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It's landing. OpenAI has announced ads are coming to ChatGPT for Australian logged-in users on the Free and Go plans in the coming weeks, following a US pilot. OpenAI assures users that ChatGPT answers “remain independent and unbiased”. Great. I wonder if you can buy ad space against the search term "how to export my ChatGPT history to Claude."

Meanwhile, Spotify has announced Carousel Ads, which is a swipeable display format in the Now Playing view that lets brands feature up to six cards with images, descriptions, links, and pricing. Currently in beta with Priceline, GNC and eBay. Don't you dare infiltrate my early 2000s indie pop comfort mixes.

It's bloody tough out there, and some Australian founders are copping a bit of heat this week, whether fairly or unfairly. But there are some genuinely good stories worth celebrating. Hats off to the team at Koala, who went public on the ASX this week. They floated at $3.40 with a market cap of $305M and are now sitting at $3.80, so they survived the first week. Stay away from the burritos.

Other founder activity that caught my eye… Fayt The Label is bringing multiple brands and influencers together in Byron Bay for the ultimate Instagram content fest. Camilla has launched a 68-piece collection in collaboration with The Met. And keep an eye out for Rob Ward, co-founder of Quad Lock, who's just about to drop The DTC Playbook - 82,000 words from product fit through to exit. One of the best operators around. Register for access now.

It's not just Ford Ranger drivers crying this week. Australia Post has increased its fuel surcharge, effective 23 April. Domestic parcel contract and StarTrack Courier jump from 4.8% to 12%. StarTrack Express and Premium go from 15.5% to 22.7%. That applies to around 30,000 contract customers. The 250,000 MyPost Business customers aren't affected.

In the same week, Australia Post has acquired Rendr, the same-day delivery orchestration platform founded by Greg Leibowitz and James Fisher. The deal expands same-day delivery coverage to 90% of the population, plus evening and weekend windows. I had Greg and James on the podcast back in 2022 when they said "Retail is going to be swamped by on-demand delivery. Customers are going to crave it, retailers are going to have to adopt it." They called it four years ago. Good for them.

On a serious note, I am genuinely saddened to hear about the receivership and liquidation of Power Retail and Click Frenzy this week. Grant Arnott, who founded both, is one of the most genuine people in this industry and was at the forefront of Australian ecommerce before most of us were in it. I still remember buying physical copies of the Power 100 benchmarks every year, not just for myself but for my team. We read them cover to cover. They were our little bibles.

The group has around $7M in annual revenue and a 1.5M-strong consumer database as it enters a sales process. Bids are sought by 10 April. There are lots of ecommerce businesses doing very well today because of what Grant built. Here's hoping the legacy can be kept alive.

There's a real trend happening around keeping it real amid all the AI noise. Aerie (American Eagle's intimates brand) has just gone live with a Pamela Anderson campaign showing her makeup-free and just living her best life. I've never seen real and carefree look so hard to achieve. At least Sydney Sweeney has an internal career path.

Curiously, AI creative platform Air penned a full-page New York Times ad titled "AI would never smoke a cigarette with you." It was a headline-catcher. For those still reading newspapers. But can you imagine Don Draper with access to Meta Ads and Claude? My late-night scrolling fingers would be a money-spending mess.

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Is there anything more exhausting than another channel opening up that "you have to be on”? I mean, most of us haven’t yet mastered the ones we are already on.

There's a graph that does the rounds that you’ve probably seen about how fast platforms reach scale. Radio took 38 years. Instagram two and a half. ChatGPT apparently six days. The pressure to show up everywhere is real and it's only accelerating. But the best teams I've seen across 600-odd episodes aren't running the most channels. They're running fewer, better.

Jaimee Vilela bought into Cooki Haircare in 2023. Did $179K that year. Last year, closed just over $3 million. On Meta and Klaviyo. And that's it. When she went looking for outside advice on whether to diversify, she ended up with a free consult from Nik Sharma (yes, name drop). His take: stay where you are.

Examples from this Playbook

🧴 Jaimee from Cooki names it well: channel addiction. The pull toward adding something new before you've mastered what you have. It's one of the most quietly expensive habits in ecommerce.

🐾 Jon from Pet Circle was running search, Meta and coupons at $300M a year. Customer growth was still negative. They were recirculating the same customers and crediting the same sales across multiple channels. More channels = less clarity.

👗 Lauren from Motto admitted that running paid, organic, influencer and PR simultaneously made attribution almost impossible. She said they genuinely didn't know what was driving revenue.

📧 Tahlia from Kakadu Plum Co built a high-impact Sunday email without a big budget, through deep segmentation and real content over the years. Only possible because she protected her attention to make email really damn good.

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