Brand Lab Issue #2: Why I'm Telling My Team to Slow Down with AI (While Going Faster) + How One Hire Can Make or Tank Your Brand
AI, Simplicity, and the One Hire That Changes Everything
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Yoyo Founders,
Welcome to The Brand Lab Issue #3.
We’ve not sent out one Free Edition and one Premium Edition (made public).
Today, you’re getting the free weekend edition that comes every Saturday or Sunday.
Let’s get it.
This week's edition breaks down:
AI thoughts from a founder pushing AI onto his team
Why simplicity is where the profit is (and complexity eats it up)
Some Nike concept ads
How one hire can be a drag or rocket fuel
-Colin Stuckert, Founder
Rize Brands → TT, IG, YT, X, Lkd, Rize Ads Account
I’ve been in the e-commerce space for 12 years, generating millions for my brands and more for clients. 👋 YouTube, Twitter, Instagram.
⛓️💥 Links Corner
💰 Liquid Death raises $67M at $1.4B valuation → Water in a can is now worth more than most tech startups.
🛒 Amazon launches same-day pharmacy delivery in NYC and LA → Your local pharmacy has 6 months to adapt or die.
📦 Shopify's 2024 commerce report: Mobile drove 73% of all sales → Desktop-first brands can’t exist anymore.
🤖 TikTok Shop hits $100B GMV faster than any platform in history → Social commerce finally works (just not how Meta imagined).
💸 Thrive Market raises $100M, pushes into private label → Membership + private label = the future of grocery. Everything is distribution. Everything.
📱 Meta tests AI that writes and designs ads automatically → Media buyers and agencies have limited time to shift what they offer dramatically.
🏬 Shein and Temu face forced labor investigations → Fast fashion's race to the bottom hits legal walls.
💰 SellerX acquires FBA aggregator Elevate Brands → Aggregators eating aggregators. The consolidation begins.
💨 Quick Hits
💰 Pricing Power: Raise prices 10% yearly (maybe more).
📱 TikTok Truth: Products that pop in the first 3 seconds sell. Everything else is scroll-past content.
💳 Checkout Killer: Guest checkout option increases conversion 45% for first-time buyers. You may not want to force account creation. I can’t stand them.
🔍 Search Bar Gold: Visitors who can search convert 3x-5x. Make it prominent.
📧 Welcome Series: 5-email series beats single welcome email by 320% for lifetime revenue. Yet many, many, many brands don’t send a welcome flow.
🏃 Speed Rule: Page load over 3 seconds loses 53% of mobile shoppers.
🤖 AI: Some thoughts
My team is getting an aggressive push into all things AI. From me, of course.
We’re building out multiple workflows while daily pumping ads, content, headlines, and ad copy.
It’s a lot. It’s overwhelming. It’s all over the place.
My personal daily use of AI involves 3 GPT windows (sometimes 6), 1-2 Claude tabs, and an ever-present SORA that’s (ideally) running visuals nonstop.
This is a lot of context and tab switching. And my ability to track it all is going down.
As an ex-RTS gamer (AOK legend, some might say), speed runs run through my veins.
So some of this is my own doing.
But then I found out some of the team members were using a single GPT window to create prompted visuals (not even Sora)—telling me it takes 30 minutes to run a few ads or a carousel.
You can’t be serious, was my gut response. I imagined them staring at the screen while GPT loads the image.
Come on. Really? Think.
But then I thought about it, and it didn’t occur to me at all to explain that multiple tabs should be the workflow.
(Now the annoyed high performer in me still expected people to at least CONSIDER if that was the best workflow, but whatever. This type of stuff comes with being the CEO—no one cares as much as you do… ever.)
So now I’m working on how to do it a bit slower, a bit more linear, a bit more methodical, while also finding ways to combine multiple steps into a single mega prompt or packed into a Gumloop or n8n automation.
That’s currently our next effort—building workflows to remove as many of the manual steps as possible. From there, the daily workflow will include the PIC that runs the specific processes and then others that will review the output and kick it back for edits if needed.
So yes, there are still humans involved. I don’t think the “Vibe Marketing” stuff is really a thing. The algos don’t reward low-quality content, and AI can’t make high-quality content itself without a lot of coaxing (at least not yet).
So for now, the human element isn’t going away, and probably won’t anytime soon. It’s just going to SHIFT where value is created.
Right now, in ads and content creation at least, the value is found in the HEADLINE and HOOK. (And in research and assimilating it to find the best headline/hooks.)
Since they are the entry point for every piece of content consumed, and because AI is just so bad at it, it’s where the VALUE PUCK has moved.
If you can create great headlines/content outlines, you can use AI to explode the quality of your output.
So our workflows are heavily centered on human review of the content concept and the hooks and headline copy used that support it. Then automate as much of everything else as possible.
☠️ Less is More
Stop making it complicated.
Ecom is super simple, but we love complicating stuff. Winning is about doing the few things that work OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER.
At its core, e-commerce is about:
Knowing ONE customer better than they know themselves
Serving that customer with a solution to their specific problem
Conveying that solution through focused copy, landing pages, and ads
The winners in this space will be single-SKU brands with one core product for one core customer. They'll win because they do one thing better than anyone else.
The market rewards this focus with higher growth, better exits, and stronger valuations. Brands that spread themselves too thin will fail… already are failing, many of them don’t know it yet.
When the market has unlimited options, focus is how you stand out amongst the noise.
💸 Hiring and Firing
When you hire someone, your company becomes shaped by that person.
Their habits, worldview, and ethics.
If they think a certain way, their work will affect your company.
If they have a fixed mindset, they will bring that into your company and culture.
If they are slow, others around them will be slow.
This is one of those hidden dangers of hiring that few talk about because it’s hard to quantify.
I’ve made this mistake soo many times.
People start excited and with good energy. Then by the third month, you start to see how their work and output contort the things around them to fit their perogiatives… and the problem is, it’s often not what you want or need as a company.
If you want to go fast but they are slow, they become a drag on your speed.
If they think you should design or build or operate this way and you want another way, they are exerting energy against what you want.
Then, when you finally part ways, it feels like such a lift. You get clarity and space. You can reposition and rebuild.
This is why you must hire MUCH SLOWER and only on a 30-60 day trial basis, and you must fire IMMEDIATELY the second you sense a mismatch
🎯 Focus Is YOUR Advantage
Most founders don’t fail because they’re lazy.
They fail because they’re scattered.
→ Too many ideas
→ Too many tools
→ Too many goals
But when you align your energy to ONE target… It becomes a 🔪 RAZOR SHARP KNIFE THROUGH BUTTER MACHINE.
This is how we build in 2025 and beyond:
🥇 product
🥇 message
🥇 platform
🎨 Ads Corner
Prompt: Give me 10 ad carousel concept angles for nike
Prompt: Now give me a full carousel visual outline for instagram based on this angle: copy paste angle
🚀 Shopify - The App Trp
Many Shopify stores install 30+ apps and wonder why their site’s slow and conversions are in the toilet.
This is all you need to hit your first $10K:
📩 Email & SMS → Klaviyo
⭐ Reviews → Judge.me
📄 Landing Pages → Replo (may not even need this if your PDP is solid)
Cut the bloat.
🤯 Psychology
Loss Aversion
People fear losing more than they enjoy gaining...
Abandoned cart emails: "Your items are about to be given to others."
Limited quantity warnings that trigger action
Expiring discounts vs. "discounts"
"Reserved for 10 minutes" in checkout
Real Example: Booking.com's "5 other people looking at this" converts 3x better than "Popular choice!"
📚 Books
Book: "Influence" by Robert Cialdini
Key Insight: Six principles of persuasion drive all human decisions
Application: Build reciprocity, social proof, and scarcity into every customer touchpoint
🅡 Rize Offers
🎬 Beginners start here → Platform Selection Matrix → Which e-commerce platform should you start on? Based on your skills, experience, and resources, we’ll guide you through exactly what’s best for you. Start here if you’re new to ecom.
🧠 The New Rules of E-commerce Course → What you MUST KNOW to succeed in E-commerce in 2025. Incept this into your brain before you spend another minute—or dollar—playing the wrong (old) game.
👩💻 The Rize Blueprint System → From Idea to your first 100 customers in a step-by-step system built inside Notion with every tool, spreadsheet, and template needed to launch and run an e-commerce brand.
⚡️ Rize Labs Brand Build → Custom turn-key ready-to-launch product concept based on DATA: deep research, unique positioning, complete brand design build out, including static ad concepts, turn-key SEO articles, email flows, Shopify & Amazon copy, ad scripts, and everything else you need to launch a winning offer. Book a call
✌️ Till Next Time
📱Rize Brands Social: Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Linkedin | Twitter
🖼️ Rize Ads Social → Sharing ad and brand concepts daily: Instagram
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