship anything new. You didn't necessarily like move the needle forward in the sense of like, hey, we just launched a new ad that's working well, but you gave them an insight that they didn't have. And there's no reason, like everyone needs to be an analyst now with, with all the tooling that's out there. And for, for like me and on my team, the way that I like facilitate this is if I have people reach out to me that are like, asking for a data point, instead of just like giving them the data point, I'll say, hey, you know, you could go into this tool or that tool and like, if you ask it this, it'll probably be able to pull it for you. So I think that's, that's how I've tried to like facilitate that within the team is just when people are making these asks, kind of point them in the right direction and, and like encourage them to figure out how to find this data point on their own. But I think everyone's becoming an analyst. I think that's one role that is like, totally getting compressed and there's no, like, you can't, yeah.
[Sponsor Content] Almost table stakes soon. 'Cause I, so I do agree with you, but really where the value is, is then producing. Like again, yeah, there are some where you just want the analysis. And the cool thing is you can, it can do so much better. Like I, I, I tweeted about it today, but like I'm 5 for 5 and I'll talk about CRO a little bit of like CRO tests that I've run end to end in Claude. And like, yes, the speed is cool and that I can design and dev stuff. The more valuable thing to me, and, and it's both, I shouldn't say that, is the, it's the right strategy, right? Like even if I could design and dev stuff, if it's not the right test and not the right framework, like it's not gonna be a winning test. And I've never had a time in General History, Jones Road history, where we've gone 5 for 5 in a row on testing. Like that's never happened. And these aren't even small wins. Like I think that the lowest one of these was like 3% lift. Some of these are like 5%, 16%, like some of those are not statsig yet, but like, I think it's like a 5% lift on average. And I think it's because, so I think it's a few things. A, the speed and velocity of it. And so these are 4-way or 5-way tests. They're not just an A/B test. So we're getting more variations in there and it's essentially costs no extra to be able to, to produce these variations. But more importantly, it's, it's the strategy. It's, you know, have a system agent skills trained on like what we believe is not only the best practices of CRO, all of our consumer insights, any study we've done, um, as well as all of our data, you know, our heatmap data, our GA4 data. And so like it just wouldn't be possible for me, definitely for me as a CEO, but even for one person on a team to do as good of a job at it. Like usually a CRO program has, you know, a data person, a CRO strategist, a designer, a dev, a copywriter, a project manager, like, right? And that, and that's a, that's a big team. That's a lot of people to do it. And so we don't. And, um, to me, that's what's most exciting. And same thing, like we're trying to diagnose some ad account issues right now. And it's like, you know, I was never the most technical, uh, you know, I could never write SQL. Like I tried to learn it a little bit, but even like building reports in Supermetrics and stuff like that, like you just don't have to do that now. Like you can just, you can just be like, hey, what's going on? And you can get so much more granularity where like there's normally so many variables that you would have to do and be like, oh, I need to slice it this way and slice it that way. And it's like, it can just look at way more. So I think that's what's exciting. But from there it's like, okay, the real value is then can I go and produce? So maybe it's, it's not, it's not one, it's both, you know. Marketing operators, I want to challenge how you think about post-purchase. If you zoom out. Post-purchase isn't a tactic. It's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic, your one-click upsells, how you increase AOV, revenue per session, profit per session. It's your confirmation page. It's all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make per order. That's why Rocked After-Sale isn't just an upsell tool. It's a design system for the full post-purchase experience. Rocked After-Sale gives you one unified system, a smart cart and checkout offers, one-click post-purchase upsells, and thank you page monetization with Rocked banks. And here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, Rock to AfterSell opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics with Rock Network products. Run the math on your own volume. At 50K orders a month, that's $15K to $25K in pure profit with RockBanks. At 100K, that's $30K to $50K. I'm not great at math, but I love those numbers. Straight to the bottom line as well. Every month, from a page your customer is already landing on won't affect conversion rate. It's just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in. And this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, Rock the After-Sale supports it. Operators listeners can activate Rock Thanks and get the full after-sale suite for a year, or grab an extended 60-day trial to test post-purchase performance. Go to aftersale.com/operators, build the system once and let it compound.
I think your CRO thing is, is very interesting. I have a, I have an example right now that's very top of mind. We, We spent the last, God knows how long, like being really thoughtful about designing a new product page. Um, big swing, right? Like this was not a simple A/B test. This is like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna keep what we've tested into, but we're going to give it a, like a whole facelift. And we just ran the test for like 7 days, um, in the last 7 days and got like 5,500 conversions. And, you know, thank God because we worked on it for a long time. It drove a really nice lift. We got like a 5% lift in revenue per user. And it was a global product page test. So like huge, huge incremental revenue from this new experience. What I'm excited about now is that we're gonna roll it out across the entire website, um, everywhere. And now is where I'm really excited to get into the like tinkering, right? The true A/B test. Hey, we have this new experience now. How can we make it like 1% better, better 10 times in a row and, and just like stack those wins on top of one another. That's where I think you can really be leveraging all of these different, like, yeah, like Clarity and Convert.com and, and, uh, all the click data on your page to, to inform like, hey, what is the next test here? Because there's a million things we could do, right? And that, that was kind of the point that I think you were making. And especially with CRO, like if you give, CRO is the classic example of like work will fill up the space you allocate it to. Like there are 100 tests you can run on your website at any given time. But the kind of the forcing function of CRO is you're often, you have to choose which ones have the most upside because you can only do, you can't, you can't test all your product page tests at the same time. Like it just doesn't work. So I'm excited to see that.
And now you can, and now you can, you can produce, meaning you could build these tests, build the design and code faster than you can actually put slots in them. Like if you have a person dedicated to it, so it's even more of a forcing function that like you have to pick the right ones. Otherwise there's like a direct opportunity cost of not.
Yeah, well, so that's— I want to do like a training with you because now I want to like— our CRO person is super, super technical. Like he is a designer, he can do a little bit of code and he's good with these tools. So I'm like, I want to like get him set up in the right way with this new product page so he can go and do the next 10 versions of this product page test and not even have to, because now that the design's done right, like I don't even think he'll need to tap in our UX designer. We have 2 UX designers in-house. I don't even think he'll need to tap into any of them. Hopefully if he can just lean into like Claude and Manus to get these like iterative tests, uh, designed and, and built out and, and literally everything, right? Design it, put it into the code, set it up and convert, launch it, you know, measure it with Claude MCP. Like all, I want to like figure out what your workflow is so, so we can—
maybe we should do it on a live pod. Maybe we should do it on a pod.
But that's a good idea.
Yeah, no, so I, so I, so I hired somebody, um, she'll start in a few weeks and it was like, I wrote the JD myself, meaning Claude did it. Like I don't normally write JDs, but was like, I want to try something new. And I was like, this is a very experimental role, right? Like AI is here and we're looking for one person to own this end to end. And like, this is a very exciting time. Um, and I was like, you'll have some design and dev support, but you're really expected to run an end to end CRO program yourself. Like one person and, and, you know, and got, I would say the quality of candidates much higher than, much better than normal. I think because we were just like so like magnetic in the marketing of it, you know, where normally it's like, I feel like our JDs are a little bit more boring. So I have to do that more, but it was, it's a very experimental role where it's like, things are clearly changing. We think the roles that we're going to need are, are different. And so I'm really excited about that and this one. And I think, you know, It's finding the right person who has some Claude knowledge, but really just has the right temperament and personality to be able to, you know, figure these out. So again, it's not just— uh, your e-com CRO manager.
Okay. So it's, um, yeah, there's, there's no like weird new age name to it.
No, no. It's more just like in the job description, just super clear, you know? Um, so I think that'll be an experiment, but I, I think, you know, it's coming for growth. Like I think, I think, I, I, I think I can talk about it, but like I've seen some stuff that Meta's, you know, working on. I mean, they're. Yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's vision is one day becoming clear, you know, where there's not gonna be that many things that you can even do in platform. And so it's gotta be, so we're having our growth team do more landing page stuff. Like I'm teaching my growth team how to do this stuff and they'll do the cloud stuff on the landers and do the heat map and analysis on landers, you know, and then this person will do some landers but full site. And static ads, like I just no longer think that's, you just creative strategists. Like I really think that to be producing, and I think in this era everybody has to be a producer, um, everybody needs to be able to, and again, I'm, I'm super bearish on AI UGC and stuff like that. So I'm not trying to say that, but I think there's some level of creative that, you know, that has to happen and, um, by the growth team. So I, I think that those roles and that's what, you know, Taylor Holiday, I think when he either came on or did like the first reacts, like, he kind of challenged us on and was like, this is like the profit engineer. I hate that term. I don't like it. I don't think he's fully right, but I do think it's, it's getting closer and closer to that role. So we're definitely hiring for that more of like a combined growth manager, creative strategist.
Well, I, the note I had here is, you know, catalog's very top of mind for me right now after the Meta Summit. And that was like one of the first things I did when I got back to my desk. This week was I hit up our, our rep and said, hey, where's like, where's the checklist of like what a healthy catalog looks like? You know, and, and that's what I'm going to focus on with the team. But the question is like, who owns that? I think that should probably be the media buyer owning that task. Now he might have to pull in the, the web team to like get some things figured out, but in my opinion, like the media buyer should own catalog cleanliness and hygiene and make sure that We're giving Meta all the data and all the setup it wants through the catalog. And then that person should also probably, not probably, like without a doubt, be responsible for the gen AI that the catalog is, is meant to be able to produce. Right. So I think that's a great example where it's, it's a media buying role, but you're also now doing some like data hygiene work. You're also doing creative strategy work because you're, because you're generating the creative in the ad account. After the catalog's all set up the right way. So I think that's a really good example of how like Meta's building product that inherently expands the media buyer's role. Like, I don't think that should be the creative strategist role because the creative strategist, they're not in Meta buying ads. Like, it's the media buyer who's going to know how to, you know, click those buttons and generate the creative and measure it. So I think that should squarely be with the media buyer. And that probably wasn't the case, you know, a year or two years ago. Like, I think historically you'd hit up your dev and be like, hey, can you set up this catalog? And, and probably be kind of hands-off.
Totally agree. I, I think email, it'll come for next. I mean, I, I, I just haven't, I don't spend any time there, but I think just attacking, you know, email with Claude, like I think you could probably do so much and just require less people to run, you know, and a retention program, you know, an email program.
There's a lot of really cool AI. Like I think this is one of the, I generally don't think there's that much, like I've said this before, but I don't think there's a ton of like tech tooling to overlay under your Meta account. That's not 100% true. Like I do think like event matching tools are super valuable. I think that does drive an uptick in performance, but like, you know, the latest and greatest audience targeting, for example, I don't think generally there's a ton of lift there. I don't, I do not think that's the case with, with email. We've seen like 3 or 4 tools drive significant lift to our retention programs and There are tools now that basically like connect to your entire content of past emails, your raw content library, and they can basically produce creative that's personalized to specific audiences. So we are, we're starting to test more of that. I forget the name of the tool off the top of my head, but I'm really excited about like some of the, it's not true Gen AI. I mean, it is because it, but it's leaning into like your content, right? It's so it is Gen AI using, using your historical emails and all of your raw content library, but. I fully agree. I think, and our team's been doing a great job of leaning in there and like really understanding how they can create leverage in their roles using those tools. And I'm really, really, I'll report back to let you know how it goes, but it's, I'm really excited about that.
Yeah, definitely. I think, yeah, where there's, where there's just, um, levels of personalization that, you know, couldn't be done manually before. I think that's where it's really exciting and I think with with these ones. So like, this is my opinion on it. You know, everybody talks about, and I don't know what, what, what you've seen, but you know, oh, it's gonna take jobs and stuff like that. There's some, we're, we're hiring additional, you know, cuz to me, like as a, as a CEO, it's all about like, what's the, what's the ROI, return on invested capital I'm gonna get, you know? And now, like if I had a 0 out of 5, um, you know, win rate on the CRO test, I'm like, ah, there's nothing there. But like, think about the additional value that we're able to create with these tests. That's like, you would then want to hire and run as many tests as possible. And like, it's, it's worth it to spend six figures on a person to do that because that one person, like before, the, the returns weren't as great on them. If you spend, I'm just making up numbers, but if you spend $150K on, you know, a CRO person, well, like they're not really that valuable unless you have design and dev and stuff like that, you know? And so your, your returns are, are therefore less, right? If I'm just making up numbers, if you're going to get a million in incremental revenue from adding this, this division, well, now you used to have to add $600K of, of, you know, payroll annually to do that, right? If you need all that, well, now you add $200K to do that, you know? And so it's like, it just, to me, it just makes more sense. So there are some places where I'm hiring more. You know, like we've, we've increased even our dev support. We've increased some of our design support because we're now able to move so much faster on some of this stuff. Um, I think there are somewhere we are hoping to hire less and try to automate some workflows, but I think that's short-sighted if you're only thinking about how you're going to save money. I care more about how am I going to build more value and get more out of it. And like, you know, the stuff that as a bootstrap business, like I could never have a best-in-class CRO program before because that's usually pretty expensive. I now think that's completely possible to do.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think, yeah, what— so you're basically saying, hey, you, Cody, the CEO, went and spent the last month or two kind of figuring out how to build this CRO program with Claude. You're finding wins. You said you're 5 out of 5, and you're thinking is, well, if I had someone thinking about this, focused on this all day, every day, and using the system you've built, they could launch, you know, 10x the amount of tests that I've launched while I've been kind of building this system. And that, like, that the asymmetric upside there is massive. So that's a scenario where you're saying, hey, we're actually hiring because of the output of this AI system, not less, right?
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We're hiring more 'cause we can get more value out of it. Yep.
We're, we're doing that with one of the things we've done that's probably been one of our biggest, like, AI enabled projects this year has been just building out a new product seeding program, and we built it all through, through Lovable, and it's been— it's awesome. It's so much more— yeah, yeah, I will. It's so much more streamlined. We used to like do it through ClickUp. It was like a super manual process. It just, it was very clunky. Um, there wasn't like— there's just a lot of different people involved, right? Like the, the creator has to apply, you need to screen them, you need to have some level of comms between them. They need to select their products, you need to ship it, you need to track it. It's just a— there's a lot of steps. Um, and so we built that whole thing in, in Lovable now, and it's a lot more streamlined. And it's kind of the same situation, like we are now going to be able to seed way more products way quicker than we could in the past. And we actually hired another person to help support that program because we think the upside on that additional person is so much greater than it used to be. So I actually see that as being the same situation, um, as what you just described with the CRO hire where initially we were planning to hire like 2 or 3 people to help support seeding because seeding is such a big part of our influencer program. And now I'm just meeting with our, with our, you know, lead on influencer yesterday. And she's like, oh yeah, actually like so-and-so, we think they're going to be able to support the UK now too because of how streamlined this new process is with Lovable and We were only hiring them to support the EU at first, and now it's like they're expanding markets because they're, they're realizing we can actually do way more with the same amount of time. So that's a, that's a great example where we hired because of the AI tooling and not, not less because of it.
[Sponsor Content] We talk about incrementality a lot, but how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently, and Houzz has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our Geolift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner, I've been one of the early design partners on how to see MMM. C stands for causal, so it's one of the only MMMs, if not the only MMM that I've seen, that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to just trust the data so much more. So it's not a black box, but actually informs our roadmap and has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The Houzz team is world-class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best D2C growth operators out there. They have a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the Houzz Growth Lab. One is in LA on May 19th and the other is in New York on May 21st. I highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about CMM, go to Houzz.io/operators to start making better data-driven decisions today. And I am hopeful on some of the more operations workflow stuff. I don't know if you've noticed it. What I think we've uncovered lately is like, I, and I've kind of always felt like this or known this, but there's just so many manual things that people do just because it's legacy systems and ways of doing things. And it's hard 'cause everyone's also like, I need more people, I need more people. And it's like, I'm trying to figure out right now where to draw the line and be like, oh yeah, sure, I'll get you people. Or it's like, It doesn't necessarily have to be me, but it's gotta be either me or like 1 to 2 people I really trust who can roll up their sleeves and be like, prove to me that you're doing things as efficiently as possible. And I think I have to do that. And I think that's where I'm gonna draw the line because it's just, there are just so many things that are so inefficient that it's like, we don't really need these people and the people are not really contributing to revenue. And no one wants to hear that.
Everyone wants more people, but I want to, I want to dig into that a little bit. What's an example? Like, how would you think about, let's say someone comes to you in any department and they're like, hey, we need, I need another retention manager. I need another paid media manager or influencer manager, whatever it is. Like, what would, how would you as a, like, as like the leader of the org kind of make them prove to you that they've maxed out efficiency with, with the available tooling? Before you're like, okay, I think you, I agree with you now. You do need this person because you've proven to me that you're, you're already opti— or operating at a super efficient level based on the tooling you're using and you're not doing a bunch of manual stuff that could be more efficient.
Yeah. Number one, like especially if it's like a marketing side, it's like, how does it, like even before you talk about the automation, it's like, how does it make me more money? How does it make the company more money? You know, is this related to one of our big goals that we're trying to invest more in? You know, or is this just something where you, you know, you feel like you're underwater and, and, and need it. But if it's like, it's a clear like, oh, we have this opportunity and we just don't have enough bandwidth to be doing this thing, right? We, we, you know, don't have a, a CRO lead and so we're just not testing as fast as we need to. And if we did, we could, you know, have a better converting website.
Like, cool.
That, there's a clear financial impact of that.
Yeah. And you're looking at your last 5 tests and you're like, okay, well what if we did this times 10? Okay, well that obviously makes sense. We did the same thing with product seeding. We're like, hey, we've done, we had 500 million impressions in the US in, in the last 3 months. Like what would happen if we could add 10 to 50 million impressions per quarter? Like, okay, that pays for this, this influencer hire just in that. So yeah, we think about the same way.
Yeah, there's that. Like we just brought on, uh, and it's, again, it's not an expensive role, but like, uh, some support on retention. You know, because we, you know, essentially the agreement that I have with my team is like, okay, if I allocate this, here's, here's like the expectations. And they're like, yeah, we can go do all these things. If we can go do this loyalty program, if we want to do on, we can, we can test this, this much faster. So it's kind of like, that's kind of how, you know, it's underwriting it, um, from a revenue side. And then from a, from like a bandwidth side, um, on, I would say these are more of the operations roles, right? Like supply chain, things like that. It's, you know, it's, again, it's an additional cost and, and, you know, it's, yes, people can make the claim, oh, well, if we had more time, we'd be able to do this and it would save us more. Like, I don't know, it's kind of like, yeah, prove to me that we're not like, show me your workflow, show me. Um, and I have one person on the team who like is going to do this, but it's like, show me that we're not just doing something super, you know, on automate. 'Cause what I've learned over the years, um, and I'm not like a very like woo woo spiritual person, but I always think about this, like whenever there's like a department that doesn't seem to be running very well, people are usually like, I need more, I need more people. And I just, when I think about that department and I just like put my hand over it, like it just feels like chaotic. I don't know if you like ever feel like that. You're just like, it just doesn't seem smooth. And it's usually because there's a, not a strong leader in that department. And they, and the processes are probably not great. They're probably not super clear. And so people are just running around. And then whenever I've hired that leader, like we did it with finance recently, we've done it in other departments. They're like, well, this isn't set up correctly. Like we're not using Ramp to our fullest. NetSuite's not set up correctly. Why are we doing it? Why are we doing this so manually? You know what I mean? So it, you just, I will say it's exhausting. Like it is exhausting to go in everything and do it. But as a bootstrap company, like we kind of have no choice. You just have to do that and be like, and so now, yeah, like I'm kind of deciding with my like COO and head of people, like, what are we, what's our stance? But I really think it's like, I think some companies, and maybe it's more core, have like forms that they have to fill out if they have like a headcount request or a software request and they have to do an RFP. It's like, it's kind of like making people show that, you know, or having somebody sit with them who we think is very objective and, and, and having that person that you trust be like, oh yeah, no, this is super inefficient. Like, let me at least try to do that first.
I love, I, so I love, I love your answer. It's so pragmatic. It's like, literally, I'm gonna like, let's audit your workflow. Like, literally show me your current workflow. Like, record a Loom, show me your workflow, and then you can make the decision as the leader on whether or not. It's also a good coaching opportunity, right? Because you can then go and say, hey, you should go like, at points 3 and 5 in your steps you just showed me, like, I think, because obviously you're super technical with Claude, like you can, you can go and give them that feedback and it's like, all right, go try to make these changes to your workflow. If it still is not working, like then maybe we, I like that process though. Like I love how you're like literally having them audit their own workflow and it's almost like they need to pitch you, right? Like you gotta convince me that you are doing things as efficiently as you, as you can be. And. If you are great, I'll give you the— which is also super empowering to the team. You're like giving it a very fair shake. You're not just coming in with an iron fist and saying no, like you can't have that.
I don't think transparently, I don't think people like it. I think, I think, you know, well, they just want their—
they just want you to say yes, of course. But like, I think they want that. Yeah.
And they also— people worry that they're going to automate themselves out of a role, you know. People, people, people worry that, okay, if I automate this, what's my role? And it's, it's kind of funny because from my seat here is how I look at it. Like, I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to not hire additional people, right? I'm trying to say the people that we have, I just, I want them to be able to do more. I'd rather pay them a little bit more because they are actually more valuable. Like, my, my, you know, the CRO person that we're hiring, like, that's going to be a lot more valuable to me, you know, than if they couldn't do all of these things and I had to hire additional people, you know what I mean? Um, so I think the strong people that have confidence in their abilities and, and know like what their worth is have no problem and they don't want to be spending time automating. Uh, they don't want to be spending time doing stuff that could be automated. But I have found for other people, junior people, people that are less strong, like even prior to AI, like, like I had, I had senior growth people who were like uploading ads and as I tried to get them to offload, like they wanted to do it. I'm like, Well, that shows me the, the value you're providing the company. Like, you should be getting that off your plate to, to spend time on the higher leverage things as soon as possible.
Yeah. Yeah. It's like you can almost tell, you can almost get everything you need to know by how, like, if people are eager or resistant to, to— yeah, yeah, 100%.
But it's a, it's a challenge and it's a, and what I'm really not good at is like You know, everyone, everyone says everything is like a people thing. Like, I just, I just like, guys, we're doing this. Like, you have no choice. And some people like that. Some people clearly don't. We're like, you know, there's like a better way to do change management. So I try to have somebody else in the company do it who has more patience.
Yeah. So who is that person for you guys?
Uh, director of data and AI.
Got it. Okay. So they're the, so they're, they're the one that is the bad guy a little bit more.
No, no, I'm, I don't think that he's more of like supportive and he'll like, he'll act as like a forward deployed engineer. And so he'll meet with people and he's the one who's like trained people on cloud and I've done some, but he's done the majority of it. And he'll meet with people and be like, hey, what's your, like, people will come to him. He has like open hours. It's like, hey, this is, this is what I'm trying to do. It would be great if I had this calendar, great, whatever. And he'll kind of like, I wouldn't say he builds it for them. He's trying to like get them started and then help them and then like audit their stuff. Yeah.
So you've basically hired someone that their whole role is to like help support and enable the team to leverage, like solve their problems with AI basically. And, and it's not, which I think is great because I mean, for some people just getting started can be a big, a big point of friction. Like, where do I even start? So you've actually hired someone to, to solve that issue.
I promoted him. He was our data analyst., and showed a lot of passion for the AI stuff. And so I promoted him. And so again, he, one of the things, one of his goals was getting our data warehouse in Claude. Uh, and then he's, yeah, done all of the trainings and, you know, helping people build stuff out. Like, for example, our like demand planner built out a demand plan in Claude. Like we're, we're literally trying to cancel an $80,000 a year software that was worse, you know? Um, but he helped her with the, with the backend data stuff, things like that, with like understanding, you know, some of the stuff, set her up in GitHub. So he's kind of like facilitating throughout the company. And there could be a point where we hire like a person under him. Like I'd love to because it's like his, he only has so much bandwidth, but if there's 4 people that need people, well, I could just hire 1 person to prevent us from hiring 4. And I really think like we're probably large enough where that makes sense.
What are the, I saw you, you've tweeted a little bit about this and maybe we can do this without naming any specific companies, but What are the, like, what are the categories of e-com tech companies that you think are just straight up cooked from what Claude has, has proven it can do in the last 6 months, even not, or, or less landing page builders. Agreed. Yeah. Cooked.
So it would, it would be slower. It would be slower now than what we have in Claude.
Yeah. Yep. Agreed with that.
I think that's a tough one to, yeah, it's, it's tough because I think different organizations have different technical experience or technical skill sets. Like I think I'm further along in this Hero stuff and Shopify stuff than anyone I've seen. And so not everyone's gonna wanna take the time to do it. Like static ads, you know, like static, like everything is just like a wrapper, you know? So I think that's one. I'm trying to think what else, like, I think some of the influencer tools. Again, it's like, that's a more complicated one to build. Um, but that is certainly one there.
I think like some of the like tools used to prospect influencers, like I just don't, I think you prob— like I think if you give Claude all the context into your company and you say, hey, we want to go find creators that are like, like gym bros, like I think they're gonna be able to go find exactly who you want right away. So I agree. I think, I think some of like the, Now those tools often have more, more functionality than just prospecting, but I think, I think stuff like that is just too easy to do with cloud now.
Yeah. Anything else you can think of? I'm trying to think what else there is. I don't know.
I'm curious, like if like a track suite type tool, how like at some point, I don't know if there's a, if there's like a, a Google Search Console connector, maybe there is, maybe not. But like, I mean, if there is, you could build really awesome dashboards on how you're like, brand search queries are trending over time and how your like Google search trends are trending and like that you can kind of back into your awareness. And now you don't underst— I mean, you could even build a dashboard for your competitors too, probably to like see how, like how many times you're being Googled versus them. Like that's an interesting one.
You could do that. It would give you some stuff directionally. What those guys do is they have panels and so they use, you know, AI to, to, you know, with APIs to, you know, survey and run panels. And the reason that their so much cheaper than, I don't even know, is it like Kantar? Like, who are like the big ones? I forget. But like, you know, I don't, I have no reason, but like the reason they're so much cheaper is because they are using AI to automate a lot of that stuff. Like it's still real people, but they're able to like, you know, do it so much more efficiently. Um, so if you have the ability to do the paneling, I just, you know, that's the hard part. Yeah. Like there's some like consumer Again, anything new is kind of like the same way people want, you know, new, new, new, new bodies. It's also like new software. It's like you do have to put it through a buy versus build analysis. And, um, like we were looking at some like, uh, market trends stuff, you know, there's like, uh, WGSN is one or Mintel is another. And like, they're not cheap, they're not crazy expensive. It's like, oh, let me, let me try to see what we can get, you know. Um, or we use like a fraud tool that's coming up, and it's like, we pay a lot. We pay like a junior person's salary for this like fraud prevention tool, and it's like hard to even prove if it's working. And so I'm like, what can we do with Claude? So I just think you have to try, you know. Again, I just don't think where that's the value. It's like, I don't— I think it's short-sighted to be like, how can I just use this to cut costs? I really want to use it more for stuff you can you could, you know, do, because like a post-purchase survey, you can build that in a day. It's just not— then you have to maintain it and do stuff. Like, it's just not worth it for how cheap a post-purchase survey is too.
[Sponsor Content] Richpanel CEO just predicted his own SaaS product will lose 90% of its revenue, and he's the one building what will kill it. They are betting that AI agents will replace traditional support tools entirely. No dashboards, no seats, no workflows. So what did they ship? An autonomous AI agent that handles customer support from end to end, reading order data, issuing refunds, updating shipments without a human ever touching it. It means you can run a faster, leaner support team at a fraction of the cost while resolving tickets instantly, 24/7. Richpanel is cannibalizing their own business to build the future of CX and support for brands, because if they don't, someone else will. Go check out what they're building at richpanel.com and learn how you can automate your entire support operation today.
I want to like dig into the fraud prevention one. I think that's a good example. So if you were, if you're sitting there and you're thinking to yourself, all right, how, if I want to like go and cut some tech costs and the way that I want to do that is I want to see if I can build out some workflows with Claude, where would you start? Because I talked to, you know, I listened to the Dan Martell Open Residency episode and he has this really like refreshing simplified way of thinking about things, which is just like give it the outcome you want, right? Like, hey, I go into Claude and say, hey, I, I use this tool to do this thing. Here's what I would— I'm, I'm curious if I can build this with you. Like, here is the outcome I want, right? Like, and like explicitly list out like what does preventing fraud look like and just see what ideas it comes up with.
I use Whisperflow for everything, right? It's just like, hey, I use this thing, I have this problem. Sometimes if I know, if I know What I'm trying to do, or I've done a similar project before, I'm like, hey, we could do it this way. What other ideas do you have? Like, I like automated some like thing that my finance team was spending too much time on and I like made it super automated and I found out you could do Google Sheets API in, in Google Cloud Console. Like, I didn't know it before. So second time I did it, right? A similar project. I was like, hey, we should do it this way. We should set it up, you know, like, but when you don't know that, you just have to ask cloud. So I said, I think the challenge here is it's like the there's like an ICE framework. It's like the same way you do testing. It's like, you know, what is high enough? It's actually hard because it's what's high enough dollar amount that it would make sense to do, but possible to do and not risky. Like, I have no interest in trying to vibe code an ERP or a Northbeam or a Klaviyo. Like, there's just too much risk if those go wrong, right? And then on the other end of the spectrum, it's like, not to pick on post-purchase survey, but like, you know, I have no interest in trying to do that. It's going to take my team more time, right? Like, the, the, the, the salary cost that they're going to spend building and then maintaining this thing is going to be more than what we get. Um, I, I also, again, I, I think it's reductive to just think, how am I saving money here? Saving money would be a nice byproduct, and don't get me wrong, like, I love that, but it's like, how can I actually make my workflow better? So So in the case of the two landing page builders we cut, they actually would slow us down, and I didn't think that they were as AI sophisticated, and we were able to produce better pages and much faster time directly in Cloud and Shopify.
Yeah, there's like, there's like this— you have to like find the sweet spot, right? Like, you're probably not going to go and vibe code an MTA that is like really complex and, you know, North Theme spent a decade building. But you're also probably not going to go and try to like automate a tool that's only costing you $50 a month because what What's the point? There's not a ton of, so it's like that middle ground. Like, I remember like there used to be these like apps that would like tell you when a product went outta stock. Like, you don't need that anymore, right? Like it connect, your cloud can connect right to Shopify and you can set up an automation where it'll tell you one, like, or email me every time a SKU hits 50 in inventory.
All right.
10 in inventory, 0 in inventory. Like, I think stuff like that is. I mean, is it a, is it a better or a worse time to be building tech tools? Like, I don't know.
I would be terrified unless you have something super, super unique. I would be, I would be terrified of doing it. But again, it depends what, and it depends, maybe like, like maybe I'd be more bullish on the things that are launching now, but like the things that launched 2 years ago are probably more, you know, more, more commoditized, I feel like.
I think a lot of these tools too are, in my opinion, they're a little more like, they're kind of like utopian and they're like, like I saw the tool, I forget the name of it that you retweeted or something. It was like replace your head of growth and it looks cool. Don't get me wrong. It looks super cool. But in the reality, that's not replacing your head of growth with the tool, at least from the demo I watched, it's like, this is helping automate your meta workflow. But like, if you're a $70 million brand, like you're doing a lot more outside of just Meta ads. So it's like, it's a little, I do think it looks cool and I'm curious. I saw you were going to like try it out, but it just feels like the way that they're positioning it is like very utopian. I don't think that's how it's actually, it's not actually going to replace your head of growth. It's only, at least from my perspective in the demo, it's only looking in helping with Meta. There's a lot more that goes on in growth outside of just Meta. There's a bunch of other channels, there's new products, there's anal— like, you know, there's a lot other stuff happening. I don't doubt that it can't help you with Meta, but like, it was just positioned a little— yeah, I don't know what the exact, the right word.
It's, uh, it's cool. It's a, it's an AI static ad builder that takes insights from your ad account and does analysis in an automated way. And then builds a creative strategy, which then builds statics based on that, which is cool. There's actually a lot of value in that if that works. That's, that's just what it does. And I also feel like that's what, like, the funny thing is these guys were clearly not reading the room of the market because like Icon said, we're going to be your AI CMO. Like sophisticated people don't want that. They want, hey, we can help you produce more, more ads and do it based on the right insights.
Right. Yeah. So it's like, do Tool looks cool. Maybe not the most accurately described, but I think, I think they should just like take what you just said and, and make a new headline for the tool.
I agree. I agree. That's really, but yeah. Um, no, but even that one, like I, I, I've been spending some time working on AI statics. Like that's just another buy versus build one where there's pros and cons of each. Um, but I wouldn't want to be, I mean, I don't think Icon exists. I wouldn't want to be an AI. Creative thing right now unless you have like a really unique moat.
Yeah, agreed.
Um, because everything is just— not everything, but a lot of the stuff is just, it's just a, you know, ChatGPT wrapper or something like that. And then Claude can also do, you know, a lot of it.
Yeah, I think it's on the, on the flip side of that though, like there's never been a better time as a marketer. Like I, what I always tell people, if you're someone that's spent a lot of time writing briefs in your career, which is like, you know, like me and my, like back, if I look at like my journey, like I was never a designer, I was never a landing page builder. Um, so I was like, but did a lot of creative strategy, a lot of analytics. So I'm, I was constantly briefing designers, landing page designers, developers, analysts. So like, I think those, those people that have that like strong briefing skillset, I think those are the, the backgrounds that are gonna allow you to be really good with all of the AI tooling, cuz you already have that skillset. You already know how to brief really well. Now instead of briefing a human being, you're just briefing AI and you're getting feedback way quicker. So I think like there's never, there's the best time to start getting really good at, at prompting and vibe coding and vibe designing and vibe everything was yesterday. The next best time is today. Like I just think. You got like, it's not a, maybe a great time to be building tech tools, but it's a great time if you're in-house at a brand to like be able to build your own, your own tech solutions through AI.
Yeah, no, completely, completely agree. It's a great, it's a great time for strategy people who, you know, and giving them more leverage.
Yeah.