What You'll Learn Today

In 5 minutes, you'll be learning about the following:

Don’t Waste the Tariff Crisis: A Shopify Survival & Growth Workshop [EVENT]
Google’s AI Mode Is Coming - Here’s What Shopify Brands Need to Know
3 Real Shopify Success Stories Worth Stealing From
The Ultimate Shopify AI Growth Toolkit
Build Full Web Apps from a Prompt [TOOL]

What did everyone enjoy last week?

The most clicked link was ... Subscriptions Done Right

Cheers,

Jim Huffman, GrowthHit CEO
(Want a friend? Let's connect on Twitter or LinkedIn)

My Take of the Week
The Ultimate Shopify AI Growth Toolkit

Tired of generic AI prompts that miss the mark?

We built a prompt library just for Shopify brands - packed with proven strategies and step-by-step prompts we use to grow 7- and 8-figure stores.

What’s Inside:

Improve your homepage, product pages, and checkout to turn more visitors into buyers
Write ad copy that actually gets clicks (Meta and Google)
Build email flows that bring shoppers back and boost sales
Get more traffic with easy-to-follow SEO prompts
Understand your numbers (like CAC and ROAS) to spend smarter

👉 I WANT THIS NOW

Special Find: Team Pick

Shopify Brands, Take Notes from Elastique’s Homepage

We’re loving how Elastique Athletics turns education into conversion.

Their homepage does an incredible job of breaking down product benefits without overwhelming visitors—and it looks great doing it.

✅ Explains complex product tech in a clear, visual way

✅ Builds trust with expert-backed proof and detailed science

✅ Uses scrolling to guide users through a compelling product journey

💡 Takeaway: If your product is different, own it. Use design and storytelling to educate, build belief, and make the value feel obvious.

GrowthHit Class: EVENT

Don’t Waste the Tariff Crisis: A Shopify Survival & Growth Workshop

The tariff crisis is on pause — but that doesn’t mean your brand should be.

With 90 days of breathing room, now is the time to get ahead. At GrowthHit, we believe the best brands use windows like this to strengthen their foundations and prepare to scale - profitably.

Join us on Friday, April 11 at 10:30 AM PST / 1:30 PM EST for a forward-looking, no-fluff workshop built for Shopify brands ready to turn uncertainty into an edge.

You’ll learn:

How to bulletproof your margins, no matter what happens next
Why mastering your unit economics is non-negotiable for growth
Real strategies smart brands are using to scale sustainably (even during cost volatility)

The brands that win aren’t just reactive — they’re proactive. Use this pause to sharpen your strategy and come out stronger.

👉 Sign Up For Free

In Partnership with The Rundown.ai

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Curated Growth Tips of the Week
2 Growth Tips to Grow Your Shopify Biz

Featuring growth tips and insights sourced from other publications.

1/ Google’s AI Mode Is Coming for Your Organic Traffic - Here’s What Shopify Brands Need to Know

Google is ramping up its AI-powered search experience with the expansion of AI Mode - a more personalized, conversational version of search that’s already rolling out to early users and coming soon to everyone.

For Shopify brands and marketers relying on SEO, this shift could reshape how customers discover your site.

Let’s break down what’s changing and how to adapt.

📌 What Is AI Mode?

AI Mode builds on Google’s AI Overviews, which generate long-form, Gemini-powered responses directly in the SERP. Now, with AI Mode, users can go deeper—engaging in chat-like back-and-forths right inside Google.

This means:

Users get structured answers, comparisons, and next-step suggestions without clicking through.
The SERP now includes links, images, product feeds, and conversational context—all in one interface.

For Shopify brands, this marks a significant shift. The way people discover and interact with products via search is becoming less about clicking links and more about staying in Google’s native experience.

📌 Why It Matters

Google has made it clear: it aims to show AI-powered responses as much as possible. If your content doesn’t meet its quality threshold, it simply may not show up at all—regardless of rankings.

That means your organic visibility depends on how well your content feeds the AI.

📌 How to Optimize for AI Mode

Here’s how Shopify brands can stay competitive:

1. Write content AI wants to surface

AI Overviews favor structured, concise, and expert-backed content. Start with clear answers. Use tables, product comparisons, and lists. This is especially critical for educational content, buying guides, or FAQs that help customers research products.

2. Own the next step

AI Mode is great for initial queries—but deeper insights (like reviews, real-life applications, or tutorials) still require a click. Invest in thought-leadership content, UGC, and product storytelling that positions your site as the next logical step in the journey.

3. Strengthen your E-E-A-T

Google is laser-focused on Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Make sure your site includes clear author bios, customer testimonials, backlinks, and credentials that show you’re the real deal.

4. Optimize for conversational queries

AI Mode encourages back-and-forth questioning. Use FAQ blocks, schema markup, and content that answers not just what, but why and how. Think about long-tail, follow-up queries your customers might ask when researching your product.

5. Track AI-driven traffic closely

Set up GA4 to track AI referral traffic. Monitor changes to your top-ranking pages. The SERP may shift—and you’ll want to understand why, fast.

📌 Final Takeaway

Google’s AI Mode is changing how customers interact with search—but it’s not all doom and gloom. For Shopify brands focused on quality content, product education, and credibility, this is an opportunity to stand out.

Don’t chase algorithms. Focus on what actually helps your audience—and the AI will follow.

Source: Google’s New AI Mode: Everything You Need to Know

2/ 3 Real Shopify Success Stories Worth Stealing From

Plenty of Shopify stores get stuck in the same place: traffic is flowing, but conversions aren’t. Sound familiar? The good news: you don’t need to rebuild everything from scratch.

These brands made smart, targeted tweaks - from AI popups to audience segmentation - and saw real growth. Let’s dive in.

📌 1/ Chubbies ($45M/year)

This retro shorts brand built a cult following by leaning hard into its brand voice. From day one, Chubbies nailed its fun, informal tone and matched it with highly engaging social media content. Instead of chasing every audience, they focused on college-age men and created content that resonated with that lifestyle.

What worked:

Constant engagement with followers (aka “Chubsters”)
UGC-driven social campaigns
Humor and pop culture in every touchpoint

Takeaway:

Want loyalty? Create community. Chubbies turned followers into fans with contests, memes, and influencer collaborations—and built a brand people want to belong to.

📌 2/ Madsen Cycles ($5M/year)

Inspired by Denmark’s bike culture, Madsen Cycles launched the “Bucket Bike” to help U.S. families ride together. The product stood out, but growth came from social proof. They prioritized user-generated content and let their customers do the talking.

What worked:

Encouraging customers to share content
Featuring UGC on-site using the Instafeed app
Making credibility visual through real families and real photos

Takeaway:

Don’t just sell—show. Over 90% of shoppers trust UGC more than brand marketing. Madsen made customer stories the hero, and it worked.

📌 3/ Partake Foods (<$5M/year)

Denise Woodard started Partake after struggling to find allergen-free snacks for her daughter. Rejected by 86 investors, she bootstrapped her way forward and built a thriving Shopify store that made over $4M in 2020 alone.

What worked:

Creating a truly differentiated product
Investing in Google/social ads to drive traffic
Building and nurturing an email list to drive lifetime value

Takeaway:

Don’t sleep on email. While ads brought traffic, it was email that built the customer relationship. Onsite popups offering 15% off + content helped grow their list and educate customers over time.

Source - 10 Brilliant Shopify Success Stories [+Tips for Entrepreneurs]

TOOL OF THE WEEK:
Build Full Web Apps from a Prompt

This one’s for the builders.

Lovable.dev is an AI-powered full stack engineer that turns your idea into a beautiful, fully functional app - no code needed.

Just type out what you want, and Lovable handles the frontend, backend, design, and deployment.

You can even prompt changes in plain English.

Why it’s exciting for founders, marketers, and teams:

✅ Build and launch tools, MVPs, or landing pages without engineering bottlenecks

✅ Own your code — everything syncs to GitHub

✅ Make copy and layout edits just by describing them

✅ Integrate with real databases and APIs

CHECK OUT THE TOOL

PODCAST: IF I WAS STARTING TODAY

How to Build the Ultimate Lifestyle Business with Josh Nielsen

This week, Jim is joined by a man who is literally responsible for the creation of thousands of podcasts, including this one. Josh Nielsen is the founder of Zencastr, a podcast recording service.

Josh talks about how he built the service in his free time while working as a contract engineer and reveals the tactics and hacks he used to launch and eventually pivot to a venture backed tech startup.

TOPICS DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S EPISODE