Subscribe here | Unsubscribe here | Aug 14, 2025 | FIV #89

✅ Today’s Checklist:

• Head-to-head no-code website cloning comparison

• How founders are using AI to win in the world of consumer brands

• The creative team you don’t have to hire

QUICK LINKS

🤖 AI site building. A head-to-head of Lovable vs Replit for cloning 5 popular platforms.

🌱 Personal growth. You don’t need a niche. You need this.

📱 AI app building. He asked 3 top LLMs to build the same app. These are the results.

🎥 AI video production. Grok Imagine just dropped. 10 wild examples of what it can do.

🏆 Achievement. Scarcity vs. abundance. Which scales better? An ultra-quick read.

How Brand-Owners Are Deploying AI Right Now to Win

The savviest consumer brand founders are already folding AI into their playbooks—and watching it drive revenue, cut costs, and unlock creative leverage this quarter.

The difference between the brands seeing lift and the ones still “thinking about AI” isn’t budget. It’s mindset. They’re testing, deploying, and iterating in weeks, not years.

Here’s what’s working right now and how you can adapt it without slowing down your business.

1. Personalization at Scale—Without Adding Headcount

AI-powered recommendation engines are reshaping the customer journey. Sephora’s chatbot delivers product suggestions that feel like they came from a personal stylist who’s known you for years. That level of precision used to require a robust CRM team and months of segmentation work. Now? You can set it up in an afternoon.

👉 Founder advantage: The sooner you plug in a personalization engine, the sooner you own the direct relationship. That means higher repeat purchase rates, better margins, and less reliance on paid acquisition.

🚀 Where to start: Shopify’s built-in product recommendation apps, Rebuy, or Dynamic Yield if you want enterprise-grade.

2. Immersive Shopping That Closes Without Discounts

The best founders know conversion is about confidence. That’s why AR + AI “try-before-you-buy” experiences are crushing it. Perfect Corp’s YouCam Makeup lets beauty shoppers see a new shade on their face instantly. Apparel, eyewear, and even home décor brands are doing the same.

When a customer can see it on themselves, objections disappear—without you touching margin.

👉 Founder advantage: If you sell high-consideration SKUs, AI-driven try-ons shorten the path to “yes” and reduce returns (protecting your P&L).

🚀 Where to start: Run a lean test using Shopify AR.

3. Creative That Iterates While You Sleep

Ad fatigue is real and expensive. Omneky uses AI to generate, test, and launch creative across Meta, Google, and TikTok automatically. Pinterest is doing it internally and saw a 17% YoY revenue bump.

👉 Founder advantage: When your ad engine is self-optimizing, your marketing team can focus on strategy, brand storytelling, and partnerships—not resizing banners or guessing headlines.

🚀 Where to start: Omneky or Pencil for creative variations.

4. Predictive Analytics That Act Before the Customer Does

McDonald’s drive-thru menus adjust based on weather, time of day, and trending orders. Instacart prompts shoppers to reorder before they run out. This is proactive revenue capture.

👉 Founder advantage: Instead of reacting to data, your business can anticipate it. That means better inventory turns, fewer stockouts, and tighter cash flow.

🚀 Where to start: Look at RetentionX, Klaviyo’s predictive segments, or Alloy Automation.

5. Operational AI—Your Invisible Margin Booster

Yum Brands (Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC) rolled out “Byte by Yum!” to optimize kitchen workflows, mobile ordering, and staffing. LVMH uses its AI platform MaIA for everything from supply chain to pricing.

👉 Founder advantage: Internal AI won’t get headlines, but it’s where most of the profit hides. Shave minutes off processes, reduce waste, and you widen the spread between revenue and cost without touching volume.

🚀 Where to start: Leverage ChatGPT-powered internal copilots for forecasting, scheduling, and repetitive decision-making.

6. AI as Your Creative Partner, Not Your Replacement

Adobe’s new AI agents can storyboard, design, and edit in minutes. At Cannes Lions, CMOs admitted they’re investing $10M+ annually into AI for personalization, efficiency, and insight, but the winners are pairing AI’s speed with human taste and strategy.

👉 Founder advantage: You gain unprecedented leverage. Let AI draft, mock up, or iterate so your team can push the big, brand-defining ideas forward.

🚀 Where to start: Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, Runway, or Google Veo 3 for video generation; and Claude, Poe, or ChatGPT for early copy drafts.

7. The Quiet Moat: Clean, Connected Data

Here’s the hard truth: AI is only as good as the data you feed it. That means if you invest now in clean, unified, privacy-respecting data, you’re building a moat most competitors don’t even see yet.

👉 Founder advantage: Better targeting, smarter automation, and fewer wasted cycles when you deploy AI across marketing, ops, and product.

🚀 Where to start: Audit your stack. Connect every touchpoint—POS, e-comm, CRM, and support—so AI sees the full picture.

Final thought:

As a founder, AI isn’t about chasing every shiny tool. It’s about compounding advantages. The companies winning right now aren’t the ones doing everything. They’re the ones picking one or two high-impact plays, deploying fast, and expanding what works.

The earlier you put AI to work in your business, the faster you turn it from a curiosity into a competitive edge—and the harder it becomes for anyone else to catch you.

Sean’s Pick of The Week

The Creative Team You Don’t Have to Hire

I’m incredibly bullish on where AI video production is headed, and HeyGen’s new Video Agent feels like one of those rare inflection points worth watching closely.

For founders, this is a potential creative operating system that can compress weeks of production into minutes without sacrificing taste.

The fact that you can upload a doc, a clip, or even just a sentence and have it analyzed, scripted, cast, shot, and edited means you can go from idea to market faster than ever before.

I’ll be tracking this evolution closely, because in a world where attention moves fast, tools like this could be the difference between leading the conversation and missing it entirely.

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