In Partnership with Roku

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV 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

You and 4,305 subscribers are going to enjoy this newsletter or i’ll let AI write the entire and pretend it’s a pirate.

Welcome back friend!
And a big welcome to the +18 new readers this week!

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AI Can Build Your Tools Now. Should You let it?

Noah Kagan just shared something pretty mind boggling. AppSumo’s revenue is down 50% in two years.

This is the company that invented the lifetime software deal. The company that launched thousands of SaaS tools into the hands of entrepreneurs like us. And they're fighting to figure out what comes next.

"No one wants software, they want outcomes."

This reveals something most of us haven't fully reckoned with yet.

Right now... today... I can open Claude Code, Codex, or OpenClaw, describe a problem in my business in plain English, and it will build me a working tool. Not a recommendation. Not a tutorial. A functioning thing. Keyword dashboards. PPC analyzers. Inventory calculators.

The implications are massive. And they cut both ways.

The obvious side: I might not need that $97/month subscription anymore. Maybe some of my tools are doing things AI can do for free.

The less obvious side: the moment I build my own tool, I become its developer. Its QA team. Its customer support department. I'm the one debugging at 11pm when Amazon changes something and my automation spits out garbage.

I traded a subscription... for a job.

So here's the question I've been sitting with. Not "should I cancel my software?" but this:

What is the highest-leverage use of my next hour?

I started tracking my time (Here’s a good book on how to do it). The answer showed up fast. The repetitive, low-stakes stuff that makes me think "there has to be a better way"... saving invoices, doing product research, creating flat files, understanding PPC performance...

That's where I'm starting to automate. Small, contained, and low risk (if it breaks).

What I'm not doing is trying to rebuild Helium 10. Or QuickBooks. Or SoStocked. Those are massive systems running hundreds of processes behind the scenes. That's a month-long rabbit hole that leaves me worse off than when I started.

Here's what I keep coming back to:

The sellers who thrive in this new landscape won't be the ones who built the most custom tools. They'll be the ones who got ruthlessly clear on one thing...

The difference between tinkering and selling.

Every hour I spend playing developer is an hour I'm not sourcing, optimizing, or growing. So I'm learning what to build. And more importantly, I’m learning when to close the laptop on the side project and get back to the actual business.

The IVS

Big thanks to Danan Coleman from eCom Triage for supplying this week’s IVS. Danan is an expert at removing TOS-infringing reviews and when he’s not posting on LinkedIn you’ll likely find him on a dirt bike.

Your 4.2-Star Product Might Be Bleeding Revenue (Here’s the 5-Minute Fix)

If your product is sitting at 4.2 stars, you’re in a danger zone.

Amazon visually rounds ratings. That tiny drop from 4.3 to 4.2 can slash conversion rates by 25–50%. And here’s the part most sellers miss:

Not all negative reviews are compliant.

Amazon allows removal of reviews that violate their Community Guidelines, including ones that mention shipping issues, FBA complaints, seller service, product misuse, or certain types of claims that have nothing to do with the product itself.

Here’s the quick hack. Go to your 1–3 star written reviews and scan for:

• “Arrived late”

• “Box was damaged”

• “Didn’t receive it”

• User-error complaints

• Off-topic rants about the brand or company

Then run them through a ToS check before assuming you’re stuck with them. To make this simple, we built a free GPT that analyzes reviews against Amazon policy in seconds:

👉️ https://landing.ecomtriage.com/home-review-checker-gpt

Paste the review. It tells you if there’s likely a violation and why. Most sellers accept bad reviews as permanent. Sophisticated sellers audit them systematically.

Small rating shifts create outsized revenue impact.

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Chase got busted at school

One Last Black Friday, Chase used his own savings to buy a 3D printer. When he finally received it in January, he has been printing fidgets and small gadgets and selling them at school quite profitably. Demand grew so fast that he started having trouble keeping up.

Fidgets turned out to be extremely popular in the elementary grades. Popular enough that the school asked him to stop selling them last week because they were making too much noise in class. And honestly, that is business. Problems come up. Rules change. Friction appears. The real question is how you adapt. So we adjusted the strategy.

Chase can bring one item he makes to school during the week. That item is his to show friends. Then, on Thursdays after school, he sells his inventory at the café next to the school where everyone goes after class. This gives him the week to build inventory, respects the school rules, and still lets him run his business. If kids buy the same fidgets and bring them back into class later, that is no longer his problem.

So far it has been a great learning experience. He has learned about product selection, production limits, selling, customer expectations, warranty claims, and plenty of other lessons. Not bad for an elementary school entrepreneur.

Here's What a Non-Technical Seller Can Build With AI Right Now

Here are 9 things I automated in my first two weeks for my Amazon business using Claude Code as a layman/non-coder (meaning you could do it too).

1. A system that scrapes all of my listings. Every attribute, title, bullets, backend keywords, everything. Gives me one complete, accurate source of truth for all of my Amazon products.

2. A variation builder. No more flat files. Ever. I describe the variation I want in plain English and it builds it for me.

3. A bot that optimizes my DTC site for SEO. It understands everything about the site and handles blog post schema, meta text, and everything else that would make it rank on Google.

4. A social media scanner. Reads tweets and reddit daily about any topic (like Amazon selling), decides if it's relevant to my business, and ranks them by importance and how I'd apply them. Comes into my email daily.

5. A morning health checker. Runs every morning across all my ASINs. Checks for suppressed listings, out-of-stock issues, hijackers, and anything else that needs immediate attention.

6. A "why are sales slowing down" diagnoser. Deep-dive single-ASIN checker. Did a competitor raise their price? Are we running low on stock? Suppressed on the Buy Box? Did ad spend drop? Is the listing suppressed? Did our main images change? It checks all of it.

7. A product launch dashboard. Takes every step of my Amazon launch process and turns it into a checklist with stages, progress tracking, and automated reminders.

8. A product research agent. I give it keywords, it fills out the Data Dive product scorecard for each one, ranks them, and surfaces the best opportunities for deeper research.

9. A complete email flow for my DTC brand. Full campaign schedule for the customers on my email list. Mapped out, sequenced, ready to go.

What are you building? Let us know by replying to this email.

Look It Up Online (Then Call the Hotel)

Most people don't know this, but hotels pay 15-25% commission to sites like Expedia and Booking.com every time someone books through them. That means a $200/night room costs the hotel $30-50 in fees.

They would rather give you the same price (or better) and keep that commission for themselves (For what it’s worth, SkipTheDishes & DoorDash work the same way).

Here's what I do: find the best rate on whatever booking site you like, then call the hotel front desk directly... not the 1-800 reservation line, the actual hotel. Tell them what you found and ask if they can match or beat it. They almost always will. But here's the real win. Because you booked direct, you're now in their system as a direct guest, not an Expedia guest. That puts you first in line for room upgrades, late checkouts, early check-ins, and any perks the hotel offers. Third-party bookers are basically invisible to the front desk. Direct bookers get taken care of. Same price. Better experience. Takes two minutes.

Good luck!

To your success,

Rob & Max

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