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50,449 founders and marketers are getting this newsletter today.
Welcome to the 291 new operators who joined us this week! 🤯 |
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Hey Fastlane Insiders! 👋 |
DoorDash, TikTok Shop, and AI assistants all arrived with the same offer: reach you cannot easily build on your own, in exchange for a layer of your customer relationship. The hidden price is easy to miss, but a three-question rent-versus-own test can expose it in under an hour. |
Each deal looks reasonable in isolation. DoorDash became a native Shopify sales channel with 42 million monthly shoppers. TikTok is piloting a program that runs your entire Shop operation for $10,000 plus commission. And AI assistants keep absorbing more of the top of the funnel, with AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores up eightfold year over year. |
Whether you’re doing $30K months or $3M months, the same decision is sitting in front of you. Only the right answer changes by stage. |
This edition breaks down the test that separates smart channel rentals from quiet dependency. Plus, Maxx Blank, co-founder of Triple Whale, reveals how Moby 2 turns your analytics layer into an execution layer, and why your “we should test that” list never shrinks, no matter how much capacity you add. |
Here’s what’s inside: |
🎧 This Week’s Podcast: Triple Whale’s Maxx Blank on Moby 2 and the shift from dashboards to doing. |
💡 Knowledge Drops: The rent-versus-own channel test, and why your test backlog never shrinks. |
🔥 Tool of the Week: Katana brings your inventory into one source of truth. |
📡 Industry Pulse: A Shop app scam, the Collections overhaul, and a hard API deadline. |
Let’s dive in. 👇 |
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ZenMux: Which AI Model Is Actually Worth Your Tokens? |
AI benchmarks only tell part of the story. The real question is: which model would you actually keep using? |
ZenMux just launched Token Economics Arena, where you can compare 10+ popular AI models across coding, agents, long-context reasoning, multilingual tasks, and content creation. |
What's even better is that this isn't just an experiment—it also makes it much easier for everyone to try leading Chinese AI models like GLM 5.2, Kimi K2.7, Seed 2.1 Pro and Qwen 3.7. During the campaign, many of these models are available at up to 80% off, making real-world testing much more affordable. |
Instead of relying on benchmark scores, ZenMux lets real usage decide. |
Every 1M tokens consumed = 1 vote Test different models on your own tasks Vote for the model that actually delivers the best experience
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At the end of the campaign, ZenMux will award the Most Used Model and People's Choice Model, with the winners receiving a crown badge on the platform. |
Real tasks. Real usage. Real votes. |
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🎧 New Podcast Episode! 🎧 |
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Triple Whale’s Moby 2: The AI Growth Team Shopify Brands Can’t Ignore |
Your ROAS drops. Your dashboards disagree. While you investigate, ad spend keeps leaking. |
This week, I sat down with Triple Whale co-founder Maxx Blank to explore how Moby 2 is moving AI beyond reporting and putting it to work inside your ad account. |
You’ll discover: |
How AI agents can rebalance budgets, launch creative, and build landing pages Why business context beats even the most powerful standalone AI model The safest path from human approval to marketing autopilot How one forgotten “zombie app” quietly burned $6,000 a year When Triple Whale’s full AI stack starts paying for itself
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More than 60,000 Shopify brands already use Triple Pixel. If you want to see where ecommerce analytics is heading next, don’t miss this conversation. |
[ LISTEN NOW ] Learn how to give AI real work without handing it the keys. |
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💡 Knowledge Drops of the Week 💡 |
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The Shopify Channel Trap: Are You Renting Growth or Losing the Customer? |
DoorDash offers access to 42 million monthly shoppers. TikTok will run your Shop for $10,000 plus commission. AI search orders are up nearly 13x. |
The opportunity is enormous, but so is the hidden cost: every new layer puts another platform between you and your customer. |
The smartest Shopify brands are asking three questions: |
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Renting reach can accelerate growth. Renting relationships you already earned quietly destroys margin and control. |
The full breakdown reveals the channel limits to set at each revenue stage, the DoorDash detail most coverage missed, and the investment that compounds in three directions. |
[ READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN ] Run the three-question test in under an hour. |
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The Shopify Test Backlog Costing You Up to 15% of Revenue |
The abandoned bundle. The outdated shipping threshold. The VIP segment nobody emailed. Your “we should test that” list could be hiding 5% to 15% of annual revenue, according to one industry estimate. |
Most brands blame limited capacity. But adding another hire or AI agent rarely fixes the real problem: nobody owns the decision. |
Here’s how smart operators clear the backlog: |
Keep only three tests at a time Give each one an owner, deadline, and kill rule Prioritize changes with high reach and low risk Test offer depth, not simply bigger discounts
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Below $2 million in revenue, the hardest truth may be the most valuable: the owner is you. |
[READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN ] Get the one-hour triage and four tests that can pay off first. |
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🔥 Tool of the Week 🔥 |
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Know your stock. Everywhere. All the time. |
Sell on Shopify, Amazon, wholesale, and retail with cross-channel, real-time stock visibility. With Katana, you get the right numbers every time, across sales, orders, and production. All the features you need without the ERP price tag or complexity. Start today and go live in as little as a week. |
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⚡ This Week’s Industry Pulse ⚡ |
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A few updates actually move the needle. Here's what made the cut… |
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Scammers are weaponizing your Shop app notifications — Fraudsters are planting fake order notifications inside Shopify's Shop app that link to real-looking invoices (one showed a $345.07 Geek Squad charge) with a callback number routing victims to a fake support desk, and Shopify says new controls have sharply reduced the activity. Because the Shop app is where your customers expect your order confirmations, this abuse borrows your brand's trust, so a short proactive note telling buyers to verify charges through their bank and never call a number inside an unexpected invoice protects both them and your support reputation.
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DoorDash is now a native Shopify sales channel — DoorDash launched a native Shopify app letting U.S. merchants with a physical store list their catalog on the DoorDash marketplace for same-day local delivery, at a 15% to 30% commission with channel-specific pricing available to offset it. For a local or hybrid-retail brand it's a new discovery lane worth testing, but mind the gap: it does not fulfill your own Shopify-store orders via DoorDash drivers, so it adds reach, not a delivery layer for your existing checkout. |
Shopify sets an October 15 card-vaulting deadline for apps — Shopify's July 16 developer changelog now requires any app that stores saved card data through its card-deposit endpoint to present a Shopify-issued mTLS certificate by October 15, 2026, a control it's putting in place ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If your store leans on apps that vault cards for subscriptions, one-click, or post-purchase upsells, ask those vendors now whether they're certificate-ready, because an unmigrated app quietly loses the ability to save new cards right as peak season starts. |
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Until Next Thursday |
Every story this week comes back to the same question: who owns the work, and who owns the result? |
Platforms want to own your distribution. AI agents want to own your execution. Your test backlog is a list of decisions nobody owns. None of these arrangements is automatically wrong, but each has a price that rarely appears on an invoice. |
This week, choose one thing and put a name and date on it. Run the three-question test on your biggest channel, or pull one experiment from the backlog and commit to a decision. |
Ownership isn’t a philosophy. It’s a habit built one decision at a time. |
What channel or test have you been avoiding a decision on? Hit reply and tell me. I read every response, and your answers genuinely shape what I explore next. |
P.S. Missed a previous edition? Check out the archive for more growth strategies and insights. |
Cheers!
Steve |
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