Aggregate 08: brand-led growth, the April slump, and the power of GPT-5.5

Your weekend read from Early Stage Growth

Hello to our many new subscribers. This week’s post on 15 ways Claude has changed our business went a little bit viral. 👋

As a heads up for you. Our usual cadence is a weekly Tuesday essay and a weekend lighter snack. I like to think of this as FT Weekend for startup, DTC, and consumer growth people.

April is coming to an end, which for most of you – based on our recent seasonality analysis we did – I imagine is a good sign. We’re seeing more and more brands move up the funnel in their marketing efforts in times like this, and of course a shift towards partnership ads.

I don’t know about you, but Claude’s felt disappointing this week, and yesterday’s news that they’ve pushed some bigger edits is maybe a welcome sign. That said, yesterday I kicked off experiments with Codex – and that was before last night’s drop of gpt-5.5. I’m dual testing workflows today, will see how I get on.

I hope you have a great weekend
Enjoy
Josh

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Signals

Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.

• Meta’s AI creative tools are creating trust issues [Meta Ads] - Those of us in the weeks of ad accounts know that Meta’s AI auto-optimisations are a bane, but this has now reached bigger marketing news. Marketing Brew reported that some advertisers have struggled to switch off Meta’s AI creative features, with ads altered in ways that made products look wrong or visibly AI-generated. Snag Tights said Meta’s tools modified creative without the brand’s knowledge.

• AI referrals are becoming a commerce channel [DTC / Ecommerce] - Adobe says traffic from AI sources to US retail sites grew 393% year-on-year in Q1. In March, AI traffic also converted better than non-AI traffic, after being meaningfully worse a year earlier. The caveat is that the absolute base may still be small, but the direction is obvious: product pages now need to be legible to humans, Google and LLMs.

• Thorne shows the return of brand-led DTC growth [DTC] - Modern Retail wrote about Thorne driving 63% DTC sales growth after a brand awareness push. The interesting move is that a supplements business is not just trying to win on information, despite being in a research-heavy category. It is moving toward aspiration, community and authority. In other words: performance is being rebuilt on brand.

• AI in fashion points to the human layer becoming the luxury layer [AI / Consumer] - Vogue’s piece on AI in fashion argues that luxury is likely to use AI behind the scenes, while keeping the human as the interface. This feels relevant beyond luxury. In a world of agentic commerce, the brands that feel human will stand out precisely because everything else is becoming easier to automate.

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  The Stack

  A shortlist of things to read, watch and visit this weekend.

  🎧 Is AI going to turn us all into middle managers?. The Atlantic
  📝 142 things you need to know in consumer growth in 2026. Early Stage Growth
  📝When your digital life vanishes. New Yorker
  🎧 The science of why you hate small talk. NPR
  📝 What I learnt about Jeff Bezos’ billionaire retreat. The Atlantic

  📝 Where should your beauty brand be after 10 years?. Vogue Business

  📝 Out of office: what the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to in April. Wallpaper

  📝 Five tables to book this spring. Monocle
  📺 You are the bottleneck in AI. Andrej Karparthy on No Priors
  📝 Sam Altman may control our future, can he be trusted. New Yorker

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