This founder built the AI OS for DTC companies

^{A week in AI is like a year in other industries. I hope these issues become your weekly source of AI information, inspiration, and ideas. If we haven’t met before, I’m Amanda Smith. I write about AI and the fascinating folks who are building in this brave new world.}

Good morning. For the first time in history, small AI-native companies can compete with the big guys. In fact, going lean is how many of these companies are surviving the tariffs, rising costs and economic pressure. 

If you run a small business with an online store, this week’s issue is for you. Solving operational efficiencies inspired this founder to create his own AI operating system SaaS for ecommerce. 

Wild times.

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Matthew Hassett has been shipping products as an ecommerce founder for six years, but the last has been the hardest. Tariffs, shipping delays and inflation have made it hard to operate his brand, Loftie. After seeing what was happening with AI and knowing key staff were moving on from the brand that he couldn’t afford to replace, Hassett turned to Claude. 

When the developer who'd maintained Loftie’s Shopify website for three years got a new job and gave them six weeks' notice, Hassett learned everything we could from him and put it all into a structured database. 

When the creative strategist left, Hassett figured out how to create Meta ads at volume, as he saw the biggest winners cranking out thousands of ads per month. 

“I'm running right now an analysis of all our ads ever – breaking them down by hooks, format, the people in them, whether there was something about the lighting or the way a hand entered the scene. It can pattern-match across hundreds or thousands of ads that no human could,” he explained. 

By automating this type of repetitive work, it’s actually a better retention strategy for your people, he believes. This frees up his people to do more human things like attend events, talk with influencers or creative direction. 

He hasn’t backfilled anyone’s position and has been able to pay staff more, while keeping them employed in the midst of a tough time to have a consumer company. 

Hassett has three employees left: An engineer, a marketer, and a designer. “There’s still a need for each of these. Operations still need a human in the loop, too.” 

What started as an internal experimentation to optimize operations, customer support and creative workflows for Loftie has also become a standalone business: Deliberate Studio. 

Loftie was the first customer. Now he’s opened it up to other DTC companies. 

“Running an ecommerce store, you have this pile of information, and never before have we been able to really manage it and make informed decisions from it. This kind of machine intelligence and detailed analysis is available to someone like me with a four-person start-up,” Hassett said. 

While Deliberate is designed for DTC companies, it also has features for Amazon and wholesale partnership sales.

"One of the most helpful things I've found is getting a much clearer picture of the margin discrepancy between DTC and Amazon sales. I've discovered a 17-percentage-point difference in gross margin, so I drastically cut our Amazon ads spending and realized it did almost nothing for sales – most of our revenue was being driven by Meta. That kind of multi-platform analysis is a lot easier when you can put it all in one place.” 

“On Deliberate, I've got almost 50 different platforms connected by API – customer support alongside our warehouse alongside Meta ads. The data is in one place, and I can ask questions to Deliberate, and it looks at all of it. I'm not the one retaining the context and jumping between websites making all the inferences myself.” 

Hassett said that many founders are focused on how they can show up in GEO, when they could be exploring how to run their store more efficiently. “Deliberate enables you to keep the lights on and retain the people you have, while standing in for several hires you might not have the money to make right now.” 

Deliberate can look at all customer support tickets and tell you what you should be building in your products that would help the most people. Hassett explained that Loftie’s on-time delivery “looked incredible” but Deliberate drilled down to find a tiny pocket of orders going to part of Spain with very slow shipping. 

“I would not have been able to figure that out without AI diving deep into thousands of shipment records. Even the warehouse handling the shipping wasn't aware of the exact problem.” 

Hassett plans to grow Deliberate organically, slowly bringing on merchants with referral as the main source. “A lot of bigger SaaS companies are in a tough spot long-term, but there's a huge opportunity for smaller, nimbler startups like us to serve a niche for not egregious amounts of money.”

If one of these stories stuck with you, I’d love to hear which one.

Speak soon,
Amanda

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