Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you had a great weekend; got some sunshine, roasted in vitamin D, spent time with people you love and the rest. If you’re the type of person who’s mind never stops running or who loves to tinker on things, today’s newsletter is for YOU.

I’ve recently been spending more time with Jet at my side, a new addition to my team and rarely misses anything. In fact, he’s great at proactively making sure I don’t miss anything now, across all projects. How? Setting up a second brain, and it’s incredibly beneficial to do as a brand, too.

Tiago Forte (teacher behind the “Second Brain” movement on the internet) has been an internet friend (where you follow each other and sporadically DM) of mine for over a decade and the second brain concept has lived rent-free in my head since the day he started writing about it. The idea was genius. Build a personal knowledge system where every article you read, every conversation you have, every note you take, every idea that crosses your mind ends up in one place, organized, searchable, and ready to be used when you need it.

The problem was always the execution. It relied on me, the human, to actually consume everything in a way I could catalog cleanly. Speech-to-text wasn't good enough yet, so capturing thoughts on the fly was slower than just having the thought and moving on. And then, even when you did get something into the system, going back to reference it later meant remembering it existed and having a search that actually surfaced the right thing. The search was rarely good enough.

So the concept was right. The tooling just wasn't there. That has changed.

AI finally makes a second brain something that runs autonomously instead of something you have to manually curate. A brand can do the exact same thing. Plug everything in. Let it run. Use it to make every decision you make better, faster, and with more context than your competitors will ever have.

But, before we get into that...

Instant — AI email flows for the shoppers your site is already forgetting.

Most brands think retention is handled because Klaviyo is installed. Welcome series fires. Abandoned cart runs. Box checked.

Unfortunately, it's not handled. Roughly half the high-intent traffic your paid spend just bought never even gets recognized, never enters a flow, and never sees a follow-up. That's the leak. And the brands actually winning retention figured out years ago that good retention is part of good acquisition. You earn the second purchase the same day you earn the first one.

Instant is the AI retention stack that closes that gap. It identifies up to 10x more shoppers than the default setup (most tools recognize about 5%, Instant gets to 45-50%), reads what each person actually did on your site, and runs the follow-up flow that specific shopper should get.

I just had Liam Millward, the founder, on Limited Supply this week and the part that stuck with me is this. For years "personalization" was a word, not a thing. First-name tokens and a "you might also like" block. That's it. What changed is that AI can now read a shopper's behavior in real time, make a judgment, and execute the right message back automatically. We are finally at the Jarvis from Iron Man point. The system isn't reporting to you. It's running.

Brands like ThirdLove, Liquid I.V., and Neuro Gum are using Instant to drive 3x more email revenue. One of my clients pulled $37K from their first four flows. Right now Instant is 50% off the first 60 days. Zero contract, live the same day.

Go check out Instant!

The simplest way to describe it: one connected system where all your business data, conversations, and knowledge live together, and where you can ask it questions or have it run work on your behalf.

The pieces are three layers.

Layer one is your inputs. Anything with an API or a login screen. Your ad platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Applovin, Tatari), your store (Shopify), your retention stack (Klaviyo, Postscript), your customer insight tools (Outer Signal), your creative analytics (Motion), your call recordings (Fireflies), your support tickets, your 3PL, your QuickBooks, your bank, your reviews, your inventory system. If it has data your business runs on, it should be plugged in. MCP connections (a fancy way of saying "a clean way for AI agents to talk to a tool") make this easier than it was even six months ago. Almost everything can plug in. Worth calling out, Triple Whale was one of the first companies in DTC to take this seriously and that's part of why I liked them as a partner at our AI Summit last year.

Layer two is your memory. This is where most people stop thinking about it, and it's actually the most important part. The memory is built out of markdown files. I'll explain those in a second because I think a lot of people skip over this and it's the unlock.

Layer three is your agents. These are the actual workers. The creative strategist agent. The finance agent. The legal agent. The VP of ops coordinator agent. Each one knows what's in your inputs, reads from your memory, and does specific work for specific people on your team.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Inputs, memory, agents.

A markdown file is just a text file with light formatting. That's it. You can write one in any text editor in 30 seconds. It's the same format I'm writing this newsletter in right now. But here's why they matter… a markdown file is how you teach an agent something once and have it know it forever.

I have a markdown file that explains how I think about ad creative. What I look for in a good ad, what angles I think are working in 2026, what hooks land, what closes don't. When I give an agent a creative brief to write, it reads that file first, then writes the brief the way I'd write it.

I have a markdown file for landing page design. What converts, what doesn't, the order I want sections in, the tone I want copy in, the friction I'm willing to accept versus the friction I'm not. Every landing page review the agent does, it does through that lens.

I have a markdown file for my writing style. How I write. Why I write that way. What words I won't use, what punctuation I avoid, what energy I want every piece to have. The agent uses it to draft, to edit, to fact-check itself.

You can write one for anything. How you think about hiring. How you review legal contracts. How you decide which influencer to work with. How you build a launch plan. Every one of these is a markdown file your team can drop into an agent and instantly have a system that thinks the way you think.

This is what most operators are missing. They think the value is the AI. The value isn't the AI. The value is the markdown files you build that tell the AI how your specific business operates.

Without the files, you have a smart intern with no context. With the files, you have a senior operator who's been at your company for five years.

Once your inputs are plugged in and your memory is built, you can start running agents on top.

A creative strategist agent. It's plugged into Motion, your Meta ads data, your Outer Signal customer insights, your Klaviyo flow analytics, your product reviews. It reads Reddit and X every week to see how people are talking about your product, your ingredients, your category, the problem you solve. Every Monday it drops a brief into your Slack with the angles that hit last week, the angles that flopped, and three new advertorial ideas based on what's working. Because it has your style guide as a markdown file, it can write the advertorials in your voice. Because it's plugged into your Shopify or WordPress API, it can publish them itself. I've walked people through setting up the advertorial site on Limited Supply step by step. The whole thing can run weekly with a single sentence as the prompt.

A finance agent. Cash flow projections, modeling, runway. It sees a spike in Meta efficiency and adjusts your forecast for the next two to three weeks accordingly. It flags when a SKU's margin is drifting. It tells you on Tuesday morning what your bank balance is going to be on Friday.

A creator sourcing agent. You teach it how you think about sourcing, who you target, why the outreach reads the way it does. It runs the program. Sources, drafts the outbound, manages replies, hands you the warm ones.

A VP of ops coordinator. Say you're the VP of ops at a beverage company. You're tracking purchase orders across multiple flavors, multiple SKUs, multiple retailers that all get differently merchandised label versions. Your agent watches every one of those. It's your second set of eyes. If a label revision didn't make it onto the PO that goes to a retailer with custom packaging, you hear about it before the truck rolls.

A legal agent. This one is huge. Your $500/hour attorney does not need to be the first set of eyes on a new vendor contract. They need to be the last. Build a markdown file that says what you allow in contracts, what you don't, what's a red flag, what's standard, where you'll push back. Your team runs the contract through the agent. It comes back 95% of the way done. Then your attorney does the final pass. You save thousands of dollars a month and your attorney works on the parts that actually need their brain.

That's just five examples. You could have ten more. Every function in your business has one of these.

OpenClaw works. I've set it up. People I know run it well. But it breaks more than it should. It's an Android-versus-iPhone situation. You can absolutely make Android work. You can also wake up to it auto-installing something at 3am and bricking your morning.

Hermes Agent is the iPhone version. Fewer things break. Things just work. The setup is cleaner, the skills system (which is essentially the markdown-files-as-memory concept I just walked through, built directly into the product) is more polished, and the multi-agent piece is more reliable.

OpenClaw is owned by OpenAI now, and to their credit they're going to keep building. But they haven't smoothed out the friction yet, and for an operator setting this up for the first time, that friction is the difference between "this thing changed our business" and "I gave up after a weekend."

I've set Hermes Agent up for friends. They go home with it. They start using it. Every single one of them comes back to me a week later with stories about something it did that they didn't know was possible.

The companies that win from here are the ones that figure out how to do more with less. Not in a cost-cutting, layoff-our-way-to-profitability way. In a "we operate with the speed and surface area of a company three times our size without adding the headcount" way.

Setting up a second brain is at the top of that list. It's not a 2027 problem. It's a right-now problem. The brands that get this wired up over the next six months are going to be making decisions on Tuesday that their competitors don't even have data on until the following Monday. Compounded over a year, that's the whole game.

It is 2am and you want to know the LTV of a cohort of subscribers that came in on a specific advertising angle. You ask. You get the answer. The data is live, the memory is current, the agent has been watching all of it and is ready when you are.

That's the brand of the future. And the gap between the brands that have this and the brands that don't is going to be visible from space.

Here's what I want you to actually do this week. Don't wait for me to publish the step-by-step walk-through. Don't wait for the perfect setup. Start writing markdown files.

You already have most of what you need. Every tool you're paying for has an API or an MCP connector. Klaviyo, Shopify, Triple Whale, Motion, Outer Signal, Fireflies, Postscript, your bank. Most of them are connector-ready right now. Take one part of your business, the one you're most confident in, and write a markdown file explaining how you think about it. How you review ad creative. How you grade a landing page. How you write campaign copy. How you triage a customer complaint. Whatever it is.

Then take that file and drop it into an agent connected to the data sources that touch that function. Watch what it does.

That one experiment will reframe how you think about the entire business. If you want to see what this looks like in practice, I did a step-by-step walk-through on OpenClaw a while back. Same logic, slightly different tool. I'll be doing the Hermes Agent walk-through in an upcoming newsletter (and probably a podcast). In the meantime, get started with what you have.

Make sure you take care of yourself this week. Get good sleep, stay hydrated, get a sweat in. If finding more efficiencies within AI is helpful, I’m happy to keep going deeper on this. It’s been a huge unlock for so many marketers and founders.

I'll see you here, next Sunday. Same time, same place.

If you've spent money on Google Ads, you might be owed some of it back.

This is not a sponsorship. I just think you should know about it.

There's an active arbitration process right now against Google due to multiple U.S. courts and regulators having determined that Google engaged in anticompetitive practices in its advertising business. If your brand has spent on Google Ads (and let's be honest, most of you have), you could be eligible to recover a portion of that spend.

Keller Postman LLP (with Sentinel Law PLLC as co-counsel), a leading class action and mass arbitration law firm, has assembled a large portfolio of these arbitration claims against Google. The law firm handles the entire process end-to-end, from claim preparation to resolution. 

Here's why I'm sharing this: most brands I work with have spent hundreds of thousands (if not millions) on Google Ads over the years. Even recovering a fraction of that is real money you can reinvest back into growth. The filing process through Keller Postman takes minutes, not months. And there's no upfront cost to you... they only get paid if the claim is successful.

If you've run Google Ads, check if you're eligible. nik.co/refund 

Attorney Advertising. This email is a commercial message about potential legal claims involving Google Ads. The sender is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice. If you submit information through links or forms in this email, it may be shared with an independent law firm, for a free evaluation. You do not become a client of any law firm unless you sign a written engagement agreement. Any estimated recovery amount shown estimates the maximum possible recovery based on the ad spend you submit. It is not a guarantee. A case can settle for a much lower percentage or result in no recovery. Past results for other clients do not predict outcomes in your matter. The sender is not affiliated with Google LLC or its subsidiaries. This email was sent by [Your name or your company’s name], [your address or your company’s address] To stop receiving these emails, please click the unsubscribe link in this message.

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