eCommerce Podcast

Emma Burke didn't set out to start a business. She was standing on the sidelines of her son's football training in the wind and the rain when a parent looped an elastic band around a boy's boots so his laces would stop coming undone. Everyone else's kids retied their laces three, four, five times a game. His didn't. That was the moment Laceeze was born.
Summary
This is a founder story about turning a problem nobody was searching for into a brand sold around the world. Emma had trained as a vet nurse on £80 a week, then built a 60-person contract cleaning company she quietly dreaded, before spotting that elastic-band trick on the touchline. She didn't invent it. She saw it work, asked the parents and the kids whether they'd buy and wear a proper version, and took the answer to market. Laceeze launched in 2017 at £6 and is still going today.
She and Matt get into the marketing problem most product founders never see coming, which is customers who don't yet know they need you. Emma explains how she built the UK with no marketing budget through an ambassador programme, why selling to an audience of children means treating safeguarding seriously, and how being honest on social media (the wins and the bits that go tits up) builds the kind of trust that ads can't buy. There's a brave call she made pulling her best seller right before Christmas, the supplier relationship she rates above everything else, and a complaint she turned into a five-star review.
Key sections by timestamp:
00:00 Welcome, Liverpool to Bournemouth
02:09 The elastic band on the touchline, how Laceeze started
03:47 From an £80-a-week vet nurse to a 60-person cleaning company
05:41 Throw away the business plan (she's never written one)
10:38 Going full-time, and trying to crack the USA
14:42 When customers don't know they need you, the ambassador programme
17:39 Safeguarding kids, and a TikTok violation
19:14 Grassroots community and giving back
21:38 Founder-led and honest on social media
27:35 Winning customers for life when things go wrong
34:45 Free market research, competitor sites and an inspiration folder
37:16 The one she wishes she'd known, pulling the best seller at Christmas
40:17 The most important relationship in the business
41:18 Rapid fire, Shopify, Klaviyo and getting into Claude
44:54 The dream, the US and a big brand collaboration

The Accidental Founder Who's Never Written a Business Plan (02:09)
Emma is clear that she's no inventor ("save that for Mr Dyson"). What she has is a little black book of crazy ideas and a habit of acting on the good ones. Before Laceeze there was a vet-nursing career she loved and a contract cleaning company she grew to 60 staff on the back of a Dorset property boom, knowing, by her own account, almost nothing about running a business when she started.
"I'm not your textbook kind of business builder. I've never written a business plan in my life." — Emma BurkeMatt's seen the same thing from the other side. He once had a would-be founder spread every form she thought she needed across his boardroom table, business plan and all. He swept the lot into the bin so they could actually start. The point both of them make is the same. Begin with a real problem and the simplest possible solution, and let the rest snowball.
"It was never done like, oh, we're going to create this product and it's going to go global. It was literally, there's a problem, here's a solution, and let's just take that to market." — Emma BurkeWhen Your Customers Don't Know They Need You (14:42)
The hard part of selling Laceeze isn't the product. It's that nobody wakes up looking for it. A parent watches their kid retie a lace five times a match and never thinks twice about it. Building what Matt calls solution awareness is the whole game, and in the UK Emma did it with no marketing budget at all, through an ambassador programme that started with a few mums on the sidelines and a £9.99 pair of bands gifted in exchange for a tag.
"You've hit the nail on the head, because we've got a solution to a problem, but parents don't go looking for the solution." — Emma BurkeThat programme is now a points-based platform with monthly challenges, and she's rebuilding it by hand in the United States, where the brand-recognition gap is the real reason PPC on Amazon wasn't growing. Because the audience is children, the work comes with a duty of care. Laceeze only sends to parent-run or clearly flagged accounts, and Emma is candid about a TikTok post of the product on a pitch being flagged for "exploiting children", with the appeal auto-rejected by a bot in about fifteen seconds.
Honesty as a Marketing Tool (27:35)
Emma's case for founder-led social media is simple. Tell the truth, including when a container's stuck or a shipment's delayed, because that's the reality of building a brand and people connect with it. Matt backs it up with a story of his own. One of his sites had its best month ever after a totally honest email about a stock shortage, telling customers they'd get one of six now and the rest later at the company's expense. Sales went mental.
The same instinct shows up when things go wrong. Emma describes a customer who vented on Facebook without ever contacting the brand directly. She moved them into the DMs, apologised, sent product, and two weeks later they were asking where to leave a review.
"Take the more negative, unhappy ones and see what you can do to resolve that. Because let's be honest, they're the ones that shout the loudest." — Emma BurkeAs Matt puts it, the angry ones are at least telling you what the problem is. Going out of your way to fix it is the secret marketing tool no one talks about.
The Brave Call That Saved the Reputation (37:16)
Asked what she wishes she'd known sooner, Emma goes right back to the first Christmas. The bands started snapping, a cutting and manufacturing issue, and rather than risk kids finding duds in their stocking fillers, Laceeze pulled everything at peak selling season. It was gut-wrenching, every instinct told her to keep selling and just replace the faulty ones, but the unseen risk was the customers who'd never complain and would simply decide the product was rubbish.
"It's not just a rubber band. There's a lot more to it." — Emma BurkeThey switched manufacturers afterwards and have stayed put since. Emma rates that relationship above every other in the business, a supplier with a UK office and a China factory, on her time zone, close enough to pick up the phone. The brave call cost a Christmas. It bought the reputation that carried the brand worldwide.
Today's Guest
Emma Burke is the Founder and Managing Director of Laceeze, the elastic-band brand that keeps kids' football laces tied and gives back to grassroots sport with every UK sale. She spotted the idea on the touchline of her son's training, launched in 2017, and is now building the brand in the United States.
Website: laceeze.co.uk
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/emma-burke-5bb73826
Social: Laceeze on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok

About the eCommerce Podcast
New episodes of the eCommerce Podcast land every Thursday. Join the free eCommerce Cohort, our monthly group for ecommerce founders, at ecommerce-podcast.com/cohort, and find everything else at ecommerce-podcast.com.
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/the-elastic-band-that-became-a-global-brand-with-emma-burke

Two people who each host a top ecommerce podcast sat down and recorded a single conversation for both shows. Brett Curry runs OMG Commerce, one of the most respected Google and YouTube ad agencies in ecommerce, and hosts the eCommerce Evolution podcast. Matt buys and builds ecommerce brands. So they did the obvious thing and interviewed each other.
Summary
This is a peer crossover, recorded once and aired on both the eCommerce Podcast and Brett’s eCommerce Evolution. The conversation splits cleanly into two halves. First, how to run an ecommerce business the way an investor would, even if you never plan to sell. Matt walks through what he actually looks for when acquiring a brand (culture and the founder before the numbers), the three ways to grow any business, why a 5% price rise can mean roughly 40% more net profit, and how turning buyers into subscribers and members can take an exit from a 3x multiple to an 8x one. He also covers the roll-up play, why strategic buyers pay the most, and Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth.
The second half is Brett’s territory, which is YouTube ads in 2026. Half of all YouTube is now watched on a smart TV, which changes everything about creative. Brett explains the five things a YouTube ad needs, how to turn winning Meta creative into YouTube winners, the mashup format that consistently performs, and why measurement is the trap that makes most people quit too early.
Key sections by timestamp:
00:00 Two podcasts, one conversation
01:30 Buying a business, culture and the founder over the numbers
11:52 How a small brand competes with Amazon
13:25 Jay Abraham’s three ways to grow a business
16:49 The price rise founders are too scared to make
20:04 How a business is really valued (3x and EBITDA)
21:33 Turn buyers into members, 3x to 8x, and the roll-up play
25:53 What private equity actually cares about
27:59 Build a business that runs without you (The E-Myth)
31:12 Why half of YouTube is watched on a TV
37:34 Turning your best Meta ads into YouTube winners
39:15 The five things every YouTube ad needs
43:00 Where to start, mashups of your top moments
47:56 The measurement trap (incrementality and attributed brand search)
51:30 Where to find Brett (and Matt)

The Three Ways to Grow a Business (13:25)
Matt first heard this from a Jay Abraham lecture when he was 18, and it still shapes how he reads a set of books. There are only three levers.
Grow the number of customers (he splits this into new acquisition and repeat customers).
Grow the frequency, how often a customer buys. If someone buys once a year and you get them to twice a year, all else being equal, you have doubled the business.
Grow the average order value, how much they spend each time.

The clever bit is the maths. Grow any one of these by 10% and the business grows by 10%. But grow all three at once and the business grows by about 33%, because each lever multiplies the others.
“If you grew your customer base by 10%, your business grew by 10%… But if you can grow all 3 things at the same time, your business grows by 33% because you start to see this geometric effect.” — Matt EdmundsonThe Price Rise Founders Are Too Scared to Make (16:49)
Most brands Matt looks at have not raised prices in a long time, usually out of fear of losing customers. When he runs the numbers, the increase almost always wins. For his businesses, a 4 to 5% rise has a minor impact on customer loss but a major impact on profit.
“5% increase in price is something like a 40% increase in net profit depending on your profit margins. That’s a massive chunk of change right there.” — Matt EdmundsonThe other lesson here is conviction. You need real belief in the product (and in its quality) to hold a higher price, and Matt argues for buying and building only in a lane you understand. Amazon, he points out, can beat a small brand at almost everything except being you. Own that, and it is the one thing a commodity broker cannot copy.
Turn Buyers Into Members, and a 3x Becomes an 8x (21:33)
A billionaire client told Matt years ago that you value a business by taking net profit and multiplying by three. That raises the obvious question of how net profit is really defined, which is why people reach for EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation).
But there is a number Matt thinks ecommerce founders underuse. Take a brand making £1m in EBITDA, worth perhaps £2 to £3m at a standard multiple. Change nothing about the sales, but convert those customers into subscribers, or better still paid members, and the same business can be worth closer to £8m. The revenue is identical. The mechanism makes it predictable, and predictable revenue is what investors pay up for.
Brett backed this up from a friend’s recent agency exit. What the private equity buyer cared about most was simple.
“Really, all the private equity company cares about is the durability of the revenue… subscribers, much more durable. It’s predictable… instead of 3 times multiple, we’ll pay you 5 times multiple. Or 8 times multiple.” — Brett CurryTwo more moves came up. The roll-up, because there are far more small businesses for sale than buyers for them. Matt describes the inverse pyramid of buyers, where bigger businesses attract more bidders and higher multiples, so merging four or five firms into a £5 to £20m group both finds you a buyer and raises the price. And the strategic buyer, the competitor who already has the warehouse and distribution, who values your gross profit rather than your EBITDA and so pays more. Matt’s beauty business sold that way. The underlying advice is older than all of it, which is read Michael Gerber’s The E-Myth and build a business that runs without you.
YouTube Is a TV Platform Now, and That Changes the Ads (31:12)
Brett has run YouTube ads since 2016 or 2017, and the platform has shifted under everyone’s feet. Somewhere between 50% and 60% of all YouTube views now happen on a smart TV, and that is the YouTube app, not YouTube TV. It is also the number one podcast platform. People engage with podcasts on YouTube more than on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
That matters because YouTube creative is its own discipline. The good news, which is new, is that winning Meta, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok creative can now work on YouTube if it meets the right criteria. Brett’s five things a YouTube ad needs:
30 seconds or longer. Assets under 30 seconds rarely drive meaningful scale.
A voiceover or someone speaking on camera. People watch YouTube with the sound on, and adding a voice lifts engagement by around 30%.
A product demonstration, seeing the product actually in action.
Social proof, whether that is reviews on screen or UGC in the ad.
A clear call to action, because most people will not click on their own, so you have to tell them what to do.

The format Brett singles out as a consistent top performer is the mashup. Take the best moments from your 10 to 15 strongest videos and order them into a single 16:9 narrative, hook then demo then proof then desire then objections then a call to action. That landscape format also opens up all the TV inventory.
“What is consistently a top performer, or the top performer, is creating a mashup of those top moments… how can we weave those moments from these top 10 or 15 ads into one narrative?” — Brett CurryThe Measurement Trap (47:56)
The thing that makes most people abandon YouTube too soon is that it is genuinely hard to measure. In-platform metrics severely undercount it, and so do multi-touch tools like Northbeam and Triple Whale, because they are click-based and most people do not click on YouTube. Often they cannot, because they are watching on a TV. What they do instead is search for the brand afterwards.
So Brett measures three different ways. Incrementality studies through a service like Haus, which runs scientific geo holdouts. Conversion-lift studies that Google and Meta can run at the user level. And one metric you should ask your Google rep for by name, attributed brand search, which shows how many brand searches each campaign drove after people saw the ad. Haus found that a YouTube campaign showing a 1 ROAS in platform is, on average, actually delivering around 3.4x once you account for the incremental impact.
“If you just look at in-platform metrics for YouTube, severely undercounted… most people don’t click. Most people are on YouTube to watch their favourite podcast.” — Brett CurryToday’s Guest
Brett Curry is the CEO of OMG Commerce, a Google, YouTube and Amazon ad agency widely regarded as one of the best in ecommerce. He hosts the eCommerce Evolution podcast and is a long-time student of two questions: how to make marketing work, and how to prove it did.
Website: omgcommerce.com
LinkedIn:

He runs five businesses with zero employees, and he's never written a line of code in his life.
Summary
Dmytro "Dima" Negodiuk calls himself a fractional AI officer, a title his own AI agent came up with. From New York, he runs five-plus businesses across ecommerce, B2B distribution, retail, education and AI consulting, all orchestrated by a single AI agent, and without a marketing, IT or sales department behind him. In this conversation Matt and Dima get practical about where an ecommerce founder should actually begin with AI, why Claude Code is the on-ramp even for people who've never touched the tech, and how to point it at the biggest problem in your business rather than treating it like a toy.
They dig into the difference between playing with AI and deploying it, the 24/7 use cases that hand small stores an unfair advantage, and why a human still has to stay in the loop. Dima shares his AI call centre running on its 44th version, the meeting "dossier" that knows what golf game you lost twelve years ago, and the overnight autonomous work that means he checks his AI before he brushes his teeth. Matt offers his own mobile-optimisation story, where one podcast transcript turned into a scoring tool and lifted mobile conversion by over 400%.
00:00 — Three takes and a fractional AI officer
04:00 — The AI that works while you sleep
09:24 — Letting AI run your real life
16:00 — Where is all this heading
18:35 — Start Claude Code today
21:00 — When AI gets it wrong
26:48 — Start with your biggest problem
37:46 — Mobile conversion up 400%
40:25 — The dossier and cleaning the mess
43:23 — An AI call centre that never sleeps
47:58 — The best AI tip, save it for last

Why a Fractional AI Officer Runs Five Businesses Alone
(01:00)
Dima describes a model that would have sounded impossible a few years ago. He runs more than five businesses across ecommerce, B2B distribution, retail, education and AI consulting, all sitting on top of one AI agent. As an entrepreneur who has never coded, he's replaced the departments he used to run with AI.
"I never wrote a line of code in my life. Never. So I had like marketing system, marketing department. I have IT department, sales department, everything. Now I'm like sole entrepreneur." — DimaHe points out that the title isn't just his invention. The big AI labs now hire for the same role under a different name, the forward deployed engineer, at starting salaries north of $300,000. The word that matters in both is "deploy".
"Main word deploy. So you need not only to know how to, for example, create it, you need to know how to deploy it and all the system need to work." — DimaWhy Claude Code Is the Place to Start
(22:00)
For founders who feel AI is passing them by, Dima's advice is blunt and encouraging at once. Start today, start with Claude Code, and don't be embarrassed about how little you know.
"When I saw my first video and it says open terminal on your MacBook, I ask ChatGPT like web version, what is terminal? And I'm not shy about it." — DimaA few practical pointers from the conversation:
Search YouTube for a "Claude Code for dummies" video and begin with the basics.
Skip the cheapest plan if you intend to build. Dima suggests starting on the $100 plan rather than the $20 one.
Treat ChatGPT or Codex as a reviewer sitting on top of Claude Code, sense-checking the work. A $20 subscription is enough for that job.

Matt agrees it's a genuine on-ramp, and adds that the choice between tools is a bit like Apple versus Android. Dima uses Claude Code for ecommerce; friends building crypto trading bots reach for systems that fire requests many times a second instead. Stick to what fits your niche.
Start With the Problem You Actually Have
(27:00)
The most useful starting point, both agree, is the biggest problem in front of you. No product? Ask for product ideas. A product that won't sell? Ask for marketing ideas. Then check the output, because AI gets things wrong.
Matt tells the story that makes the case. After Adam Pearce came on the show to talk about mobile optimisation, Matt fed the episode transcript to Claude, had it extract the key ideas, research and score each one, and eventually build a tool that audits a website against current best practice.
"Mobile conversion on our website so far is up almost 500%. It's definitely over 400% increase, um, on mobile conversion. You're talking about hundreds, if not millions of pounds worth of difference." — MattDima frames the same idea around two questions worth asking of any business. Where are the problems AI could help with, and what are the repeated tasks you could automate? A one-off phone call is quicker to make yourself. A task you do every day is worth handing over.
"Now your knowledge and your ideas it's your best benefit because everything else will Claude do for you. But one thing he can't do, it's like, I think, to dream and to generate really brilliant ideas." — DimaThe 24/7 Use Cases That Give Small Stores an Edge
(31:00)
This is where the conversation gets concrete. Dima runs an AI call centre built on 11Labs, now on its 44th iteration, with Claude analysing each call and suggesting improvements. For his granite pavers business, where staff sometimes step away to help with a forklift, it means no missed call ever becomes a lost customer.
"If you will not answer immediately, the client will go to someone else who will answer immediately." — DimaThe point isn't novelty, it's the round-the-clock cover that small companies usually can't offer. A customer with toothache at 2am who can't reach a dental practice will phone the next one. The business that answers wins.
He also describes a meeting-prep skill he calls the "dossier", which spends hours researching a person from open sources and then advises on how to approach them. And for mid-sized businesses drowning in mismatched spreadsheets and systems, he makes the case that you don't need to rip anything out. You put AI on top, let it find the mess, and let it clean the data.
"It's how it works that each day you have some kind of ideas, new ideas, and you wanna make it live... It's like I call it like some kind of AI addiction." — DimaAI Is a Co-Pilot, Not a Pilot
(14:00)
For all the enthusiasm, both are clear that a human stays in charge. AI hallucinates, apologises, and moves on, but it doesn't carry the consequences. Matt mentions a man fined £30,000 by the tax office after letting AI file his taxes incorrectly. The AI says sorry. The person pays the bill.
"This is why I often talk about AI needs to be a copilot. It can't be in charge." — MattDima ends on a characteristically direct note. The pace of change is so fast that even the labs won't forecast more than a couple of months ahead, so the only sensible move is to get in the water and start.
"You just need to sit and you just need to understand that if you will not spend at least 10 hours per day learning AI now, AI will— someone will control you who is now doing this." — DimaToday's Guest
Today's Guest
Today's guest: Dmytro "Dima" Negodiuk
Company: Negodiuk
Website: https://negodiuk.ai
LinkedIn: Connect with Dima on LinkedIn
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/hes-never-written-a-line-of-code-in-his-life

Two founders, both wildly successful, just gave completely opposite advice about whether ecom operators should build a personal brand — and Matt is running a 90-day experiment to find out which one is right for founders like us.
Episode Summary
Davie Fogarty (the $200M-a-year founder behind The Oodie) reckons founders shouldn't bother with personal brand until they're past $10 million — the opportunity cost of a single YouTube video runs to roughly $3,200 of founder time, and that money tests paid-ads creative far more effectively. Daniel Priestley and Alex Hormozi argue the opposite. AI can now replicate most of what a founder does, but it can't replicate lived experience — and the window to build that moat is closing fast.
Rather than pick a side from the cheap seats, Matt is running a head-to-head test for 90 days. Organic Instagram versus paid Meta ads, with a real commercial outcome on the line — signups to Slingshot, Aurion's new AI-for-ecom membership. The methodology is borrowed from Matt's 22-year-old son Zak (the Nutritionist), who went from zero to 100,000 followers in seven months using a four-step loop — Find, Decode, Replicate, Iterate. The niche is deliberately tight (AI workflows for ecom operators under £5M), the lab is Matt's personal Instagram, and the numbers will be published either way.
Chapter Timestamps
0:00 — Cold open — Davie vs Daniel
5:18 — Welcome
6:03 — Act 1 — The £10M Question
20:44 — Act 2 — Zak's methodology
29:39 — Act 3 — What Matt learned from 15 videos
41:43 — Act 4 — The playbook
56:23 — Act 5 — The 90-day bet
1:06:58 — Wrap + the Lab Kit

Key Takeaways
The £10M Question — Two Smart Founders, Two Opposite Answers (6:03)
Davie Fogarty's argument is built on opportunity cost. By the time a founder has planned, scripted, filmed, edited, and replied to comments, a single YouTube video costs roughly $3,200 of founder time — money better spent testing paid-ads creative until the business is well past $10 million.
Daniel Priestley's counter-argument is built on the moat. AI can write the copy, design the ads, even handle support. The one thing it cannot do is be the founder. Lived experience is becoming the only defensible asset a Digital David has — and Hormozi's 35,000 pieces of content a year shows what going all-in on that thesis looks like.
"Relatable beats impressive. Founders, when we're honest, have a real edge here — because we've been through the mess." — Matt EdmundsonZak's Four-Step Loop — Find, Decode, Replicate, Iterate (20:44)
Matt's son Zak grew from zero to 100,000 followers across Instagram and Facebook in seven months, built a recipe-book business off the back of it, and is about to launch his first app. The methodology is brutally simple — find videos that work in the niche, decode why they work, replicate with a personal point of view, and iterate based on real engagement data.
The lesson hiding inside that loop is the tea towel test. Same script, same person, same camera — but a tea towel on the shoulder lifted engagement. A few degrees of camera tilt lifted it again. Most founders make content based on what they think looks good. The audience always tells a different story, but only if someone is systematically testing.
What Transfers From Creator Advice And What Doesn't (29:39)
After running 15 top videos in the audience-growth space through MAGPIE, Matt found a clean split between gold and creator-economy fluff.
Gold:
Kallaway's "pick one platform for six months" rule — commit fully before even thinking about expanding
Chantal Leonhardt's audience-naming trick — naming the audience directly in the title (e.g. "for your small business") pre-qualifies the click and lifted her performance 15× over baseline

Fluff to ignore:
Vanity-metric opens ("This month I did 32M views") — these actively repel founder audiences
Daily-grind cadence advice — a recipe for burnout when social is the seventh priority on a founder's list, not the first

The 90-Day Bet — Real Numbers, Either Way (56:23)
Instagram-attributed Slingshot signups versus paid-ads benchmark, measured over 90 days, published openly. Phase 2 is taking the proven playbook into Aurion's other brands — Vegetology and Seven Yays — once the founder version has been pressure-tested.
Resources
The Founder's 90-Day Instagram Lab Kit (free) — the Decision Sheet, the Tea Towel Test Worksheet, and the Founder Content Scorecard, all in one pack. Grab it at ecommercepodcast.net/resources
Slingshot — Aurion's AI-for-ecom membership. The full 90-day playbook, plus SAM, MAGPIE, Prism, and Scout — all the AI tooling Matt is running this experiment on. Details at ecommercepodcast.net/slingshot
eCommerce Cohort — free, application-only community where ecom founders solve real problems together. Monthly 90-minute virtual sessions, regional groups (UK, AUS-NZ, US). Apply at ecommercecohort.com

About The eCommerce Podcast
The eCommerce Podcast is a show dedicated to helping you deliver eCommerce WOW with real talk about building online stores. Every Thursday. Join Matt Edmundson and guests, experts and founders who've been in the trenches, built the stores, and learned the hard way — so you don't have to.
Host: Matt Edmundson
Connect with Matt on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattedmundson/
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattedmundson/
Episode link: https://www.ecommerce-podcast.com/90-days-cracking-instagram-for-ecommerce-with-matt-edmundson

Organic Search for Ecommerce in 2026
What happens to an ecommerce business when paid ads stop working? Matt Edmundson walks through the six organic traffic fronts every founder should be building right now, before paid stops carrying the business on its own.
Summary
Paid ads are getting more expensive, less effective, and harder to justify. Facebook CPMs are up 60–90% over the last few years, paid search clicks have effectively doubled across every vertical, and organic clicks have fallen between 11 and 23 percentage points depending on the industry. Matt opens with the story of switching the ads off in his beauty business out of necessity, and watching sales hold because of an organic foundation that had been quietly compounding underneath. He then walks through the six organic fronts he thinks every Digital David needs to be working on in 2026, with one concrete action per front that can be done this week. Twice in the episode he stops to make it very clear he is not telling anyone to turn paid off — the point is to build organic now while paid is still doing some of the work.
00:00 — Turning the ads off and the foundation that quietly held
03:04 — A confession about sponsorship and the SAM reveal
05:06 — Why paid media is breaking for ecommerce right now
15:48 — Why this isn’t an instruction to switch ads off
23:47 — The six fronts of organic traffic in 2026
27:06 — Front 1, AI discovery
29:48 — How Mrs Smith found the beauty store on day one
38:33 — Front 2, site SEO
42:43 — Front 3, blog and content
46:12 — Front 4, YouTube
51:50 — Front 5, social SEO
55:35 — Front 6, digital PR
1:05:00 — What SAM is and how it shortens the runway
1:11:10 — Why a free customer changes the LTV to CAC maths
1:13:24 — A teaser for the next episode and a platform rebuild

Why Paid Media Is Breaking and What to Do About It
[05:06]
Matt walks through the shape of the problem most founders are quietly carrying. Customer acquisition costs climbing, return on ad spend falling, and a treadmill that moves you from Google to Facebook back to Google to TikTok to whatever the marketing industry invents next. Around 8 out of 10 of the founders he speaks to right now have meaningful issues with paid media, and the businesses most exposed are the ones depending on first-time customer acquisition with low repeat rates.
“The marketing industry will keep inventing new places for you and me to spend our advertising budgets.” — Matt EdmundsonHe stops twice to make this clear, once at 15:48 and again at 16:42 — he is not telling anyone to turn paid off. If first-time customer acquisition is the lifeblood of the business and ads stop today, the founder will feel it by the end of the day if not the end of the hour. The point is that paid is still working at some level, and that makes now the right window to build the organic foundation underneath it.
The Six Fronts of Organic Traffic in 2026
[23:47]
Matt argues that thinking of organic as just SEO is a 2018 mindset. In 2026 it sits across six channels, and most founders are only dabbling in one or two of them. Before he runs through them, he flags a warning — the same agency-promises-the-world problem that plagued SEO in 2018 is now happening with AI search, and most of the agencies charging premium fees for AI discovery don’t really know what they’re doing yet either.
AI discovery — getting recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. 78% of consumers have used large language models for product research in the last year and 64% plan to use AI chatbots for shopping decisions this year. Three concrete actions, add an llms.txt file to the root of the site, complete full product schema (including GTINs, return policy, aggregate rating), and keep content fresh — ChatGPT pulls about three-quarters of its most cited pages from content updated in the last 30 days.
Site SEO — the technical foundation that made it possible to turn the beauty business’s ads off without dying. Pick the top 10 product pages and audit each one for four things: a 50–60 character title tag using keyword plus differentiator plus brand, a meta description written for humans, og:type set to product rather than the default website, and image alt text that describes the image rather than just naming the file.
Blog and content — the trust layer AI now uses to decide what a brand actually knows. Brands that blog consistently see roughly 13 times more positive return on investment than sporadic publishers. The action is simple — ask the customer service team for the top three questions they get every week, and write one proper 1,200-word answer per month. That’s 12 articles a quarter, 50 a year, each one a piece of content AI can cite.
YouTube — the second largest search engine on the planet, with 35 billion hours of shopping-related content watched last year (a 250% year-on-year increase). 61% of 14–25 year olds say YouTube introduced them to brands they hadn’t heard of. One product demonstration video a month, with a proper title, three-paragraph description, chapters in the description, and product cards on the video.
Social SEO — Gen Z search inside Instagram (67%) and TikTok (62%) before they touch Google (61%). Captions, hashtags, bios, and on-screen Reels text are all searchable assets now. Treat captions like meta descriptions and bios like homepages.
Digital PR — press mentions, podcast appearances, founder authority, Reddit presence. Brand search volume correlates with AI recommendations roughly three times more strongly than backlinks do.

“The question isn’t how do I rank anymore. It’s how many people are searching for your brand name.” — Matt EdmundsonHow Mrs Smith Found the Beauty Store on Day One
[29:48]
Inside the AI discovery section Matt tells a story from 2006, when he launched his beauty business. They set the site live, planned to come back the next day to keep testing, and overnight Google indexed them and put them in front of a real customer called Mrs Smith — who placed the first order before the team had even told anyone the shop was open.
“I appreciate that doesn’t really happen anymore.” — Matt EdmundsonThe point of telling it now is that AI feels like that early-Google moment all over again. There’s no rulebook everyone is following, the ones who get in early are the ones who get discovered, and a handful of his own businesses are already getting leads who say “ChatGPT told me about you.”
SAM, the Slingshot AI Mentor
[03:04] [1:05:00]
For the first time on EP, Matt openly opens the episode with a sponsor — his own company. SAM stands for Slingshot AI Mentor, the e-commerce layer Aurion has been running on Claude internally and is now opening up to the public. It’s Claude plus a focused e-commerce knowledge layer plus the context of the founder’s own business. Inside SAM lives Scout, the skill that runs the same six-front audit covered in this episode automatically across a site and hands back a playbook of specific changes. SAM membership is currently $2,000 (about £1,600) on a waitlist with personal onboarding from Matt. Anyone who joins the waitlist by Thursday 22 May 2026 gets a 25% discount code plus extra credit for Scout. Available at ecommercepodcast.net/slingshot.
Why a Free Customer Changes the LTV to CAC Maths
[1:11:10]
The point of building organic isn’t to abandon paid. It’s to change the underlying maths of the business. A customer who finds the brand organically has, in effect, a CAC of zero. Organic isn’t actually free — it costs time and staff — but it costs differently, and it compounds.
“Organic isn’t actually free. It just costs differently.” — Matt EdmundsonPaid media CAC across ecommerce is currently running about 2.5 times higher than blended CAC. Drop ten organic customers into the LTV to CAC ratio, then a hundred over a year, and the shape of the business changes — not because more customers are being acquired, but because the average cost of acquiring them falls.
Free Resource Mentioned in This Episode
Matt has put everything in this episode into a free printable PDF — the Organic Audit Kit. It includes the full checklist for each of the six fronts, 18 AI prompts (one to audit, one to fix, one to verify per area) that paste straight into Claude or ChatGPT, a scoring radar to see strengths and weaknesses at a glance, a 20-minute quick win for each front, and a glossary for the technical terms. Grab it at ecommercepodcast.net under Resources.
About Today's Episode
Host: Matt Edmundson
Company: Aurion
Website: aurioncompany.com
LinkedIn: Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
Episode link: