In partnership with |
 |
|
|
|
Fastlane Insider goes out to 51,818 founders and marketers.
Welcome to the 406 new operators who joined us this week! 🤯 |
|
|
| |
| |
|
|
Hey Fastlane Insiders! 👋 |
It's the first Thursday of September, and there's a long weekend in front of you. I bet your Q4 plan is probably still a blank page. That's not a criticism. It's the same page many were on this time last year… |
Here's what I'd do with it, and it isn't the promo calendar. |
Only 17% of holiday shoppers wait for BFCM week. 28% shop year-round, and another 30% start in September or October. The season you're planning for is already underway. |
That changes what October is for. Structured product data takes six to twelve weeks to do properly across a few thousand SKUs, so the work that compounds into peak season has to start now. A promo calendar takes a weekend and can wait until Halloween. Almost everybody runs those two in the wrong order, and I watched that mistake recur for six years at Shopify, across every revenue level. |
Doesn't matter if you're at $50K months or $1M months. Same move: before you touch a discount, confirm a machine can read your catalog and a shopper can see the shipping number before checkout. |
Here's what's inside: |
🎧 The Podcast: The $15,000 ad test that now costs $50, with Extuitive CEO Armen Mkrtchyan. |
💡 Knowledge Drops: The BFCM number that should change your October, and what Anthropic's free shopping agent actually costs to run. |
🔥 Tool of the Week: Redo Recover, for the 70% of carts your SMS flows can't touch. |
📡 Industry Pulse: Google keeps its exchange, live shopping's hidden math, and a €3 levy that cut parcels 46%. |
Let's dive in. 👇 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads |
|
|
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel. |
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints. |
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products. |
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads. |
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category. |
Learn more. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
🎧 New Podcast Episode! 🎧 |
|
|
The $15,000 Ad Test You Can Now Run for $50 |
You're about to launch a campaign and you have two choices. Spend roughly $15,000 and wait four to six weeks for an agency to build and test ad variants. Or spend about $50 and get 20 consumer-validated concepts in under 15 minutes, with scores showing which ones are likely to convert. A year ago, option two didn't exist. |
I chatted with Armen Mkrtchyan, CEO and Co-Founder of Extuitive, a company that emerged from Flagship Pioneering, the same innovation lab behind Moderna. Armen has a PhD focused on AI and built autonomous drone technology for farmers before this. His board includes Flagship founder Noubar Afeyan and Nielsen Executive Chairman David Kenny, which tells you how seriously the consumer research world is taking this shift. |
Here's what we unpacked: |
The depth and breadth gap most "AI ad" tools can't close. Armen explains why generating more images is the wrong problem, and what a real consumer model does that a ChatGPT prompt structurally cannot. 150,000 AI consumer agents, trained on real anonymized US consumers. They carry age, zip code, past purchases, household details, and car ownership, which is what separates predicting whether an ad looks good from predicting whether the person buys. The enterprise lineage nobody talks about. Affinnova pioneered evolutionary consumer design 20 years ago, Nielsen acquired it in 2014, and its DNA now lives inside the BASES platform. Armen rebuilt that methodology for the AI era. Validating creative you already own. Upload the ads currently sitting in your account and have the consumer agents rank them before BFCM, rather than finding out after the budget is gone. "On the loop" beats "in the loop." Armen is direct about where humans still win, and about the one thing he thinks a model should never own in your business. His honest answer on Q4 timing. Whether a brand three weeks from Black Friday should start now or wait, and what a three-second URL paste actually reveals.
|
Whether you're at $10K months or $1M months, this is a look at what happens when testing that used to require a research budget becomes a URL paste. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
💡 Knowledge Drops of the Week 💡 |
|
|
99% Will Shop. That's Not the Number That Matters. |
99% of the 1,205 shoppers surveyed for this year's BFCM data report plan to shop, 42% plan to spend more, and only 13% plan to cut back. Demand has been one of the most stable numbers in ecommerce for four straight years. |
Which is exactly why it's a trap. A brand doing $800K reads "demand is guaranteed," adds a channel, installs four apps, and builds a twelve-day promotional ladder nobody on the team can execute. I watched that pattern repeat for six years inside Shopify, and it's still the most reliable way to turn a good season into a mediocre one. |
Here's what's working: |
Only 17% of shoppers start during BFCM week. 28% shop year-round, and 30% start in September or October. Transaction data matters more than intent: Shopify merchants generated $14.6 billion over the 2025 weekend, and Triple Whale recorded $1.77 billion from 16.6 million orders in the week before that weekend. AI picks the shortlist. Your store still closes the sale. 55% have already used AI successfully in a shopping journey, and Adobe measured a 693% year-over-year jump in generative AI referral traffic, converting 31% better than other sources. But only 1% feel most in control buying inside an AI tool. That split decides where your October effort goes. The biggest conversion killer is a settings problem, not a strategy problem. Unexpected costs drive 46% of mobile cart abandonment, well ahead of changing their mind at 35%. Nothing on that list requires a new app.
|
The report, published by Tapcart, which sells mobile apps to Shopify brands, concludes that you should build one. That doesn't make the app data wrong. It means you read that chapter with the incentive in view, and weight the sections where a partner's transaction data confirms the survey. I broke down which findings survive that test, which two most merchants will overreact to, and the stage-by-stage list of what to skip entirely this year. |
|
|
|
|
|
Anthropic Made Your Store's Shopping Agent Free |
On September 2, Anthropic published a complete, Apache 2.0 licensed reference implementation for two agents you run yourself: a shopping agent that lives on your storefront and a merchant agent that sits in your back office. Shopify shipped its own implementation the same day, connected to a live store through the Universal Commerce Protocol. |
I've watched enough infrastructure get commoditized to recognize the shape of this one. Something that cost real money last Tuesday is free this Tuesday, everyone reads that as the barrier falling, and the actual barrier turns out to be sitting one layer down where it always was. |
Here's what's working: |
Know which direction your problem points. Agentic Storefronts made you findable to external agents like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode. This is the opposite arrow: your agent, on your site, serving a shopper who already arrived. If ChatGPT doesn't surface you, a storefront agent solves nothing. Diagnose before you fund. Read the 35% cart lift with the publisher in view. Anthropic reports carts up to 35% larger and shoppers 60% more likely to complete. Those numbers come from its own retail partners, aren't independently audited, and "up to" means best case rather than median. Free code, real cost. The repository is public and forkable, but inference is billed per token, integration is engineering work, and evaluation is ongoing rather than a launch task. My estimate for a mid-market brand's first year lands in the low five figures, not at zero.
|
The category feeling genuine pricing pressure is on-site conversational search, and I name the vendors in the blast radius, along with those this doesn't touch at all. There's also a stage table for who should skip this entirely, and a prediction about 12 months from now that I'm willing to be wrong about in public. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
🔥 Tool of the Week 🔥 |
|
|
Your SMS flows reach 30% of carts. Recover gets the other 70%. |
Your abandoned cart flows only text shoppers who opted into SMS marketing. That's about 30% of your carts. The other 70% never subscribed, so your flows never reach them. |
Recover does. Trained agents text those shoppers one-to-one in real conversations. They answer sizing questions, handle shipping objections, send a code, and win the sale back. No automation, no templates, no blasts. |
It runs alongside the flows you already have. Nothing to rebuild, nothing to rewrite, five minutes to install on Shopify. |
You only pay for results, backed by a 10x ROI guarantee. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
⚡ This Week’s Industry Pulse ⚡ |
A few updates actually move the needle. Here's what made the cut. 👇 |
Google keeps its ad exchange: Judge Brinkema declined to break up Google's ad tech business on September 2, choosing instead to rewrite how the auction works. First look, last look, and unified pricing are all out. The full opinion stays sealed for fourteen days, so the mechanics that actually change your display buying are still unread by everyone currently arguing about them. |
A curling iron brand is quietly running QVC: Beachwaver runs hundreds of livestreams a year out of a warehouse north of Chicago, and a quarter of its $1M in 2026 TikTok Shop sales came from them. TikTok told CNBC live shopping sales more than doubled in the first half of the year. The constraint that made QVC's model brutal is exactly the one that no longer applies. |
Europe's €3 parcel is working: Small parcels from outside the EU into the Netherlands fell 46% across July and August after the new €3 per-item-type charge, with Belgium's Liège hub down 53%. The volume drop isn't the interesting number. What Shein and Temu did operationally in response within one quarter tells you how durable your cost advantage over them really is. |
Two more agentic builders shipped: Nitro Commerce launched a tool that lets Shopify merchants build private apps via prompts, and LTK shipped an agentic campaign builder. Neither is urgent in September. Both are worth knowing exist before someone pitches you one in October. |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
| |
The Quiet Week |
There's one week a year when the calendar hands back your attention, and this is it. Summer's done, Q4 hasn't started, and nothing on your list is actually on fire yet. By the second week of October, you won't be deciding anything. You'll be running decisions you made this month, whether you made them on purpose or not. |
I've spent a lot of Septembers watching how founders spend this week. The ones who come out of Q4 happy almost always spent it on something boring. Not a new channel, not a new app. Something closer to reading their own product pages the way a stranger would. |
So if this edition nudges you toward one thing, make it that. Export your top twenty revenue SKUs and read them the way a machine would, asking whether every attribute a buyer needs exists as a field instead of buried in a paragraph. An hour, maybe two. Then build the promo calendar in October and watch it take half as long as it did last year. |
Thank you for the ten minutes. Thousands of you opened this today, at wildly different stages of the same problem, and every one of you had somewhere else that time could have gone. I haven't stopped noticing that. |
Hit reply and tell me what you're heading into. I read all of them, and they're doing more work than you'd think. When six people in a week describe the same problem in slightly different words, that becomes a Knowledge Drop. Half of what runs in this newsletter started as somebody's reply. |
P.S. If you only click one thing today, make it the BFCM breakdown. The two findings most merchants will overreact to are in there, and overreacting is the expensive mistake this month. |
Cheers!
Steve |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
