By the end of the email, you’ll have a Shopify app you can install on your store.
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Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re having a relaxing weekend and you’re excited for today’s newsletter. If you’re a creator, a builder, someone who likes to roll your sleeves up and create your own solutions, today’s newsletter is perfect for you. But, before we get into it…
Sharma Brands has been acquired by Lunar Solar Group!
The official announcement can be read on this blog post, but in summary, our work is going to become supercharged by Lunar’s capabilities. Lunar raised a series A last year, invests 7-figure R&D budgets into building technology, and is a juggernaut of an agency in our space. Over the last 6 years, building Sharma Brands, I’ve interacted with Pierson and Lunar on multiple occasions, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to combine forces and bring our specialty into their ecosystem. If you want to learn more about how we can supercharge your brand, fill out this form and let’s chat!
Vendor of the Week
Instant — the AI email platform that delivered a 14x revenue lift in 45 days.
Fayt the Label is proof that it’s never too late to resurrect your retention strategy. Just a month ago, this fashion brand was blasting its entire email list every day or two with campaigns while its automated flows barely ran at all. They had only two flows active (cart and checkout abandonment), each with a single email touchpoint. No surprise, but deliverability was dropping, conversions were flat, and most shoppers never heard from them again.
That’s until Instant stepped in and flipped the script. Instant helped Fayt the Label launch AI-driven email flows with 3 to 5 touchpoints each, personalized subject lines, and smarter send logic. Fayt the Label’s total email volume skyrocketed by 46x (targeting the right shoppers at the right times), and the conversions followed. In just 45 days:
Their flow-driven revenue jumped 14x
The abandoned checkout flow more than 3x’d
The once-neglected cart abandonment emails showed a 33x increase in revenue
They even spun up new flows like a “Collection View” reminder (which didn’t exist before) which added 5-figure monthly revenue, overnight.
Because Instant’s flows started capturing revenue on autopilot, Fayt the Label was able to ease off the constant campaign blasts. Now they send maybe one or two campaign emails a week (focused on branding and education), while letting automated flows handle the heavy lifting of sales and re-engagement. The result: much stronger and more sustainable email revenue growth.
It’s not too late to update your own retention infrastructure, but you have to act fast with BFCM only weeks away. Instant can get you LIVE the same day with 11+ AI-powered flows that adapt to each shopper in real time.
How to Vibe-Code Your Own Shopify App in 60 Minutes
A few weeks ago, I did a podcast with my friend Billy Howell, who calls himself a “vibe coder" and after how much positive feedback it got, I thought it was worth writing a newsletter about. If you’ve been on social media at all this year, I’m sure you've seen the massive amount of automation happening with AI tools. You have ChatGPT and Claude for text generation, Sora and VEO3 for videos, Dall-E and Midjourney for images, N8N for complex Zapier-style workflows, AI tools for customer service, voice AI products for sales and everything else that’s happening with AI right now. Everyday, there’s at least a handful of new AI products on Product Hunt, alone!
But I think one of the craziest things I’ve seen this year is the trend of AI tools being able to spin up fully-functional software products or web pages based on text prompts alone. This happens via tools like Cursor, Replit, Bolt, Lovable, and GPT-5’s code generation products which are quite literally changing the way that both technical and non-technical teams build and deploy new things. It’s not just people like me, an Indian who can’t code, even the most legit developers are leveraging AI to help them write, test and deploy faster.
In my conversation with Billy, he even talks about how paying for a $50/month app is now something that can be replaced with your own vibe-coded Shopify app. He said that if you learn the skill of vibe coding, you can not only replace some of these small apps, but also arm yourself to do whatever you want, whenever you want, at your own speed.
Now, I’m not saying don’t go and use a proper developer to continue building your website… I’m saying you should learn how to vibe code, and see what that inspires to enhance your brand. It may not be a Shopify app, it may be an app that helps your creative and media team track what is being tested and how that creative performed. Alright, let’s get into it.
WTF is Vibe Coding?
First of all, let me start with the term itself. I feel like "vibe coding" kind of started as a joke. The way I read it is people were making fun of non-technical folks who were just telling AI to build stuff without proper planning or engineering skills. But here's the thing, the vibe coding tools actually work and now people are vibe coding entire SaaS businesses in a few days and making $10K to 100K/month in MRR.
You describe what you want in plain English, and then within minutes, you have a fully-functioning app. There is no formal training required and you don’t need a CS degree from Stanford to figure this out. You just have to sign up for tools like Cursor, Replit, or Lovable, explain your problem, and AI will turn it into working software (most of the time). Billy himself got a C+ in his college coding class but now he runs an agency building custom apps for businesses just with vibe coding. That should tell you everything you need to know about the barrier to entry to get this done.
The Opportunity for E-Commerce Brands
But Nik, this newsletter is about DTC and eCommerce! How does this apply to me? When it comes to vibe coding, I think there’s a few interesting use cases right now. Billy and I talked about this in our episode and 2 areas we both see value are:
Data Unification (i.e.,combining data from all of the apps you use into one place). For example, your marketing data might be in one place, your inventory is in another ERP, your Shopify store is separate, and your 3PL uses another platform. None of these platforms talk to each other, and they probably won't (on their own) for years. But with vibe coding, you can build a custom dashboard that pulls all this data into one place using APIs. You can even throw AI search on top of it to get insights like "based on our high inventory of product X and our current ad spend, what should we spend on Black Friday and what should be our promo?” and it will give you suggestions.
Cutting SaaS costs. I think a lot of smart operators realize that they're paying $50 to $100 PER month for simple Shopify apps and widgets that only do one thing. Whether it’s a waitlist app or an upsell widget or a bundle builder. Now, you can build These are all things you can now build yourself with vibe coding and own forever.
During our podcast, Billy shared an example where a guy needed to track shipping containers and automatically update how many pre-orders could be done on their Shopify store for a specific product based on their inventory and availability. That integration doesn't exist. It probably won't exist for a while (and even if it gets created, why pay for it?), but he was able to build it himself in a weekend just by prompting AI.
The Tech Stack You Need
I asked Billy what tools you actually need to do this well and here was his answer:
ChatGPT and Replit or Cursor. That's it.
This is Billy’s workflow which I think anyone can copy.
He said to plan in ChatGPT: Billy uses a voice-to-text app called Super Whisper to talk through his idea conversationally, then he ports this into ChatGPT to expand further. He said the key here is that explaining more actually helps. No matter what you are trying to build, AI needs a bunch of context in order for it to do meaningful work. Billy even tells ChatGPT to "ask me three clarifying questions" every time he has an idea for a product to make sure he's thought it through and then lets the AI help co-design the specs of what to build.
Building in Replit or Cursor: Replit is browser-based and all in the cloud. Cursor is local on your computer. For quick prototypes and simple apps, Replit is perfect. For more complex stuff with lots of moving parts, Cursor gives you more control. It’s really up to you on which tool to use. They both work very well and can build similar things.
Optional is Bolt or Lovable: These tools are more for websites and landing pages and they do an incredible job with visualizing the frontend but the backend tech is not as good as Cursor or Replit according to Billy. He uses Lovable to preview ideas but still uses the other tools to generate more complex code.
The Prompting Strategy
The one thing Billy sees as a mistake when vibe coding is that most people don’t follow a strong enough process and they don’t give the tools enough context. They give AI a one sentence prompt like “rebuild me TripleWhale” and expect a perfect app in 10 minutes. That obviously does not work. Then when whatever the AI tool generates doesn't match their vision, they try to fix hundreds of lines of code they don't understand by themselves.
Billy's approach is very different. He told me you always need to start with a PRD (which stands for a Product Requirements Document).
In a PRD, you want to list out all of the features, define all of the screens/pages needed, specify any potential integrations you'll need, and get as specific as possible about the end goals and functionality of what you are trying to build. But here’s the best part about PRDs, you can have AI create them for you.
Instead of doing this yourself, you should go to ChatGPT and explain what you want to build with as much detail as you can. Then ask it to refine what you shared into a PRD for Cursor and add anything else that you might have missed. ChatGPT (or Claude) will spit out an incredible document with step by step instructions for Cursor to run.
Moving to Cursor
Once you have the PRD, you can drop this into a Cursor chat prompt and let it start building. This usually takes a few minutes for it to generate several hundred lines of code. Once you have an output, you can preview the app to see how it’s functioning. If something isn’t working, Billy recommends diagnosing first and solving second.
So don’t immediately try to follow onto your prompt telling it to fix something. Instead, ask Cursor to "Diagnose the problem and find the solution, then walk me through it. But don't write any code yet." Why? Because when the AI is just thinking about the problem, it uses 100% of its bandwidth to analyze and come up with solutions. When it's writing code simultaneously, it splits that bandwidth to maybe 40% thinking, 60% coding. You get better results when it focuses on one thing at a time.
Another super valuable tip Billy gave me was to “Roll back, don't stack.” What he means by that is if the AI writes code that breaks something, don't ask it to fix it by adding more code on top. Roll back to the last working version and try again. Billy said to never add good code on top of bad code. It will just break things down the line.
What About APIs?
Billy explained APIs in the simplest way I've heard. He said that you should think of them as different stores you visit in a city. Each API endpoint is a store with different data or capabilities and functions. One store might give you user data or another might transform data into an image, another store might specialize in generating video etc. The cool thing is that almost every tool you use has an API. Shopify, Klaviyo, your email provider, your analytics tools, they all have APIs that let you pull data programmatically. When you see those nodes in Zapier or Make.com workflows, those are just API calls you could replicate in your own app. APIs are how you make the apps you are building with Cursor or Replit valuable and functional. You need it to be connected to other 3rd party apps to make the information flow.
Where This Is All Going
Billy said we're heading toward a world where everyone has custom AI trained on their specific expertise and he thinks more companies will build their own custom-AI-coded tools. Right now we're using general-purpose LLMs to give us advice and text but imagine a media buyer bot trained on years of your campaigns, or an inventory management AI trained on your company’s entire history, or a conversion rate optimization bot trained on every test you've ever run.
Billy also shared a concept where you could do weekly video calls with an AI that asks smart questions to you about your business, slowly building up a knowledge base of your expertise. After a year, you'd have a bot that thinks like you do about your specific domain and then can be deployed to help solve problems that are unique to you.
The "Build Your First App" Challenge
Listen, I know this sounds a little intimidating but it really shouldn’t be. As I mentioned, Billy got a C+ in his coding class and now runs an agency. My other friend, Troy, spent an hour with Billy and built his first app the same day. At our AI summit we did too. Billy built an app on stage, in real time, and it was the most talked-about session of the day.
So if you’re reading this newsletter and you’re interested in trying out vibe coding, here's my challenge to you. You should spend next week building something. Start small with something like
A dashboard that pulls your Shopify and ads data together
A simple waitlist widget for your product pages
An internal tool that your ops team needs
A chatbot trained on your product catalog
Use ChatGPT to plan it and make the PRD for you. Use Replit to build it. Break things and then roll back to the last working version and try again. The seventh thing you build is going to be amazing but you have to build the first six things that fail to get there.
I think what excites me most is how fast you learn by doing this. Billy went from struggling to finish a single project over months to building 2-3 apps every weekend.
With vibe coding, you learn by doing because you're iterating, failing and fixing rapidly. Before ChatGPT, Billy would spend weeks building a simple app. Now, he builds functional apps in hours and each time you build something new, you understand the frameworks a little bit better or how the APIs work a little bit better even though you never formally studied them.
I’ve been doing this and it's kind of like learning Facebook Ads. Yes, you can watch videos and read about it, but you really just need to get in there and mess around. Eventually you figure out that changing this setting causes that reaction and or doing a prompt a certain way leads to better results. That’s how you’ll learn how to be a vibe coder.
Right now, we’re at a bit of an inflection point. It’s hard to imagine how good these tools will be in 2-4 years. Think of what you will be able to do with GPT-7, 8 or 9’s coding features. It’s coming sooner than you think.
In the future, I think more companies will have dedicated vibe coders on their teams to just tinker and build AI solutions. Even my own designer, I push him to vibe code tools that make his life easier as a designer. If you do build something, you should send it to me or Billy on Twitter. I want to see what you create!
Alright, that’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed this and got some value. I’m looking forward to seeing you back here next week.
P.S. Billy's agency is called Stupid Simple Apps. His Twitter is @BillyJayHowell. His YouTube also has great tutorials where you can follow along screen-by-screen. He has a lot more free content out there that might help.
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was a fun one for you. If you’re someone who likes to build, create, or solve problems, you will start to build apps for everything. Outside of eCommerce, I’ve already built a BPM calculator app and a contacts-logging app. I’ve even got my Mom to start vibe-coding apps that will make her life easier — tracking workouts, saving recipes, etc.
It’s Sunday night, so I hope you plan to get a full 9 hours of sleep tonight going into the new week. We’re right in the thick of Q4 madness, which means you should prioritize your health! Sleep, hydrate, phone a friend, etc.
