A client removed me from Slack and Shopify. No warning.

+$2,599,104 in extra yearly revenue. 28.9x service ROI in just the first 4 months. 4-5 experiments monthly on multiple pages. 6-8 new listicles per month.

Apparently not enough.

And you know what? That's totally fine!

They made a good investment. I got my monthly rate.

Reality is that some clients expect just something else.

An example could be that while you are testing an offer, they would rather test less important things, like scarcity iterations with timers and stock communication.

Our earth is so large that there cannot be a match in each client and service provider relationship. For one reason or another. Sometimes not even connected to you.

Brushing the pride aside and moving on!

When someone spends 10+ years building a company with you, it means they believed in what you were building before the world saw it.

When Noise was still a small team selling phone covers and accessories, we were figuring out our products and processes one step at a time. Over the years, people who stayed with us through that journey became the ones who carried that context forward. They carry the context of where the company started and the perspective to help shape where it goes next.

Mansi Saxena is one such example. She joined Noise in 2015 and has been part of the journey as we evolved from a small team into a consumer technology brand.

We believe longevity and ownership go hand in hand. When people stay long enough to understand a company, they become the ones who help shape its future.

The most meaningful part of building Noise is seeing people who joined us in the early days continue to grow alongside the company and become the people who help take it forward.

"Add a card so ChatGPT can make purchases for you." I thought ChatGPT had given up agentic commerce, but they are back. They are working on a Wallet which stores credit cards and uses them to automatically checkout on merchant websites with the user's approval.

It says "Stores get a virtual card number instead" so it works like Stripe Link, which can inject credit cards into any payments page, even if they are not using Stripe. Not sure if ChatGPT is rebuilding that from scratch or if it is actually powered by Stripe behind the scenes. It also supports multi-item shopping carts, which we first saw on Meta's Muse and Instinct. Plus it says it can also purchase recurring subscriptions.

The key difference from ChatGPT's previous Instant Checkout integration is that this wallet uses virtual cards and thus can checkout on any website.

I have not seen this in the wild yet, but my ChatGPT tracker says they started working on this two weeks ago and made a bunch of new changes recently. The screenshot is some of those.

I'm becoming a PR engineer🫠

This year I started rebuilding how my PR work gets done with AI.

Of course, some parts of the job can't be delegated right now like kickoffs, conversations with founders, briefings and asking questions until the real story comes out.

=> AI comes in after that. Once the story is clear, it helps me with fact sheets, messaging, journalist research and the work that turns a story into outreach.

At first I thought that I'd build everything by myself with Chat and Claude😅
Do not make this mistake! Use as much help as possible!

So I'm researching every service I could plug into this setup and testing them one by one.
It includes outreach tools, media databases, awards, podcasts, events, trend watching and so on.

If you work in PR or comms, what do you actually use?
I'd love to hear about the tools you rely on, and about the ones you paid for and regretted too.

I'll share what I find here as PR Engineer Notes❤️

Do you know what the leading cause of bad business reviews is?

Spoiler: it’s not pricing or bad quality. It’s communication.

In her new study, Miriam Ellis analyzed reviews on 1,200 Google Business Profiles across 50 industries, and communication issues topped the list for almost all of them.

Unreturned calls, being late to the appointment, no-shows, hanging up on customers - all these things guarantee you’ll get a 1-star review sooner or later.

Here’s what you need to do:

- Always answer your phone.
- Return every single call and message. Hire someone to do this if you need to.
- If you’re running late, call the customer before they have to call you
- Most importantly, if you are using AI to handle your calls, make sure it doesn’t drive your leads away.

Read the full study at whitespark*ca/research.

Your Manager isn’t that rich yet. 😄

9 Crores Compensation!!!!

SRK Naam toh Suna heh Hogaa naa- Unki Manager ka hain Yeh Compensation.

Pooja Dadlani has been associated with Shah Rukh Khan since 2012, and reports often place her annual compensation around ₹9 crore.

But the more interesting part is the role itself.

It isn’t just about managing schedules.

It is about handling deals, coordination, operations, stakeholders and the business machinery behind one of India’s biggest personal brands.

Did you imagine - What their appraisal meeting would look like?

KRA's Hikes - Deadlines....

Kaisa Rehta hogaa!!!

Just imagine!!!

Astha and I got married in 2014. A year later, I quit my job to start Cult.

She married someone with a stable job. She did not sign up to be married to a founder. When I took the leap, she took it with me, because a risk one of you takes is a risk both of you carry.

That first year was hard, and she backed me through all of it. She also kept reminding me that I am a person outside of Cult, which is easy to forget when you're building something.

Twelve years on, I'm grateful she's still supporting me in ways big and small. When I'm at a HYROX start line, or anywhere else I'm doing what I love, she's close by.

If you're building something, the person you choose to share your life with will shape it more than almost any business decision you make. I got very lucky with mine.

Thank you, Astha.