ASR Weekly #23

From the founder:

Third Friday in a row, and this is the last one before I stop fiddling with the send day and leave it alone.

Something in this week's submissions caught me off guard. Nobody is asking how to spend better on ads. They're asking how to stop needing to.

Jon • Connect on LinkedIn • Book a call

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Welcome to the brand network

These are a few brand operators that joined us this week:

Donart C. — Operations · Fashion & Apparel · Plus plan

Deidre O. — Marketing · Jewelry & Accessories · Grow plan

Eric H. — Owner, United States · Fashion & Apparel · Plus plan

Start a project to meet these participants and others like them.

Popular projects last week

DTC founders and retention leads in fashion, beauty or health 
Sales Call · Incentive: $300 · 30 mins - on driving revenue from your best customers beyond email and SMS

Looking for people who want to spend less on marketing and make more profit
Sales Call · Incentive: $250 · 45 mins - an AI analytics platform connecting Shopify, Klaviyo, GA4, Google and Meta in one place

Product feedback from DTC founders on an AI that runs marketing end to end
Research Call · Incentive: $100 · 60 mins - analysing Meta, Google and Shopify data, then planning and producing the creative

Log in as a brand to see all available projects →

What the $1M–$10M stack actually looks like

New this week: the apps brands doing $1M–$10M actually run, scored on operator reviews rather than App Store stars.

Three things worth taking out of it:

• The happiest category isn't the one you'd guess. Judge.me posts the highest satisfaction of any well-reviewed app on the list - 86% across 77 reviews. Klaviyo, the most-reviewed app in the whole network at 209, sits at 73%.

• Satisfaction and staying are different things, again. Smile scores the lowest satisfaction on the list at 53%, and every single one of its 30 reviewers still uses it. Recharge is at 62% with 100% retention. When nobody's thrilled and nobody leaves, you're not looking at loyalty - you're looking at switching costs.

• This band is where point solutions become infrastructure. Below $1M you can run anything next to anything. Through this range the tools have to share data, and the cost of picking wrong stops being the monthly fee and starts being the migration.

Small samples swing hard, and the piece says which ones are too thin to lean on - Triple Whale and Okendo both land near the top on under 20 reviews each.

If you run any of these, your review makes the next one better - add it from the App Stack tab in your account.

New jobs this week

Hand-picked roles in ecommerce, app growth and digital retail — sourced daily from inside the network, no fluff, no expired listings.

• Director of Ecommerce Growth — R2 Global · Fort Lauderdale, FL · on-site · $150–200K + bonus — view →

• Director of eCommerce — 10X Health System · Scottsdale, AZ · hybrid · $170–190K + incentive — view →

• Staff Software Engineer, DTC — Lume Deodorant (Mammoth Brands) · New York, NY · in-office Tue–Thu · $170–182.5K — view →

• E-Commerce Manager — imogene + willie · Nashville, TN · on-site — view →

• eCommerce Manager — Solo Fitness · Burscough, UK · on-site — view →

Pattern of the week

Five of this week's twelve submissions described the same ambition in different words: grow without paying for the traffic.

One wants "more customers and sales... organically without spending heavily on ads." A subscription brand is "curious about ways for customers to find out about our brand outside of paid media." One is chasing long-tail product SEO and AI search visibility explicitly for "reducing reliance on paid advertising." One is pulling SEO back in-house from an agency. One is already running AI-generated content to drive free organic traffic across 1,200 sites.

Why it matters: acquisition has meant "the ad account" for most of a decade. This week it meant search, content, owned channels and bringing the work inside - and the people saying it aren't bootstrapped hobbyists, they're brands actively replacing paid-adjacent tooling. Five weeks out from Black Friday is a strange moment to be rethinking where customers come from, which is probably the point: they've seen what this year's CPMs do in November.

The budget line nobody wants to defend in 2027 is the one that stops working the moment you stop paying it.

Photo of the week

Target opened its holiday hand on Tuesday: thousands of gifts at $5 or less, 8,000 new gift items with more than half exclusive, a Deal of the Day running every single day from November 1 to December 24, and Black Friday pricing starting November 5.

That's the discount weather every DTC brand is about to compete in. Not a reason to match it (you can't) but a reason to know what the shopper's eye is calibrated to by the time they reach your product page.

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See you next week.

Jon and team
— app store research