Show Notes
Your Website Is About to Become a Line Item
Matt Hassett spent seven years making byloftie.com beautiful.
Now he is fairly sure that beauty is depreciating.
Not because the design is bad. Because the customer is changing shape. Shopify says AI-driven traffic to its stores grew roughly 8x year over year in Q1 2026, with orders from AI search up nearly 13x. Loftie's post-purchase survey went from 1.5 percent AI attribution to 3 percent in six months. That is still small. That is also what small looks like right before it isn't.
Here is the part that should scare every DTC founder. Ask an AI for a sleep product and you never land on a homepage. You get a list. Six items. Your brand is one word next to a category tag. Every hour of art direction and every bit of story that justified your premium folds into a row in a table.
The row is the problem. Matt puts a number on it: Amazon costs Loftie roughly fifteen points of contribution margin versus direct. If agentic commerce quietly rebuilds Amazon inside every chatbot, that is not a distribution change. That is a repricing of your entire business.
So he did something more interesting than panic. He pointed the same technology at his own books.
Loftie had a rule buried in its email platform, written years ago by someone being responsible about GDPR, blocking welcome emails to the EU and UK. Sensible then. Loftie did not sell there. Then tariffs reshaped the business and international became roughly half of sales. Nobody updated the rule. Half of new customers were signing up for a welcome sequence they would never receive. No dashboard flagged it. It just sat there costing money until someone thought to look.
Another brand poured spend into one narrow audience while Meta now rewards broad targeting. Another ran two creative families where one beat the other 2x, and funded the loser for months. Matt's advice was blunt: stop making those ads, you are losing money.
None of it is clever. That is the point. These are not insights, they are inventory. Money already in the building that nobody had time to walk down and find.
Which is how Deliberate got built backwards. Matt was not trying to start a software company. He was trying to keep five people employed through a tariff year without hiring a sixth he could not confidently pay. So he handed the rote work to agents, gave each one a name, a lane, and a personality, and let them argue. Zelda runs paid media. Maggie runs finance and pushes back when Zelda wants to spend. Louisa listens to customers. Seven more cover ops, Amazon, wholesale, people, and the site. Ten in all, $7,500 a month.
The naming is not only a gimmick. Agent teams behave like human ones: they get better when perspectives differ. One optimist, one pessimist, one who always asks about the money. Make them identical and you have built an expensive echo.
Underneath it is the thesis Ryan keeps circling: your taste is not data. You will build the beautiful ad and it will die, and a stick figure with a red X will convert like a slot machine. The businesses winning are not the ones with the best instincts. They are the ones willing to be corrected in public, by a machine, weekly.
Both things. At the same time. That tension is the episode.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-hassett/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/estesryan/
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