Steven Anglin

This is what I've built for my clients in the last 6 months🧵

AP has never sold a watch under $1K, is this legit?

Most brands measure their entry product on gross margin. AP measured theirs on LTV at 24 months. That single shift in measurement changes everything: pricing, distribution, incentives, partnerships. Wrote about how they pulled it off:

did you know claude had split screens?

Weak beliefs keep you poor.

I think most people don’t understand market sophistication levels. Can this product be replaced with a terminal command? Yes Do 90% of the people using AI Agents know what a terminal even is? Probably not.

@EcomRedneck network placements is what i’m seeing

Yoo! Anyone dealing with this right now? Have an ad account that cvr dropped for 5% to .10% and CTRS are absolutely sky rocketed and cpcs low ASF and tons of visitors and sales are CookeD? Help.

At some point Shopify stopped being a platform and became plumbing. $100B+ in merchant sales, twice in a row, isn't a software company. That's a layer of the economy. The same way Stripe became how money moves online, Shopify became how product moves online. Which is the part most founders are missing. When your tooling becomes infrastructure, the platform stops being the variable. You're not competing on theme polish or which app stack you picked. You're competing on the things infrastructure can't do for you. Brand. Product. Story. The actual reason someone buys. The boring stack is solved. The moat moved to execution. And execution is the part nobody tweets about. It's not the strategy doc. Every founder has one of those. It's the 90 days of small, unsexy decisions. The meeting you took when you didn't want to. The hire you made faster than felt comfortable. The feature you killed even though the team loved it. Shopify isn't winning because they out-thought anyone. They're winning because they out-shipped them, quarter after quarter, while everyone else was still workshopping the plan. Here's where Harley's AI point actually lands. AI doesn't just accelerate entrepreneurship. It rewrites what execution looks like. It looks like 3-person brands doing $20M. A founder, a designer, and an ops lead running what used to need 25 people. The "we need to hire a Head of X" instinct getting quietly retired. The next decade of great commerce companies won't be bigger. They'll be smaller, faster, and run by founders who figured out early that the platform was never the moat, the headcount was never the moat, and the strategy was never the moat. Output was. Output is. Output will be.

did you die?

@Jaytel why did you?

I'd have never guessed that I'm back to using Cursor

Just ended a 25-min call with an 8-figure brand owner. Walked out with full store access and only one ask: run the full optimization. Founders past a certain level don't want the breakdown. The only reason they ask for one is because they don't trust you yet.

It's called Agentic. Think of it as AI SEO. Enable it in Shopify admin under Sales Channels - it's live now, no waitlist. Install Knowledge Base and answer the suggested FAQs - that's what AI agents read when shoppers ask about your store. Check the Query Log to see what AI agents are already being asked about you.

Shopify just released a native AI sales channel - your store can now be discovered and recommended by ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot without running a single ad. Here's what's inside it. (CHECK REPLIES)

Page looks incredible. That's the problem. Even the creator's walkthrough shows it lagging. Users don't diagnose that it’s probably an intentional low frame rate. They assume the page is broken and bounce. "Doesn't chase conversion, earns them" reads as justification next to a page that's clearly visuals-first. No hate. I’d priorities and this might convert much better.

he might need a dopamine detox

@EcomKostnchko_ Used to run emails heavily. Still do a little. For comments, can’t beat figma. The best is loom links in more important feedback and bullet points in smaller things.

For people who run email marketing in-house or agencies, What software do yall use to have a revision system where we can make comments, dot points for certain place? Im thinking maybe do it directly in FIGMA and just make live comments there? Or is there better alternatives?

their’s better ways to deliver constructive criticism

Saw an article earlier breaking down a 5-pillar subscription framework. Lost the link before I could save it. Most of the framework was right. But I think Pillar 1 could be improved. The guy argued: default to subscription on the PDP, optimize for a 60–80% take rate. But this is: Take rate first, cohort quality second. The brands compounding past $100M don't optimize for take rate. They optimize for cohort quality. Subscribers who consciously chose retain 2-3x longer than subscribers who were defaulted in. In most cases. Force the choice on the PDP. No default. ATC disabled until the customer picks. Take rate drops a few points on day one. Order 3 retention jumps. Month-6 LTV jumps harder. Then stack a social-proof stat right above the toggle: "Less than 40% of customers buy this only once" and the take rate climbs back without re-introducing the default. The same article actually warned against being too aggressive: "90% take rate sounds amazing, until those customers have a terrible LTV." Right call. They just stopped one move short. Defaulting at all is too aggressive. Force the choice. Prove the choice. Same take rate, cleaner cohort, longer LTV.

Some brands avoid Shopify on purpose. Not because it's bad. Because their claims would get their payment account frozen before the first sale clears. Saw one today. Completely understandable move. Still the wrong one. The actual play? Shopify storefront. CRM backend. You keep everything that makes Shopify great - the best checkout in the world, the native UX, the ecosystem. But your orders route through a private processor via a CRM like Sticky.io or Konnektive. No Shopify Payments. No holds. No frozen accounts. And here's the thing most people miss: Even completely legitimate brands do this now. Not because they need to hide. Because it's just a better setup. What you get with a CRM backend: Private payment processor (choose who processes your money) Post-purchase upsell flows that actually convert Subscription management with real dunning + retry logic Attribution and LTV tracking built in A/B test prices, offers, sequences - all of it Shopify's checkout - still intact You don't lose anything by moving the backend to a CRM. You only gain. One thing I'll say though - this isn't a move I'd recommend under 8 figures. The integration cost, CRM fees, and dev work don't pencil out at lower volume. But if you're doing real numbers and still on Shopify's native backend? You could be leaving money on the table. WooCommerce gives you freedom but takes everything else. Shopify + CRM gives you freedom AND the best checkout on the internet. It's not even close.

@EcomKostnchko_ yessir

@StevenAnglinn Oh shit thanks hahahaha appreciate the long ass post hahaha

Saw some guy post this on X. Don’t know him. What I do know is a month ago he was posting daily about how everything was broken. That’s all the context I need, because the pattern is everywhere. Most founders workshop their bad stretches in public. They tinker every night. They kill working ads on day 9. They rebuild the offer in week 3. Then they go quiet for a few weeks. The ones who come back with a screenshot like this didn’t really fix much. They just stopped touching the system long enough for it to do what it was always going to do. That’s the whole skill. Trust the strategy. Sit through the flat patches. Don’t rewrite the ad account because day 6 had a 0.4% CTR. The number on the dashboard today isn’t the result of today but the past 30 days of compounding lessons. The real test is the next bad day. There will be one. If you can’t sit through bad days without breaking your own strategy, don’t start a brand. Good shit @EcomKostnchko_