The image above has been freewheeling around my head for months now.

Is this where we’ll end up as “agents” remove our critical thinking? And Claude has told us we’re amazing once too often?

I don’t want to lose the little true cognition I have. And yes, thinking and chatting is the lifeblood of our working lives....

So - let’s get into it - my opinions follow...

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Recharge bought Skio on the cheap - Skio were doing $33m ARR, and got bought for 3x revenue. 2 years ago they’d have gone for 10x at least. Recharge has become largely dominant in their sector (except for Shopify’s own limited subs service), and Skio were better at lots of the elements of the Recharge toolkit. Customers are a bit sad of course, they know how this ends (more on that later). SaaS valuations are really screwed right now, and what that means for pricing, salaries, all of it - we really don’t know yet.

• The murky beginnings of Rezolve.ai - If you’re in the right community groups (or on reddit) you’ll have read about the dark arts of Dan Wagner’s not so new startup. The beginnings are largely unimportant now though. Out of a SPAC they’ve acquired Crownpeak & Advanced Commerce among others, including three search tools and a bunch of customers. And - $750m burning a hole in their pocket to be spent quickly.
  Murky or not, these are real customers with SaaS that is deeply embedded (some have had Fredhopper for 15 years)... so keep a close eye people, the agentic promise is clearly fluff for now. Oh and yes i asked them for a chat - I am being ghosted.

• Klaviyo’s CRM carcrash - A few weeks ago the CF community witnessed a new AE at Klaviyo sending a “hello, can we catch up” email to 50 accounts who had mostly left their businesses. Oh, and it came out of Salesforce... :) Still funny 10 days later.

Adyen & Talon one - what does it say about SaaS?

This transaction was very early in the cycle that SaaS has known. Talon One has had real momentum for a while now, and hadn’t actually raised that much cash... so really were in control of their own destiny.

I wonder if this has happened now because the thinking is that valuations will only get worse? I can’t see that sales momentum is an issue, the team are excellent and the product positioning has been strong.

The deal presents opportunities for others though. This is Adyen’s biggest acquisition, and they won’t be able to resist fiddling with their new toy. Inevitably, Talon One’s momentum will slow, great staff will move on, and Adyen’s conservative/cautious culture will take over.

Who will benefit? the established “loyalty” players for sure... but there are some bootstrapped and clever types out there. I suspect there will be far more of these deals this year, leading back to suites of SaaS which may never really be bought again....

Are we witnessing the demise of pureplay D2C?

As I wrote a few weeks ago, many D2C companies are spending 20-35% of their total revenues on customer advertising. All with three channels.

In 2005 Heinz (one of the biggest spenders) were lashing out 4.5% of sales revenues on marketing. This has since grown to about 8%, but D2C will never be profitable if they continue to spend at 20%+.

But continue to spend they must for now, because whilst growth is hard to come by, pureplay D2C has to spend big just to stand still. Squeezed by rising ad costs, supply chains, geopolitics and product ranges that do not have repeat purchase built-in - we worry for the sector itself.

Anyone up for opening some shops?

How we love the lion’s den

I got to witness a delicious 10 minute f2f sales pitch & interrogation last week. A senior architect from The Gap and the founder of a server-side tagging business had a really intense chat where deep knowledge was tested, eye contact maintained, subject-matter expertise displayed by both - and ultimately the test was passed, and a next step agreed.

It’s sad in so many ways that all these relationships now start with a zoom call. Face to face is ultimately faster and much more effective, and I know both salespeople and clients would rather start do it in person.

Perhaps in an AI world buying and selling will be the last bastion of critical thinking before we all turn into blobs on lilos :)

Anyway - more focus on these for the rest of the year from me, and more events in the Autumn. Happy Q2 to all and we hope you get the commercial outcomes you deserve (and not a penny more). And - a shout out to Tomo for the support with insults... Temu is a doozy.

Jamie

Oh - and in a nod to our “insult of the week” heritage... are you the funsponge? Check yourself :)

Vile Rumour & Gossip

Leapfrogging is back - More brand-side decision makers who are still on an old platform are considering a leap into the unknown. From an ancient Fredhopper platform to who knows what? Bypassing Algolia, even Constructor... the LLM visibility challenge is real. And finally the home-grown stacks are coming apart. Despite years of pursuit by SFCC they’re all going Shopify or Centra :).

How cross are Stripe? - Last October the ACP was the envy of all it surveyed. Remember everyone claiming they were part of the launch program? And now? OpenAI have bailed on the checkout, so Stripe must be mad as hell and ACP is just a “connective layer”... the website isn’t dead after all apparently.

3 month roadmaps in SaaS - I’ve been banging on about roadmaps being a vital sign to SaaS health for a while now, and in 5 convos this last week I’m told by founders “we can’t publish anything beyond 3 months”. How is a prospect supposed to make a decision based on that I ask you?

Claude for the win - Without doubt, Claude is by far the best tool for devs right now. The gap isn’t small either. One CTO told me last week that “even a really expensive contractor, armed with Claude, can deliver better ROI than a staffer with a lesser toolset. His estimate was a 10x better velocity.

Has OpenAI flown too close to the sun?

I’m not sure anyone wants to say it, but apart from being a bit “goody two shoes” OpenAI seems damaged. Too broad too fast is the call - and whilst revenues are scaling super-quick, the tools are not leading in any category.

You can always tell when the chatter is about others, and whilst “ChatGPT” is the lingua franca of the consumer still, Google has it’s UCP house in order now, and anthropic is on fire.

The “addiction” ruling damaging and distracting Meta and YouTube could not be more welcome in our house, and we hope OpenAI’s lack of a compass gives others an opportunity to reap havoc.

Is old online starting to unravel?

Human nature is curious, inquisitive. The idea of 3 channels where ALL the money goes just isn’t sustainable. Nice job Google and Meta for creating a media addiction, and an industry to go along with it, but it’s finding the bumps in the road, and some are losing grip on their handlebars.

In 20 years of digital, physical retail in the USA still counts for 80% of sales. So despite Amazon, marketplaces and every d2c brand known to man throwing money at the cart, shops are still alive, and more noticably are starting to thrive again.

A CDO I spoke to last week did store visits recently, and the staff came with a list of functionality (iMessage to CRM, SKU reference pics closer to the image for “screenshot shopping”). They’re prioritising all of this.

More from Vague Fierce...

You remember we teased a few highlights from the Commerce Futures community vendor mickey take a few issues ago? Here are a few more nuggets:

1) how much of this are we actually using ?
2) speak to the former customers not the current ones
3) the danger of the POC/POV
4) do we need it or do we like shiny things?
5) does the business need it or is it looking for an excuse for missing targets?
6) the ceo and the speculative phone call
7) how it ends is as important as how it starts
8) Tobi Lutke and why we shouldn’t worship idols
9) Is it an Alliance or an Empire?
10) Why am I the one spending my time reintroducing myself annually

Also -”Salesman please don’t call me buddy”?

More soon - oh and please do look at our new event series this autumn “Let’s go Shopping“ in Soho London if you can.

Jamie

insult of the week - #funsponge

”He literally sucks the fun out of the room. Whenever I walk past him I feel like I’ve been rubbed down with a sponge doused of meanspirited wipes… he’s got to go!”

Normal service then.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Time to respond - There’s some weirdness going on when it comes to vendors responding to sales enquiries. For some reason it has become “accepted” practice to take some time, in some cases days. I recently made an introduction to Shopify and they responded to the client 5 days later 🙂. They are not alone… is it cool to look less needy? I may use the phrase “in my day” here, but surely this isn’t representative of the hunger in sales teams? Also - statistically I’m informed that almost always the first vendor to respond and build a relationship wins.

• Private Planes & bribery - For years large trade shows have paid customers to attend. Shoptalk Luxe funded brand leaders up to $2000 in “travel” costs to attend this year, but some are going further. A SaaS vendor is offering private plane travel to Vegas in a few weeks, which gives you 4 hours in a metal tube to build a relationship. The conclusion in our Commerce Futures community is that this is the onlyfans of B2B marketing.

• When a webinar has no value - I watched a joint sales webinar this week, from a payment provider and front-end-as-a-service player. They had a customer join - and 30 minutes later I left having learned…. absolutely nothing. The customer got 5 minutes, the three other people from SaaS took the remaining 25 mins, and honestly I could have made the presentation myself and had the chat, and I know very little. No wonder these things have no attendees.

• Be nice to us please? - I struggle to have sympathy with the vendor ecosystem when they complain about customers ghosting or negotiating hard at the end of a quarter for a contract. Anyone who has had an Oracle sales director in their front garden will know where the issue lies - in the quarterly commission system and the behaviour that generates.

  ---

  Rise & Fall of community

  As you know I moderate a “group”, of brand-side people I know, have met, interviewed and given access to one another. I don’t go by job title or seniority, I go by mindset. If I see someone who seems helpful I include them. Chatting to someone at a recent event I heard them explain “Not another community”... in exasperation. Then yesterday I was told by a couple of our lot - that the other group is so dull, full of people showing off.

  In tech we see new words all the time which are overused, commoditised and ultimately discarded. It would be a real pity if such a powerful word was cheapened by people who were monetising or egotistical in their aims in this area, I for one enjoy being the benign dictator of one far too much to cheapen it with $$$.

  ---

  Redefining ERP

  A fascinating conversation last week amongst 7 brands in our group - all in various states of urgency to implement an ERP. For some their current platform is closing down (20 yrs old and the owner is retiring). For others they are growing fast and have avoided ERP for 10 years since launch.

  Given the innovation we see in the wider market it’s a great pity that this is such a frustrating space. Old tech, mafia pricing (again), long implementations and no guarantee of success.

  It’s the first space where brands are asking if AI will replace allow them to replace the idea of ERP in the medium term. Nobody it seems thinks that this space will have a commercial offering for mid-market or smaller businesses in the next 5 years.
  

  Meanwhile - MS v Netsuite all over again sadly.

  ---

  SaaS consumption will decline - an enterprise warning

  Large organisations are where the interesting AI implementations are taking place. Anyone mid-market or smaller is just going to rely on their vendor stacks (can you keep up with Shopify’s innovation?).

  I am recruiting for MACH’s Toronto conference currently, and SaaS should be a teeny bit scared I think. I’ve got several customer Engineering and CTO types who will present their AI layer, and say that they’re already using 20% less SaaS than 2yrs ago. And that’s all front-end.

  You will start to see me in the wild in a few weeks. I’m the MC for commerce live in April, and I’ll be at MACH X in Toronto - expect an unfiltered summary of all.
  

  Jamie

Jamie

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• No CSM’s worth hiring - A high growth vendor asked me recently if I knew any really strong Customer Success Managers who they might hire. Disappointingly the response from our Commerce Futures Collective was derisory, Sadly, at every point the group pointed out that none of those they knew fulfilled a role that was about the success of the customer.

• Service works both ways - A few weeks ago we talked about some vendors shutting down slightly and “keeping the lights on”. These same companies claim to be focused on “keeping what they have”, and yet having fired their CSM team have ignored most customers for a few critical months as they year starts. Having lectured brands for years about personalisation and loyalty, they need to wake up and realise this service thing works both ways 🙂.

• The Myth of CRO - Quite often we have a full on group rant in the collective about CRO in general. The “line” goes up, more sales… better efficiency… but the fancy attribution tactics rarely pay off, and the CFO isn’t impressed. Starting to think CRO is actually just a “bait & switch” myth.

• The roadmap - it’s a myth (see below). We have instances where clients have bought enterprise s/w on the promise of a specific set of features, only to find themselves in conflict with the product team about the priority of said features. And now? Well they’re funding the roadmap.

AI - Don’t make me feel stupid

We’re entering an era where once again, customers know much much less than vendors.

And once again, I’m reminded of something an eCommerce leader said to me years ago when discussing the technology buying process. “Don’t make me feel stupid”, because whilst my day job is running an eCommerce business, this is our budget and we’ll spend it with people we both trust and want to work with.

Of course, we’ve come a long way since then. Customers know more, vendors are no longer lecturing, and the reality is that nobody knows ANYTHING about AI.

“Don’t worry, we’ll get through this together” is the message we’d recommend sending - if you can bear the humanity of it 😍.

Warning - If you DO make the customer feel stupid, the contract phase will be brutal.

Roadmap webinars - Where is the value?

I’ve started sitting in on vendor roadmap calls & demos… it feels important in an era where investors seem to think Claude will replace everyone.

So far Constructor, Optimizely (Opal), Shopify, Salesforce, Fulfil, Sanity, Contentful and SCALYE. I’ll keep it up I promise :)

These are generally an hour long, and pre-baked. My takeaways:

1 - There’s often a slide at the start that basically says “We might never do any of this”.

2 - The next 13 mins are where the useful stuff is, generally presented by a grownup. But - they’re very insular... no customer references or use cases that really resonate. I feel customers are left to join the dots to their own business.

3 - The remaining 40 minutes are wasteful and vacuous... where technical staff give 5 minute answers that other technical staff ask them. It’s showing off basically.

The reason I a doing this is because I’m on a bit of a crusade about the Roadmap. AI tells us that it should be accelerating, and that customers will see huge strides. I am beginning to suspect that many vendors are really worried about their roadmap and the ability to create one that is meaningful - and deliver it.

If you get your roadmap pitch right, and fix engagement - you will win I promise you!

Use Cases - Think harder

A follow-on from the section above is “Use cases”. My experience is in helping technology vendors and services companies market and sell bleeding edge technology. From Agile 20 yrs ago to AI now.

Effective marketing is never about the technology, but about which problems it solves for customers. Often with new tech the customer isn’t cognisant of the problem they have until it is pointed out - hence my point above about “lecturing”.

With AI adoption, the nature of the technology means that use cases are the key. Thinking harder about the ones that might be relevant for your target client (or indeed yourself if you are a customer) is the key.

Make them niche, make them specific, make them real, and work harder on them than you do on anything else. Build a “Use case for the day” program that educates your staff to consider their own and their clients.

I have made a matrix of 300 use cases which I’m happy to share if you reply to this email and ask - a snip of it above (Yes I used perplexity to help, Sue me)

More in 3 weeks - and yes loads of new podcast episodes have been launched so check them out here

Jamie

P.S. We now have over 12,000 active readers and some fantastic feedback. We're open to supportive sponsorship and contributions - Just reply and we'll respond... eventually.

• Choice & Control beats money as a motivator - hands down.

• Choice & Control is why I left full time employment and started a business - 23 years ago

• Choice & Control is why I let my staff go last summer and went back to basics

• Choice & Control beats everything else as a way of thinking about your career.

Sorry for the dogmatic starting point, but sometimes needs must 🙂 - let me explain.

When I had a job in the 80’s and 90’s, I lived with what I assume is the same pressure as people in their 30’s have today. Sell more, do more, work more - or you won’t get promoted, won’t get that pay rise, won’t get that next job, won’t impress the boss who ends up making those decisions…

And it’s stressful, because in the end you have no control. If you work for a dickhead (or even someone lovely who can’t find the money) - you won’t earn any more than you are earning. That house, that baby, that wedding... they’re all dependent on moving upwards financially.

I married a wonderful woman who was as hungry as me. We liked the good things, and through both luck and hard work we’d bought a house, gained a dog, and we were making our employers a great deal of money. But I couldn’t sleep... I constantly felt that despite being good, the boss I had could bin me in an instant, and leaping forward to me as a 55 year old sales director I could see that at once I was older I’d become less and less employable.

So - I’d had an idea for a business, which gave me control back. 3 bosses instead of one... if I got fired I’d still have work, so after a few attempts to summon up the guts I bit the bullet. I only resigned when I had three clients though - zero risk! Plus, if I got it right I’d be able to choose clients, choose my bosses... no more alphas offloading their sales growth targets onto me to take on solo.

It was dreamy to be honest. We did good work, we won clients through that good work, those clients shared my values of “selling without selling”, and they were good at what they did too - IndigoBlue, Javelin, E2X, Peer 1 Hosting, some truly brilliant businesses who we really helped to grow.

10 years in with three young kids now, the business grew around me. I’d tried to have no plan, no ambition, but the thing had ideas of its own. Suffice to say that by May 2025 we’d worked for nearly 1,000 clients over 23 years - run 800+ events etc. etc.

The downsides? I wasn’t a very good MD, I was solely responsible for all revenue and overhead, and with a staff of 30 people I had no choice or control any more. I worked for the staff, and frankly in the end could not really see how it might come back. Selling the business wasn’t an answer either - who needs a 3yr earn-out with NO control... i know how that story ends.

But - I like to work. I love the content I now produce, I enjoy more than anything the Commerce Futures Community i’ve built, and I also get a big kick out of creating conference agendas - and of course hustling and making recommendations for vendors to brands... so I’ve gained my control back... I choose what I do and who I work for, Not only that, but I continue to tell the truth as I’ve done throughout my time as a business owner. Every salesperson I know in employment loses that luxury the moment they take the first paycheck.

I hope people who were in my position back in the 2001 read this... if you’re thinking about starting your own thing for the reasons I’ve outlined... give me a call - I’d love to explain.

Jamie

NB - Next week we’ll be back to our regular programming - and I’ll try to synchronise the social channels better.

Yes - we’re becoming the popbitch of tech.

Eyes down.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Platforms come and go, but when is an aging platform still relevant? Word is that Intershop recently won a decent-sized deal. For you younguns this is the predecessor to Demandware/SFCC which itself is no spring chicken... so WHY? is the question? We wonder if the current players were too people-constrained to pitch?

• Customers are super-frustrated with the sales playbook that takes 2 calls just for a price? Who has time to speak to an SDR, then an AE and then a sales engineer only for the price to change 3 times during the process anyway? Grrrr....

• SCAYLE is making waves in the U.S. having failed to show up really in the UK. A lot of noise but the classic “stepping stone” tactic using the UK to bounce to the states always seemed odd to me, and this is proving that it was unnecessary. Some wins already and a strong pipeline - bon chance!

• Seems odd to write given the state of US politics, but privacy is becoming big in the states. Fines are starting to creep in, and unlike GDPR where the single box got ticked, state variations are easy to trip up on...

Product beats People

No issue of #norocketships would be complete without a Shopify section. The comment we’d like to make this issue is that once again, they’ve shown the way for tech vendors in knowing that great product beats everything else. The layoffs they’ve made in partnerships clearly demonstrate several things:

1 - Shopify is increasingly a configuration platform, requiring little or no dev, and therefore fewer SI’s the implement. Partners count less than they did. “When everyone is super - nobody will be” - remember that quote?

2 - Customers do not churn if you invest in the product - Shopify has incomparable churn numbers, even amongst those that it was felt would outgrow it a few years ago

3 - ecosystems are lazy in the main, Shopify is relentless

Another thought on “Product” though. Such is the plethora of vendor launches and SaaS iteration today - that feature/function selling is becoming more than a little worthless. Customers expect your tooling to improve, your software to bloat almost monthly, and for features to be “nice” but not worth buying.

Instead (and once again we’ll use Shopify as an example), all vendor products need to start connecting themselves directly to consumer behaviour and an evidential consumer benefit. If vendors are able to do that - then retailers & brands will see value and produce their digital signature immediately.

The end of the Agency as we know it?

Another slightly “heavy” section, but no fear, for levity follows we promise. I (Jamie) have spent the last few weeks and months chatting to every type of agency around, from Global superpower SI to small organic SEO crews.

They’re all terrified of the risk they carry, the rate at which clients churn, the microscope that they’re all under, and in large part the way in which revenues are diminishing.

In fairness, the model of selling people’s time for profit is pretty broken. Much more tech is commoditised, media is easier to use than ever, and even complex integration is becoming table stakes. So, where services get sold… where is the opportunity? SI’s need to think harder than just putting on a new set of clothes and shoving AI at the front of their name that’s for sure… reputation is still really the only true currency that matters.

No question - big grown-up integration programs are the key opp, and building in-house proxies for true AI development too. The AI “layer” is also starting to emerge, and as I research the next MACH conference it is clear to me that the gap between those 3yrs in to AI versus those yet to start is mahoosive!

And media? Frankly who knows... and that’s the point I think. Customers are worried that agencies are unable to invest in decent service, and are just parroting back what Google tells them to say... it’s the wild west all over again right now.

How to manage vendors (Forced fun)

We wondered where to start this series, there’s so much here to laugh about. The Commerce Futures WhatsApp group is a pretty grown-up place full of customers NOT growing sellers under the bus. But - recently there was an outburst in response to a question from one member about whether a guidebook might exist on how to manage vendors…

Instead of a guidebook, the group (lead by our chief sarcy bloke known as “Vague Fierce”) started a list… this is part one:

1) what they will try to do to you and to those around you

2) Make them work for it

3) Out legal them always

4) Sign in haste, repent in leisure

5) Free days aren’t free if I’m paying for them

6) Why am I the one spending my time reintroducing myself annually

7) I can make a better breakfast at home

8) Do you have a roadmap or the intention of a roadmap

9) What’s your exit strategy

10) Build it yourself

11) There are no shortcuts

12) What if I don’t like Rugby/Cricket/Padel/Golf?

There are at least four more of these, and we’re taking suggestions. You can DM Jamie or reply to this email and only he will see it - All suggestions will be anonymised.

February here we come - payday loan anyone?

A new episode of the podcast here

Jamie

#norocketships Insults for the office
Frequently used (but never about you) phrases from #norocketships.

Coleslaw

/Coal/ /Slaaw/

adjective

1. They’re 90% cabbage

“Where is Nick Stragnel going? Who cares... he’s coleslaw”.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

• Keep the lights on when I leave? - And so it has come to pass… sadly a few SaaS vendors have reduced headcount to minimum levels and are really just trading away this year hoping for a PE exit. We’re still chatting to some of the very sad ex-staffers in a fair few of these companies where culture got toxic, sales were sub-par, and the C-Suite just got carried away with their own salaries. Dim the lights and keep walking I’m afraid.

• The Shopify strategy vacuum - Everyone’s a Shopify basher nowadays. I’m not one of them, an incredible business, but I do wonder if there’s really an “enterprise” appetite there you know. The platform is so strong doing what it does that there’s no need for a different “GTM”... big companies will use Shopify for specific use cases, and stick with an old platform or Composable for the main stack… that’s not so bad right?

• “Trust” me I’m a vendor - SaaS marketing take note. The two vendors with the worst reputation for shoddy tactics are OneTrust and TrustPilot. It is ironic I think that these two both use Trust as a marketing tool, but when engaging with clients the sales teams are insrtructured to behave truly poorly. Every renewal contains a price hike of 300% and is delivered 29 days before the end of the contract. They are giving the rest of you all a bad name.

• AI hard metrics - We’ll talk about AI bubbles a little further on, but suffice to say that AI programs within customers are now mostly subject to very hard ROI metrics. Sign off is only coming when a use-case has been thoroughly researched, and a costed timeline established. It’s early days for AI, and right now nobody is getting carried away like they did with MACH back in 2021.

UCP - it’s all about me!

Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol was announced during NRF in New York, and boy did it provoke some interesting behaviour. We saw vendors across the ecosystem take to LinkedIn to claim “Launch Partner” status, spam-tagging Google and Shopify (the real architects here) to try and ride shotgun on the announcement.

UCP’s impact will be dramatic. In one fell swoop Google has created a standard for agents to interact with one another, where some attempts have been started to create standards this shuts those down in one easy step, and paves the way for a much faster and more robust customer adoption, something the industry really needs given how leveraged the AI infrastructure players are right now.

AI bubbles

You won’t have failed to notice this prediction. From the Financial Times through Scott Galloway to my mum, we’re all expecting a rebalance sometime in Q1. My own view (what qualifies for me to have one? Nothing) is that there will be many many bubbles… which will burst fairly quietly… over the next 3 years. But AI is a genie that has come out of the bottle, so like the dotcom bubble things will recover and we’ll go again.

The signs to watch out for will be AI players who are truly over-leveraged and manage to go pop. As a customer this could really screw you over, so beware and look at funding runways in terms of cold hard cash…

Like our comment earlier this issue about hard metrics, make sure whatever you buy (and what you sell) has good returns associated with it - and if they’re not there run away.

Empathy rules

Finally for this issue, we’re making a plea for empathy. There are some quiet firings going on across the older SaaS companies, and especially inside SI’s. Paid agencies are struggling against the in-housing trend, and so there are a ton of staffers out on the street job hunting. Within customers, we’re seeing the opposite… new roles and new programs are more plentiful than in the last 24 months, but some kindness won’t’ go amiss.

We’re being kind BTW. This newsletter could be a lot more spicy, but we tone it down for those who fund the whole truth unpalatable.

Jamie

#norocketships Dictionary
Frequently used (but never about you) phrases from #norocketships.

Geldof

/Gel/ /Doff/

adjective

1. Doesn’t do any work on a Monday

“Oh FFS she’s such a Geldof - rarely turns up on a Monday morning and does bugger all early in the week”.

A quick mention of our supporter for this issue. Ocula is a very sharp pointy AI copywriting tool which solves the specific use case of creating SEO/AEO-focused product copy for brands such as AO.com, Boots, Marks & Spencer and more. Great ROI, good “product market fit”, and a nice bunch of people.