Also on YouTube

Montana Knife Company was finally releasing its first folding knife, a $390 piece their fans had been begging for, and they wanted an announcement page worthy of the moment. Apple-style scroll animations. Exploding diagrams. Every element on screen doing something. The catch: you couldn't buy anything from it. The entire page existed to introduce the new product, build the hype, and capture emails before the drop. Then it had to survive launch day.

Paul Reda walks through the build that crashed Safari before it sold out in minutes: why video was the obvious answer and the wrong one, how a canvas-based flipbook moved 40MB without killing phones, where "French developer Claude" wrote every line of GSAP, and the one rule that made it all possible. Content leads design, or you don't get the dinner.

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LINKS

• Montana Knife Company: montanaknifecompany.com
• The Montana (the folding knife landing page): montanaknifecompany.com
• GSAP (animation library): gsap.com
• Prior MKC episodes with Brandon [Horejsi]: search the feed for Montana Knife Company

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Also available on YouTube

"It was a mind and body brokenness. I'll just say like depression."

By 39, Chris Lang was running 10 businesses and falling apart. He killed most of them and bet everything on Fresh Chile, his bootstrapped Shopify chili brand from Hatch, New Mexico. It cracked the top 1% of Shopify and 8 figures in revenue, but didn't turn a profit until Q1 of year six.

Inside: why he started publishing his real ROAS on LinkedIn when the numbers were ugly, the 80% Meta cut that finally flipped him profitable, and how a 250K-follower organic community out-engages Heinz, Tabasco, and Sriracha combined.

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Swym — Wishlists, back-in-stock alerts, and more
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LINKS

• Fresh Chile: https://freshchileco.com/
• Chris Lang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrislangsocial/
• Chris Lang on X: https://x.com/chrislangsocial

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"You would probably prefer to take money from Tony Soprano."

Jeremy Horowitz has spent a decade in the Shopify ecosystem, scaled brands at Gorgias, and now runs a PE fund that's reviewed nearly 500 deals. He acquired a WhatsApp marketing app called Coco AI and he's still hunting for his next Shopify brand in the $10-100M range. We get into what actually makes a business sellable (and what kills a deal instantly), how earnouts and seller notes really work, why DTC as we knew it is dead, and his scorching take on why Shopify Capital loans are worse than credit card debt at 40% effective interest.

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LINKS

• Jeremy Horowitz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyhorowitz1/
• Coco AI (WhatsApp Marketing for Shopify): https://my-coco.ai/

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"I shipped the bike and a couple of weeks later, the real credit card holder got a statement, said I didn't place that order, filed a chargeback, and then the money was gone."

Also on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6k4iyfvjuTA

John Murphy's first-ever Shopify sale was a total scam. Two weeks into launching, he wired a $5,000 e-bike to a guy putting on an old man's voice over the phone. That single chargeback kicked off an eight-year obsession with not getting burned again. He grew eBike Generation into a $3M store and pieced together a fraud detection stack that didn't eat his razor-thin drop shipping margins. Now he runs FRIQ Labs, productizing the system he built for himself.

We covered the trifecta of red flags that almost always mean fraud, why you should never auto-capture payments on Shopify, and how being curious about a single weird order can save you thousands.

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Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more
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Promo Party - We built an app!
https://promoparty.app/

LINKS

• FRIQ Labs: https://friqlabs.com
• Drop Ship Breakthrough: https://dropshipbreakthrough.com
• Ben Knegendorf's episode: https://unofficialshopifypodcast.com/episodes/ben-knegendorf-dropships-FLGufeLE
• Ekata: https://ekata.com
• Shopify Protect: https://shopify.com/protect

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

"70% of stuff never goes sold. So you have to be prepared to interact with that level of rejection."

David Hooker is the brand director for both Printify and Printful, which merged in late 2024 to form FYUL. He's got access to the data behind millions of print on demand sellers, and what he's learned is both humbling and useful. The top 1% aren't more talented. They're more consistent. We get into AI-generated mockups that actually look real, why email marketing is still a "print money button," and how community-driven niche selling beats paid ads for customer acquisition in 2025.

Also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ppYhfdota7k

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LINKS

• Printify: printify.com
• Printful: printful.com
• David Hooker on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidhooker/
• David Hooker's TEDx Talk on Visual Literacy: ted.com/talks/david_hooker_the_importance_of_visual_literacy

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"If your product sucks, you're never going to succeed. A lot of people are trying to solve product problems with marketing spend."

Chase Clymer runs Electric Eye, a Shopify agency deep in CRO, redesigns, and migrations. He also hits about one industry event a month, which means he's got a real read on how merchants and partners actually feel right now. Not the Twitter version. The hallway version.

We got into the real state of ecom in 2026: Facebook CPMs nearly doubling since the pandemic, why most brands under $5M shouldn't be split testing at all, how agencies are using AI tools like Claude and Nano Banana to skip hours of busywork, and Chase's bold prediction that Shopify is about to overhaul its partner program after a failed enterprise bet.

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LINKS

• Electric Eye: https://electriceye.io/
• Honest Ecommerce podcast: https://honestecommerce.com/
• Fathom (sales call recording): https://fathom.video/
• Nano Banana / Gemini image generation: https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation/
• Figma Make: https://www.figma.com/

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Denis Dyli has spent 13 years building Shopify stores for the businesses nobody wants to talk about: industrial suppliers, janitorial distributors, pipe manufacturers. The unsexy stuff. He's now a Shopify Platinum Partner, and he's turning all that pain into an AI-powered deal room that converts messy email RFQs into structured quotes in minutes, not weeks. We get into why B2B and wholesale are fundamentally different buying experiences, how mid-market manufacturers ($20M-$100M) are the most underserved segment in ecommerce, and why your B2B quoting process probably still feels like 1997.

SPONSORS

Swym - Wishlists, Back in Stock alerts, & more
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cleverific.com

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LINKS

• Uncap: https://uncap.com
• Denis Dyli on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/denisdyli

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"It sucks to lose a customer not because of the product, but because of the mechanism in which they get the product."

Jay Myers has spent a decade building one of the biggest subscription apps on Shopify. Now he's telling you subscriptions are broken. Bold's data backs it up: 82% of cancellations happen because customers have too much or too little product, not because they stopped wanting it. And 76% of those who cancel never come back.

His fix is rePete, an AI-powered reorder concierge that predicts when each customer needs a refill and sends a one-click nudge at exactly the right time. We talked about the subscription death curve, why reorder revenue can 3-5x your business valuation, and the beta results that made me a believer.

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LINKS

• rePete by Bold: https://repeat.me
• Bold Commerce: https://boldcommerce.com
• Built Bar: https://built.com

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"Succeeding with paid was not about how good your ROAS was. What the paid experts did so well was they had built a business model structurally that allowed them to put as much money as they possible into that paid engine."

Andrew Youderian surveyed 300 store owners representing $3.5 billion in revenue for the sixth annual eComFuel Trends Report, and the data broke four things Shopify merchants have been told were true. AI adoption is at 72% and producing zero financial edge. Non-AI adopters are growing profits faster than adopters. Amazon's share of revenue is back to 2017 levels while more brands than ever are selling on it. Gross margins hit an all-time high the same year net margins hit an all-time low.

In this episode we dig into the paid traffic reversal that changed Andrew's own mind, why 97% of stores now run paid ads, the P&L math that separates winners from losers, and the financial literacy stat that moves net margins by 50%.

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LINKS

• eComFuel 2026 Trends Report: ecommercefuel.com/ecommerce-trends/
• Financial Mastery for Ecom Store Owners (free course): https://www.ecommercefuel.com/mastery/

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

Recorded live at Smart Marketer Mentor Tables in Nashville, this is Kurt's full talk on why most people are bad at AI and what to do about it. The pitch was that AI would let you do less work and produce better output. What actually happened: everyone is producing more slop, faster.

Inside: the RTF framework that fixes any prompt in 30 seconds, the 10 AI tools Kurt actually uses every day (not the ones he gets paid to recommend), and why Claude Cowork is the single tool worth your attention in 2026.

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LINKS

• Smart Marketer: https://smartmarketer.com
• Microsoft Clarity: https://clarity.microsoft.com
• Topaz Labs: https://www.topazlabs.com
• Adobe Enhance: https://podcast.adobe.com
• WhisperFlow: https://wisprflow.ai
• Whisper Transcription (Mac app): https://goodsnooze.gumroad.com/l/whisper-transcription
• Adobe Firefly: https://firefly.adobe.com
• Nano Banana (Google): https://gemini.google.com
• Grok: https://grok.com
• Claude Code: https://claude.com/claude-code
• Claude Cowork: https://claude.com
• Crisp Chat: https://crisp.chat
• Tidio: https://www.tidio.com
• Matrixify: https://matrixify.app

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The Unofficial Shopify Podcast is hosted by Kurt Elster and explores the stories behind successful Shopify stores. Get actionable insights, practical strategies, and proven tactics from entrepreneurs who've built thriving ecommerce businesses.

This is a memorial republish. Casey Bard, founder of Tacticalories Seasoning Co., died in early April 2026 after a three-year fight with Stage 4 colorectal cancer. Casey told the people close to him that when he was gone, he wanted them to tell stories about him. This is Casey in his own words, recorded in March 2021.

Casey started Tacticalories with $500 and mixed his first batch in his bathtub. By 2020 the company had grown 4x. We talked about building a brand around a personal Venn diagram of interests, why he drops one product at a time instead of seasonal collections, the 2020 manufacturing chaos, and why he refused to dropship, refused coupon codes, and refused to take outside money.

GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/casey-is-choosing-to-continue-the-fight

LINKS

• Tacticalories: https://tacticalories.com
• Casey Bard: https://caseybard.com
• GoFundMe (supporting Casey's family): https://www.gofundme.com/f/casey-is-choosing-to-continue-the-fight
• Struggle Well (documentary about Casey's story): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=908HdjZFyjk