Jay Neyer

A year of Shopify and Google Ads data on one of our paid media accounts, a printing supplies brand selling to businesses: Revenue and bulk order volume trended up across the full 365 days, with the sharpest acceleration in the last six months. The detail worth highlighting: the ad budget never increased. The growth came from three unglamorous places. Aggressive negative keyword filtering, so spend stopped leaking to searches that never buy in bulk. Audience segmentation separating one-time buyers from enterprise printing accounts and repeat B2B purchasers. And product feed optimization with clean tracking underneath, so every decision ran on data we trusted. B2B buyers on Google behave differently than DTC shoppers. They search specific SKUs, compare unit prices, and come back to reorder. Structure the account around that behavior and efficiency compounds without new budget. Credit to the paid media team on this one. If your ad account has plateaued, more budget is rarely the first fix. An audit usually finds the leaks: lanternsol.com/contact-us

Becoming a father did two opposite things to me at once, and I didn't expect the second one. The first is obvious: it lit a fire. There's a legacy now that goes beyond me, and on difficult days she's the grounding that brings me back to the why. I want her to grow up watching her dad build something she's proud of. The second surprised me. A daughter teaches you patience. She slows you down, makes you present, and calms a part of you that business keeps permanently switched on. So you get both at the same time: more urgency and more calm. A stronger reason to go, and a daily lesson in how to be still. I used to think those two things competed. Turns out the best version of me as an operator needs both.

Agency economics push you toward right now. New pitches, logos, and growth this quarter. The retainer has to look busy. We built @LanternSol against that grain. Our longest client relationships are going on three and four years. And they all stayed because the work compounded, and because we showed up the same way in year three as we did in month one. Some agencies are built to extract as much value as possible from each relationship before it ends. We wanted to build the kind that grows alongside the brands it serves. Both models make money. Only one is worth spending your working life on. When I think about what I want Lantern Sol to be, I think in decades. The next deliverable matters because of what it adds to the next ten years of the relationship, the team, and the brands we help build. Trust accumulated over years beats any single campaign we could run.

I spent last week in Cincinnati visiting clients in person, and the first stop was Midwest Gym Supply. They make the giant foam mats gymnasts flip and tumble on. Walking through their warehouse, you realize how physical this business is. Rows of foam stacked to the ceiling, feeding gyms and gymnastics clubs across the country. We rebuilt their website, started SEO, and launched paid ads with them. Standing in that warehouse, the owner told me they've already done over $1 million more in sales than last year. And it's only July. What struck me is how natural the conversation felt. We stood between pallets of foam mats talking about where the business goes next: new product lines, what the growth so far unlocks, what we build toward in the next twelve months. There's information you only get in person. That's why these moments are really special.

When a client hires us, what they're really getting is the team behind the work. I've been thinking about that this week, because one of the strongest things about @LanternSol is how the team supports each other. Two of the five sites we launched in the past month were run by experts in their fields, people who know their craft deeply and have the rest of the team behind them at every step. When someone hits a wall, another teammate steps in before the client ever feels it. If that's the kind of team you want on your store: lanternsol.com/contact-us

The number one fear founders have about replatforming to Shopify is losing their Google rankings. It's understandable. A careless migration can wipe out years of SEO equity overnight. We just moved a legacy automotive brand from WordPress to Shopify. The site went live June 22. At the validation check nine days later: organic traffic growing, rankings holding, visibility up, revenue up. No negative SEO impact anywhere we measured. The unglamorous work is what protects you. Full URL mapping before anything moves. A 301 redirect for every page that changes address. Preserving metadata, heading structure, and internal links. Then monitoring rankings daily after launch instead of assuming it went fine. The client saw the validation numbers and signed on for another three months of SEO the following week. A migration is only as risky as the planning behind it.

Go to ChatGPT and ask it for the best product in your category. Then ask it what sources it used. You'll see Reddit come up again and again. AI assistants don't look at your website in isolation. They read the whole web of trust around your brand name: reviews, comments, threads, mentions across platforms. Reddit carries heavy weight in that web because it reads as unfiltered human opinion. Building Reddit presence has become a large part of our off-page SEO work, and it started exactly this way. We kept tracing AI product recommendations back to their sources and kept landing on Reddit threads. People have told me SEO is dying every year for over a decade. I think the opposite is happening. When everyone carries an assistant in their pocket that answers “what should I buy,” showing up in that answer is the highest-intent traffic that exists. @Shopify's own research put organic visitors at roughly double the conversion rate of other channels. If you run a brand and have no Reddit strategy, you're behind. Test it yourself with your own keywords. The sources ChatGPT cites will tell you where to spend your effort. I made a video where I went deeper into this topic. Check this out: youtu.be/CiNaA5HKPDI

We launched a new ad account on June 19. This week it recorded its first purchases, three of them, all from a single prospecting campaign at a 34.71x ROAS. Nothing in the account changed since launch— the only difference was time spent active. New pixels start with no purchase data. Meta needs conversions to learn who buys, and sometimes it can take a few weeks to collect enough of them (especially if you have zero prior history of running successful ads). On another account we manage, we rebuilt attribution from first click to purchase and found a 25 to 35 day lag between ad spend and the sale it produced. The most expensive mistake I see with new campaigns for ecom businesses that are getting started with Meta ads is killing them in week two, right before the data catches up. If you're launching on Meta, decide your evaluation window before you launch. Three to four weeks minimum on a fresh account, and ideally minimum spend of $2-5k. Judge it after that, not during. If your paid media feels like guesswork, an audit is where we usually start: lanternsol.com/contact-us

Shopify is rebuilding what a collection is. The new Collections model shipped in the 2026-07 API, and the new admin UI is rolling out to dev stores first. Shopify's merchandising team confirmed it directly in the developer forums. The old model gave you two options: pick products by hand, or set a single rule set. That's been the structure since basically the beginning of Shopify. The new model works with sources. One collection can pull from multiple sources, each carrying its own include and exclude conditions. Another collection can be a source, with exclusions layered on top. Apps can publish shareable sources that merchants reuse across collections. And collections can now target specific variants, so a sale collection can hold only the red colorways or only the XS and XXL sizes. For merchants this matters more than it sounds. Collection pages are where buying decisions happen, and until now the logic behind them was rigid. Manual lists went stale. Smart collections couldn't handle exceptions without tag hacks. We inherit older Shopify stores every month, and tag-based collection workarounds are consistently one of the messiest things we find. This cleans a lot of that up. It's in dev stores now, with general rollout to follow. Worth watching if you run anything beyond a simple catalog.

My most productive days start in the ocean. Surfing looks like riding waves, but 90% of it is paddling. You're fighting current, ducking under whitewater, working to get into position. The ride is the short, easy part at the end of a lot of unglamorous effort. There's no way to think about client work out there. The ocean demands your full attention or it puts you on the sand, and being forcibly present for an hour does something no productivity system has ever done for me. By the time I'm back at my desk, the priorities are obvious. The problem that felt tangled at 6am usually has a first step by 9. Cold mornings included. You dip your toes in, ask yourself what you're doing, then ride one wave and the complaint disappears.

We're surrounded by noise all day. In a world that never really slows down, having a fitness habit has become less about staying in shape and more about protecting your mind. For me, training is the one part of the day where everything else gets quieter. It creates space to think and come back with a clearer perspective. We often treat exercise as something we do if there's time left over. I've found the opposite to be true. Making time for it helps me make better decisions and show up with more energy for the people around me. You don't have to lift weights or run marathons. Just find something that gets you moving and gives your mind a break. In a world that's constantly demanding your attention, protecting your headspace isn't a luxury. It's one of the best investments you can make in yourself.

Failure is a better teacher than success because it's specific. When I mistime a wave while surfing, the ocean gives me feedback within one second, and it's never ambiguous. I was late. Too far outside. Hesitated. There's no story to tell myself. Business failures work the same way if you let them. A launch that flops tells you exactly which assumption was wrong. When a client relationship goes sideways, you can usually point at the precise moment you should have spoken up and didn't. And a bad hire shows you what your interview process can't see. The catch is you only get the lesson if you resist softening the story. “It just wasn't the right fit” teaches nothing. “I ignored two warning signs in week one because I needed the revenue” teaches everything. I've built more from autopsies than from celebrations. The goal isn't to avoid mistakes, it's to make sure you don't waste them. Every failure carries a lesson, and the businesses that grow are the ones that turn those lessons into better systems, decisions, and ultimately, results. That's how mistakes become success.

We launched Google Ads for Fenceworks in January. Six months later, the numbers look like this: → $42.9K in ad spend → $175.2K in revenue → 4.08x ROAS → $132K in gross profit On a high-ticket product like fencing, growth isn't about chasing the highest click-through rate or the cheapest CPC. It's about building a system that consistently brings in qualified buyers while protecting profitability. Every industry has different economics. What works for a consumable brand with repeat purchases isn't the same strategy you'd use for a business selling products that customers may only buy once every several years. That's why we don't optimize around generic benchmarks. We optimize around what actually drives sustainable growth for that business. Great work by our paid media team. Looking forward to seeing what the next six months bring.

Quick win from our paid media team. We run ads for a Food & beverage brand. Consumable product, high purchase frequency, which changes the math on acquisition entirely: each new customer keeps ordering, so the value of every acquisition compounds over time. Ninety days ago the account was bringing in around 40 new customers a month. It's now near 90. For a product people reorder monthly, that jump can stack up fast. The cohort acquired today sits on top of every cohort before it, so the same ad spend keeps paying out for quarters. The strategy from here stays simple: keep feeding the top of the funnel and let the reorder behavior do the heavy lifting. Credit to this amazing team. At Lantern Sol, we help ecommerce brands build paid media systems that optimize for sustainable growth, not just short-term wins: lanternsol.com

@Shopify's Spring '26 Edition shipped 150+ updates on June 17. Of those, three matter for a store doing $3M+: Native A/B testing. Rollouts brings built-in theme testing straight into the admin, no third-party scripts required. The tooling gap that kept most stores from testing at all is gone. Checkout gets more modular. Checkout Blocks customization, including thank-you and order-status pages, is now open to every plan, not just Plus, and upgrade-safe instead of a pile of workarounds. Agentic commerce. Shopify's new Universal Commerce Protocol lets AI agents read your catalog and build carts by default, and Copilot users can now check out in-chat via Shop Pay. Your product data just became a sales channel. The rest is worth skimming, not planning around. Editions always mixes genuinely new features with re-announcements.

A moment from our Cincinnati retreat that sums up how I think about team culture. We spent the days working through how to improve Lantern Sol. Client experience, internal systems, all of it. One evening we did a VR experience where the whole group fought zombies together. You can hear in the video how into it everyone was. I run a fully remote company, so I don't get hallway conversations or Friday lunches. What I've learned is you can know someone's work for years and still not know them. An hour of shared adrenaline does what a hundred video calls can't. Fun with the people you work with doesn't cost you professionalism. Some of the sharpest ideas of the whole trip came out in the hours after we closed the laptops. Video below.

One of the healthiest changes we've made at Lantern Sol is simple: everyone has tasks, including me. Early on, every project moved at the speed of my calendar. Designs, proposals, approvals, everything waited on me. The problem wasn't the work itself. It was waiting. Today, everyone on the team assigns and receives tasks through ClickUp. Every task has an owner and a due date, so everyone knows what's most important and what needs to happen next. That includes me. If someone is waiting on something from me, it becomes one of my tasks too. And if I'm going to be late, I communicate it early so no one is left guessing or blocked from moving forward. The goal is to create clarity and make sure priorities are visible to everyone. The best teams don't rely on memory, they rely on systems that help everyone move in the same direction.

Every year at Lantern Sol, we organize team retreats to bring everyone together. When you work remotely, it's easy to know what someone does without ever really knowing who they are. These trips give us the chance to step away from our screens and spend time together in person. Our second retreat of the year was in Cincinnati, my hometown, and we just wrapped it up. Coming home always hits different. This city is where everything started for me, and it also happens to be where some of our best clients are concentrated. The trip had two purposes. We spent time together as a team, holding working sessions focused on making Lantern Sol even better for our clients and for the people building it. And we visited clients in person and, to be honest, that ended up being the highlight. We spend our days behind computers optimizing the online side of their businesses, but walking through their warehouses, hearing how they got started, and learning where they want to go next puts everything into perspective in a way no dashboard ever could. I'll be sharing more from those visits soon.

Five lessons I keep having to relearn. 1. Your environment does most of the conditioning. I grew up in Cincinnati and in my family starting a business was just what people did, so entrepreneurship never felt like a leap. I still spend over $70,000 a year on masterminds and operator groups for the same reason. You become what the room expects of you. 2. Consistency matters most on the bad days. I recently started surfing in Brazil. Some sessions I crush it, others the ocean humbles me completely, and the only variable I control is showing up again tomorrow. 3. Someone has to own the final call. Collaboration is great, but every project needs one person on the hook so nothing sits in a waiting period. We build that into every client engagement, and I had to learn to build it inside my own company too. 4. Watch people go ahead of you. I'm the seventh of nine kids. Six people went through life before me, and borrowing their mistakes was probably the biggest advantage I ever had. 5. Timing errors compound. In surfing, being half a second late means the wave dumps you instead of carrying you. Business is more forgiving, but not by much. Waiting one quarter too long to fix retention costs more than the fix ever would have. Which one are you relearning right now?

@imakeBADads Rebuilding from zero to $40K/mo in a single month says more than the $1B number does. Most people don't come back from losing every client and $2M in the same year. You did, then kept compounding for six more. Good post. Inspiring to see the full arc.

< 2016: Ran my first ad. 2016: Built one of the first ecom ad systems in the Middle East. 2018: Scaled dropshipping brands to $500K/mo from my mom's basement. 2019: Took those lessons to scaling local businesses. 2020: COVID hit. Lost every local business client. Lost $2M in stocks. 2020: Took over sales. Grew the agency back to $40K/mo in one month. 2020: Opened my first office with 3 team members. 2026: 200+ employees, $1B+ in annual client revenue, 8 figures a month in ad spend. 2026: Running Agency Founders, RemotelyX, Scoville, and several other companies. All from being good at two things: MARKETING SALES Highest-leverage skills in the world and it's not even close.