I usually eat at chipotle 3-5 times a week. For a while I started tracking how much they would charge me for the same meal. It ranged from $13-21 each time. Same meal. Correct price was ~$18.50 Came down to communication in the assembly line around guac and extra chicken. Just didn’t happen consistently After 50 visits I calculated they lost 8% of their intended revenue capture from poor communication. Move to digital capture and measuring of ingredients with AI as you build the bowl. Let people ask for more of something if they want it. 8% immediate revenue lift across all stores.

Pat Murphy changed the course of my life, more than any other person... And I hated him for it for a long time. Quick story about how getting kicked off the ASU baseball team in college changed the course of my life for the better. These last few weeks have been weird for me. Watching this person who I had such a challenging relationship with get celebrated endlessly in the media is a weird phenomenon. Out of high school I signed a scholarship to play baseball at Arizona State. Much to mother's dismay i turned down more "educationally oriented" opportunities to play for the #1 team in the country. It was baseball heaven. The walls covered with the retired numbers of all time legends, Barry Bonds, Reggie Jackson etc. etc. My freshman year my roommate was Dustin Pedroia! You couldn't ask for anything better as a 18 year-old dreaming of becoming a pro. Murph was tough. No non-sense, kind of a dick, but the kind of coach you really want approval from. (I see this even in the Brewers players today) My freshman year I didn't get to play, I was pissed, felt like I deserved a shot but there were more senior guys that he felt like deserved continued chances even when they struggled. He was always very loyal to "his guys". There began to develop this sort of weird divide on the team between the older and younger players. The freshman were all very close and a few of us resented some of the chances repeatedly given to the older guys. In addition, we were immature, partied too much, didn't take school serious enough and acted entitled. (I can see this now in reflection). The culmination of all this internal conflict manifested after the "Rookie Show". A tradition at ASU where all the freshman had to make comedy skits and perform them in front of the whole team. A group of us freshman made a video mocking the "Leadership Team", a group of juniors/seniors that met together with murph after practices. Bad idea. I remember playing the video and no one laughing. Terribly awkward. The night ended and I didn't think too much of it, dumb skit but whatever. The next day Murph called me up to his office and told me he was kicking me off the team. He said it was the most offensive skit he'd seen in all his years and that someone needed to take the blame and he believed I was the ring leader. I'll never forget leaving that office and walking home. I was mortified. My whole life was just flipped upside down. I ended up transferring to UCI, where we made the school's first ever run to the college world series where we eliminated ASU and Murph in a walk off win in the 13th inning. It was peak redemption arc for me personally. That same week I was drafted by the yankees, got to play in Charleston, where I met my wife and the rest is sort of history. A real butterfly effect moment on how my life could have been different. For so long I had such a negative view of my experience with Murph. I thought I got screwed. But when you watch someone succeed at so many levels, ultimately ascending to the highest level of the profession, while being adored by everyone around them you have to stop and reflect on whether or not YOU might have been the problem. Regardless the wound is long healed and I have come to appreciate the experience. So cheers Murph CONGRATS on an incredible run.

1 hour delivery is a moat most can’t comprehend.

Uhhh is this the beginning of the inevitable breakup between Stripe and Shopify? This is a big deal. It’s also a bunch of my predictions coming to life at once. Here's what's happening: Stripe is powering a native checkout inside Facebook ads. You see an ad, tap "Buy now," and purchase without ever leaving Facebook. Powered by Stripe's new Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP)*, an open standard built with OpenAI. This is not the breakup. It's worse. It's Stripe building the layer that makes Shopify optional. Here's the threat chain: 1. Checkout moves off the storefront.* If customers buy inside Meta ads via Stripe, they never visit the Shopify store. The store becomes a warehouse backend, not the point of sale. 2. Stripe becomes the merchant of record infrastructure.* ACP lets any AI agent (ChatGPT, Meta, whoever) trigger a purchase. The business keeps merchant of record status, but the commerce infrastructure is Stripe, not Shopify. 3. Shopify Payments IS Stripe under the hood. Shopify's payment processing is a white-labeled Stripe integration. Stripe going direct to Meta means they're routing around their own reseller. Why let Shopify clip the ticket when Stripe can own the relationship directly? 4. The "agentic" angle is the real play. ACP isn't just Meta. OpenAI is the first AI platform to implement it. This means ChatGPT, and eventually every AI assistant, can trigger purchases through Stripe without touching a storefront. That's a future where "browse a website and add to cart" becomes a legacy behavior. For brands specifically This changes the ad-to-purchase funnel fundamentally. If a Prophit Engineer is optimizing Meta ads and the purchase happens inside the ad unit via Stripe checkout, the attribution model changes, the role of the landing page changes, and creative becomes even MORE important because the ad IS the store. Brands should be watching this closely. Short-term, nothing changes. Medium-term (12-18 months), the brands that figure out how to sell inside AI surfaces and ad units via ACP will have a structural advantage. So is it the breakup? Not yet. But it's Stripe signaling that they don't need Shopify as the distribution layer anymore. Stripe + Meta + OpenAI is a commerce stack that doesn't require a storefront. Shopify's response will tell you everything: do they build their own ACP competitor, or do they lean into being "the backend" for agentic commerce?

Joy has built our accelerator program to 100 brands… 100 7-figure stores transparently pursuing predictable profitable growth. Publicly allowing you to grade his homework and decide for yourself if it could help your brand. Check it out.

Do not do this. You have to have an approved app. You will get banned. Meta is enacting the Manus protection plan ;)

VCs just bet $16M that you are lazy enough to break the law. Arcads just raised a massive $16M Seed round. You have seen it all over your feed. The pitch is seductive: "No more expensive UGC creators. Type a script, get a video of a human saying it." It’s impressive tech. The avatars are indistinguishable from reality. But before you fire your content team (or agency) and replace them with AI avatars, read the FTC’s new "Final Rule on Consumer Reviews" (16 CFR Part 465). The trap is in the script. If you type: "This product changed my life" into an AI generator... And the "person" saying it does not exist... And they never used your product... You just committed a federal violation. The Math of Liability: Cost of Arcads Subscription: ~$100/mo FTC Fine per Violation: Up to $51,744. If you generate 100 fake testimonials, you are sitting on a $5M liability. The Safe Path: Use AI actors for announcements, explainers, or skits. Never, ever use them for testimonials or personal experience claims. "I think this brand is cool" = Marketing. "I lost 10 lbs using this" = Fraud. If you thought the ambulance chasing on GDPR and ADA compliance was bad... this is going to be a whole different level.

@CliftonSellers Like it was an essential part of my and my entire organization’s AI adoption process.

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% of spend is just a bad business model for all parties. Doesn’t serve anyone’s interest.

Fascinating plot twist. Single handedly causing the Oura IPO delay?

Meta just acquired your new media buyer for ~$2B Here is why the Manus acquisition is a must watch for all consumer brands: As of today, Manus leads the Remote Labor Index. remotelabor.ai/ Which basically means its the best "employee" agent in the market. Where most agents hallucinate or get stuck. Manus scores highest on completing end-to-end freelance tasks (coding, scraping, analyzing) without human intervention. Now remember the Zuck Vision from his interview with Ben Thompson earlier this year: "Eventually, I think we're going to get to a point where you're a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don't need any creative, you don't need any targeting demographic, you don't need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out. I think that's going to be huge. I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising." Manus is the bridge. Imagine a new tab in Ads Manager called "Objectives," powered by Manus. It is a prompt based interface where you can provide desired business outcomes. 1. The Prompt (You):"I need to move 5,000 units of our 'Wide-Calf Leather Boot' in the next 30 days. Target CPA: $45. Go." 2. The Research (Manus Agent): Action: Agent scrapes the top 10 competitor boot brands. Finding: It notices competitors have bad reviews for "zippers breaking" and "tight ankles." Strategy: It decides the winning angle is "The Indestructible Zipper." 3. The Creation (Generative AI): Action: Agent pulls your raw video files and splices a new hook focusing only on the zipper mechanism, overlaying the text: "Finally, a zipper that doesn't snap." 4. The Execution (Ad Account): Action: Launches 5 variations. Kills 4 in 6 hours. Scales the winner. 5. The Result: You didn't manage a campaign. You managed your desires. This is the future we are working towards. It is why we believe in the evolution towards a new role we are calling "prophit engineer". Someone whose job it is to connect the tools to the business desires to engineer predictable, profitable growth. Meta just took a giant swing at bringing this to life.