Over the last few months, two topics keep showing up in conversations with founders:

TikTok Shop and ChatGPT.

One is forcing brands to rethink how they build communities.

The other is quietly laying the foundations of a new advertising platform.

Let's break both down.

But first, I’m curious:

Topics we'll cover today:
💠 3 Things Every DTC Brand Can Steal From TikTok Shop Winners
💠 What's New In ChatGPT Ads
💠 Latest news in the DTC space

Over the last few months, we've been spending a lot more time inside TikTok Shop with our clients at BSR.

And the deeper we go, the more we realize that the biggest lessons have very little to do with the platform itself.

Some of the fastest-growing brands on TikTok Shop are doing things that most DTC brands aren't doing at all!!!

Most people look at TikTok Shop and see a sales channel.

I'm starting to think that's the least interesting part.

Over the last few months, we've been studying how some of the top TikTok Shop brands operate.

Listening to founders.
Watching how they structure their teams.
Understanding how they work with creators.

And I kept coming back to the same realization:

The brands winning on TikTok Shop aren't just building revenue.

They're building capabilities.

Capabilities that will likely outlast TikTok Shop itself.

Here are three things that stood out.

Every founder wants a moat.

Something competitors can't easily replicate.

Yet most brands spend their time doing things that are surprisingly easy to copy.

Running promotions.
Increasing ad spend.
Creating content.

Then I started looking at the brands dominating TikTok Shop.

What's interesting is that many of them aren't just building another acquisition channel.

They're building creator communities.
Real ones!

Groups.
Events.
Shared goals.
Ongoing communication.

Hundreds of creators who genuinely care about helping the brand grow.

That's where the moat starts to appear.

Because you can't wake up tomorrow and copy a community.

You have to build it.
Relationship by relationship.
Creator by creator.

And that's exactly why it's valuable.

Most brands think the hard part is finding creators.

I'm starting to think that's the easy part.

Recently, I listened to an 8-figure founder explain how they manage their creator ecosystem.

They have a Facebook group with more than 100,000 members.

They host weekly calls with over 100 of their top creators!

And what surprised me most wasn't the scale.

It was the purpose.

They're not reviewing KPIs.
They're not discussing commission percentages.

They're keeping creators engaged:

→ Sharing wins
→ Revealing upcoming launches
→ Showing products months before release
→ Aligning everyone around future opportunities

If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

Creators need nurturing too.

A creator can promote hundreds of brands.

Every week there's a new offer.
A higher commission.
A free product.

Someone else trying to get their attention.

Which means the real challenge isn't creator acquisition.
It's creator retention.

Most brands treat creators like a distribution channel.

The best brands seem to treat them like a community.

And that difference compounds over time.

One comment from that same founder really stretched my thinking.

While many brands are debating whether to increase Meta budgets by 10%, they're building a 24/7 TikTok Shop live operation. 🤯

Not a few livestreams per week.
Not a couple of hours per day.
Twenty-four hours a day.
Seven days a week. (!!!)

Whether that specific strategy makes sense for your business isn't really the point.

The point is the level of thinking behind it.

The best operators often aren't optimizing the same variables as everyone else.

They're building systems.

Capabilities.
Infrastructure.
They're asking bigger questions.

And that's usually where the biggest opportunities live.

The lesson here isn't that every brand needs TikTok Shop.

It's that every brand needs to keep expanding its growth engine.

For some brands, TikTok Shop is proving to be one of the most effective ways to do that right now.

Not only because of the incremental revenue it can generate, but because of the capabilities it forces brands to develop along the way.

Community building.
Creator management.
Relationship building at scale.

And those capabilities don't disappear if a platform changes.

If TikTok Shop is on your roadmap for the second half of the year, my team at BSR can help you launch, optimize, or scale it as part of your broader growth strategy.

Just reply to this email or book a call with me here.

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Over the past few months, we've audited more than 50 7- and 8-figure brands.

Most weren't struggling to grow.
They were struggling to grow efficiently.

Revenue was there.
Profit wasn't.

And the same patterns kept showing up:

The problem?

Many brands enter Q3 thinking they need more traffic, more campaigns, or more creative.

What they actually need is a stronger foundation.

Because once Q4 arrives, there's very little time to fix what's broken.

The brands that perform best during the second half of the year typically start preparing months before BFCM.

They identify the bottlenecks.

They fix the leaks.

And they build a clear plan for growth.

At BSR, we help brands uncover where revenue and profit are leaking across ads, email, offers, and the customer journey, then build a practical roadmap for the next 90 days.

If you're planning to make a strong push in Q3 and Q4, now is the time to get the foundation right.

This week, OpenAI released several updates to Ads Manager.

The biggest update?

Product feeds. 🙌 

Brands can now upload their product catalogs and create ads directly from those feeds.

If you've spent years running Meta or Google campaigns, that should sound familiar.

Product feeds are one of the building blocks of modern advertising platforms. They're what allow platforms to match products with users based on intent and relevance.

That said, the current implementation is still far from what most advertisers are used to on Meta or Google. 😕

At least for now, product feeds require a much more technical setup process, including feed validation and SFTP uploads.

It's not yet the plug-and-play experience most e-commerce marketers expect.

But that's not what I find interesting.

The interesting part is that OpenAI is building the infrastructure in the first place.

And that's exactly what makes this update worth paying attention to.

I know it's very early. And many brands wait until a channel is mature before paying attention to it.

But, by that point, competition is higher, costs are higher, and the easiest opportunities have already been captured.

We're spending a lot of time studying where ChatGPT Ads and conversational commerce are headed because we believe they could become a meaningful acquisition channel for e-commerce brands over the next few years.

To help you get ahead of the curve, I put together a short guide covering how to set up a product feed for ChatGPT Ads, including the technical requirements, feed specifications, and the exact steps required to get your catalog uploaded.

Read it now.

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If you found this interesting, please leave us a review. It’d mean the world to me.

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📰 Visa teams up with OpenAI to let AI agents make payments inside ChatGPT [read more]

Brian Roisentul is the founder & CEO of BSR, a growth marketing agency he started in 2013 to help e-commerce brands unlock hidden revenue by identifying misalignments between their marketing and customer behavior. He is also the host of The DTC Insider podcast, where he interviews thought leaders, founders, and directors in the e-commerce space.

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