It's a familiar story
Stop me if this sounds familiar: it's a lean team, and the hero/CEO runs the day-to-day marketing. Meta Ads is run by an agency; Google Ads by a freelancer.
The CEO has other jobs too. Marketing becomes sporadic because it's no one's first job.
And so, despite the best of intentions, you have now arrived at your final destination. Welcome to ‘duct-taped marketing’.
The Handmade Soap Company
The Handmade Soap Company had three websites that resembled a Shopify template; limited email automations (consisting of one welcome email and one abandoned-cart email); campaign emails sent sporadically; and under-managed agencies/freelancers.
None of that is unusual in a founder-led brand.
It used to take capital to change the status quo. These days we can sprinkle a little AI magic.
The brief: revenue growth
I took marketing off the founder. He stopped being the marketing bottleneck and was able to put more time into running the company.
I fired the Meta agency. They were media buyers, not creative strategists — and creative is the whole game on Meta. I replaced them with an agency that leads on creative.
We rebuilt all three websites with a conversion focus, and continued to constantly fine-tune them.
I migrated Mailchimp to Klaviyo — which has deeper Shopify integration and automation capabilities. Campaign emails went out weekly at a minimum, and email automation ramped up substantially with longer and more personalised sequences, including post-purchase emails.
None of this would have been possible without AI. Claude created first-draft copy. Nanobanana generated images. AI created code, analysed performance, created docs, and more. The marketing machine was efficient because we reduced the coordination overhead — fewer briefs, specs, meetings and handoffs.
But it all still needed a human in the loop. The point of humans is not doing. It's knowing. Empathising with the customer, knowing what good looks like and adding judgement.
What happened
+40%revenue growth year on year
Shopify data: total sales over time. Indexed to withhold real revenue figures. The fourth-quarter gap understates what changed — I took over in September 2024, so the 2025 comparison is partly competing against my own work.
The CEO, the morning after Black Friday 2024.
Bring execution to senior leaders to drive revenue, rather than pushing strategy down.
— Alan
