Another week of a lot of AI pumping and doom predicting. The couple bright spotlights of the week:
Sarah giving an in depth breakdown of how the TikTok algo works.
Taylor went full tin hat conspiracy on a Stripe update.
Harley’s dropping some wholesome family content. (Shopify related of course)
Post 1: Taylor’s shot-calling the End of Stripe + Shopify
For Context: ChatGPT is bailing on purchases in AI so everyone is launching and open protocol for people to buy from AI. Stripe announced it’s building Agentic Commerce Protocol. Different from Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol.
The founder of Stripe jumped in to give the usual corporate line.
Honestly it’s a lot of big proclamations for something so early. Stripe is essentially taking an out of the money call bet where they throw a free protocol together in the case that this next amazing things happens to fall into their lap.
But this isn’t the future of commerce or how customers actually want to shop.
Post 2: How the Tik Tok Algo actually works
For Context: Sarah does an incredible job of breaking down:
How the TikTok Algorithm works.
How it applies to Andromeda updates.
What to do about it.
If you haven’t studied how both algos work take the 5 mins to understand it conceptually.
This is the most important AI you need to be studying for your brand.
Post 3: Clever Name
For Context: Shopify dropped Tinker (simple AI creation app) as a part of editions in late 2025 (released a couple of months ago).
Nice feel good entrepreneurship story about families supporting their kid’s business ideas. Tinker does look like a cool idea to mess around with ideas. Very on brand with their “make entrepreneurship accessible” playbook.
Post 4: Sean’s P&L Breakdown putting
FINALLY someone has said it. AI “savings” are so overblown for DTC brands. 80% of a DTC brands budget is in Ads or physical things (Both already dominated by AI). For Consumer brands AI should be used to get more out of your team and accelerate new areas that people can’t/don’t want to do.
I think he’s being generous with 5-15% of Rev flowing through to the bottom line. Realistically once you add all the AI tooling and headcount to now manage the new “tech stack” back in. My guess is 1-5% and it’s mostly a wash.
Post 5: Cherene and Jacob Breakdown their AI infra
Isaac and Zain host the What’s Working podcast. Cherene and Jacob started an AI native DTC Growth Agency called Growth Capital.
This is like the buddy buddy of DTC twitter ecosystem. The episode dives into the companies entire model on how they run Openclaw. Spoiler alert they have a very technical cofounder and are building a lot of technical pieces to make it work.
What posts did we miss?
See a particularly interesting topic or creator this week on Twitter? What’s the most interesting topic we didn’t cover?
Drop me the link and we’ll add it to next week’s newsletter.
