מהו יעד הרווח שלך? השאלה שרוב מייסדי Shopify לא יכולים לענות עליה (עם תומאס גליסון, StoreHero)

סטיב האט:
Welcome back to eCommerce Fastlane. I am your host. Today we’re going to talk a lot about how to run your store and make a bit of a paradigm shift from focusing on revenue to focusing on profit. When your costs are climbing, how do you think about building a profit‑first business? If you look at your revenue, in a lot of cases it’s growing, but profit never really seems to show up where you expected it to be.

סטיב האט:
I’ve heard a lot of horror stories. It’s interesting—people are stitching together spreadsheets to figure a bit of it out, and I’m sure a lot of people listening would say that’s kind of how they run their business: with some kind of master spreadsheet. We’re going to learn about getting into real profit numbers by order and finding where the money is leaking. There are a lot of leaky buckets when it comes to true profitability, and getting straight answers is the most important thing. People don’t have a lot of time; they just want to get to the numbers and get to an answer.

סטיב האט:
Ideally without living inside a dashboard all day. That’s the unfortunate challenge a lot of founders and marketers face—they’re stuck in a dashboard. My guest today, I believe, has solved a lot of these problems. His name is Thomas Gleeson and he’s the co‑founder of a company called StoreHero. They’re at StoreHero AI. He spent many years, like me, inside Shopify. He was, like me, a Merchant Success Manager before building StoreHero. I’ll let him explain StoreHero in his own words in a moment.

סטיב האט:
From what I can see, it pulls sales, marketing, and costs into what he calls a profit‑first view. I think they’re one of the few people that have shipped this sort of profit‑focused process. They even have a new cloud connector I want to dig into in a few minutes. My hope is we’re going to learn more about why profit really does beat revenue at any stage, wherever you’re at. A lot of stores are losing margin and don’t really know what to do or how to fix it. Thomas is going to help us figure that out. So Thomas, welcome to the show.

Thomas Gleeson:
Thank you very much, Steve. That was a fantastic intro. I might have to get you on the sales team at some point. Hello, everyone, and thank you very much for having me on, Steve. I’m really looking forward to this one. As you mentioned, we shared a bit of common ground during our time as MSMs at Shopify, and what an amazing experience that was. For those listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with me, I’m one of the co‑founders at a company called StoreHero, and we help ecommerce brands understand where they’re actually making profit and what they can do to improve their numbers.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, this is amazing. You actually grew up in a family business. I did a little creeping on your LinkedIn profile and found out you had a family ecommerce business. Can you talk a bit about that? I think it’s interesting that you had this family direct‑to‑consumer business, then pivoted into the Shopify world, and obviously saw something in that family business and at Shopify that led you to build StoreHero.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, it’s a really organic story, to be honest with you. My mother has an ecommerce business that’s still going today. It’s WowWee.ie—personalized baby gifts, christening gifts, that kind of thing. That business was set up in 2004 as ecommerce‑first which, in the west of Ireland—for your listeners, that’s where my accent is from—was not exactly a huge portion of retail revenue at the time.

Thomas Gleeson:
But it was an amazingly formative experience for me. We grew up hearing about broken checkouts, bounce rates, learning about hero images and samples, all that kind of thing. That business grew for, I think, 11 years on SEO only, which is a bit of a pipe dream for anybody running ecommerce today. I started running Facebook ads back in 2015, and the issue I ran into wasn’t anything to do with an algorithm or CPA—it was my dad. My dad is an accountant and a bookkeeper, and he ran the numbers for our business.

Thomas Gleeson:
I quickly ran into a trap that’s quite reminiscent of a lot of ecommerce businesses: the bookkeeper or accountant is the one making the financial decisions, and the founder is often very marketing‑led and very good at product. They’re often very different people. Getting those two people on the same page was certainly a challenge for me. It forced me to build a spreadsheet on a weekly basis to show him that, as I was spending money, it wasn’t just driving more revenue, but it was actually profitable. That was a really painfully manual experience, but one I learned an awful lot from.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, that’s amazing. I always like to do a contrast and compare. Shopify clearly has analytics, people have the GA4 tag installed, and there’s been lots of conversation about the disparity between Shopify’s analytics, Google Analytics, and paid social channels. Everyone’s taking attribution for different things at different times in different windows. Not all sessions are being accounted for. What’s your thought on how StoreHero does its analytics and how it shares data with a merchant to make decisions versus these other systems that are all firing on their own?

Thomas Gleeson:
Sure. The first thing is to look at how most businesses quantify success on a weekly basis. Typically, it’s logging into Shopify: are sales red or green, up or down? Then we log into Meta and Google and look at their return‑on‑ad‑spend figures. Both of those are extremely useful metrics. Your sales figures are obviously paramount within Shopify, and how you’re getting on within the ad platform is extremely important.

Thomas Gleeson:
The challenge I see is how they make decisions. ROAS, revenue—those business‑level ROAS figures don’t necessarily tell you if you’re actually profitable. You can have a great ROAS and still be losing a ton of money. I’ve personally seen it hundreds of times. It’s extremely subjective. A 3x ROAS is phenomenal for one business and absolutely terrible for another.

Thomas Gleeson:
What we’re ultimately trying to say to businesses is: the signal you build the business around is ultimately the business you’re going to build. If you’re a business with aspirations to grow profitably and sustainably, monitoring and tracking profit on a weekly basis is incredibly important. Every ecommerce business doing seven, eight, nine figures that is profitable understands that on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. It’s something they track every day.

Thomas Gleeson:
To answer your question more directly: we’ve built a profit intelligence system that brings in Shopify data and all your marketing channels. But the missing piece is that we don’t always think about product costs, packing, shipping, transaction, fulfillment, and return fees. I call these the paper cuts. They come out of every single order you fulfill, and they’re not captured in your Facebook or Google ROAS.

סטיב האט:
No, that’s true. That’s absolutely true. So those are some of the leaks I was thinking of.

Thomas Gleeson:
בטוח.

סטיב האט:
People don’t necessarily account for those when looking at true profitability. For a lot of the brands you work with, where does this profit leaking come from that founders don’t fully understand? They’re thinking about ROAS, revenue, and marketing efficiency.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, and before I dive into that, I don’t have a massive problem with ROAS. I think it’s actually a phenomenal metric—directionally very interesting. Even for our own family business, I still track it every day. The issue is the prism I use to make decisions for our business and our customers’ businesses.

Thomas Gleeson:
It isn’t a North Star to run your business if your aspiration is to be profitable. That’s the conflation we need to break out of. Whether you have an MTA solution in place or you’re just tracking in‑platform ROAS, they’re all interesting, great metrics to track—but they are not the metric to build your business on for all the reasons we’re talking about.

Thomas Gleeson:
In terms of where the leaks happen, it’s probably twofold. First, the leaks come from not fully understanding your numbers with all those variable costs going in. Second, there’s analysis paralysis and opportunity cost, because we’re making commercial decisions based on marketing data.

Thomas Gleeson:
Ecommerce has evolved. If we go back to pre‑2022, Facebook ads were a lot cheaper and it was a marketing game. You could be good at product or marketing and you could sell almost anything on Facebook. That has changed. Ad costs have gone up, and inflation has increased operating expenses to run a business. It has evolved into a numbers or finance game wrapped in a marketing cloak.

Thomas Gleeson:
The biggest change for successful brands today is that they’re obviously working extremely hard on marketing, but they build an underlying financial and margin model first, and then make sure the marketing works within those parameters.

סטיב האט:
I see. Another question: I read on your website, and I’ve seen you talk about this on LinkedIn—you’re pretty bold, and I agree with it because I’ve read some of the case studies. You’re telling founders they can see a 10–20% lift in contribution margin, usually in the first two or three months. What actually changes in how they run their business so they can see that 10–20% lift?

Thomas Gleeson:
Sure. Before I explain that, you mentioned contribution margin and I don’t want to gloss over it. It’s really important. Contribution margin is your profit after your marketing and all your COGS. As an ecommerce operator, I want to maximize that number. That’s the number I’m gunning for. It’s not necessarily sales or revenue; I want to maximize the most profit after marketing, whether that means spending more or less.

Thomas Gleeson:
So how do brands increase profit by 10–20% in the first 60–90 days? Often there are very easy opportunities. When we plug in a brand for the first time, on onboarding calls we usually know a lot more about the business within 10 minutes than the founders do. That’s no shade to anyone; we’re just looking at the business through a financial lens all the time.

Thomas Gleeson:
Sometimes it’s as simple as dialing up spend because they’re massively over‑efficient. We have founders chasing the highest return and efficiency rate possible. That’s not how you grow a big and profitable business. It’s about finding the balance between spending the maximum amount of money to drive maximum profit, versus maximizing efficiency at the expense of profit.

Thomas Gleeson:
Understanding where you sit on that curve is often a really easy lever to pull. Sometimes that means increasing budgets; sometimes it means pulling them back. The other piece is stuff that’s going wrong in the business that they didn’t know about. We have a detailed breakdown at SKU and order level. We often find brands with discount codes live they weren’t aware of, shipping incorrectly priced to Germany, or duties not accounted for on orders to Australia.

Thomas Gleeson:
There are so many different margin paper cuts that need to be taken into account. Ecommerce is dynamic; it’s changing all the time. Not everyone keeps up with it daily. Usually there are three to ten simple margin improvements that can be made quickly and easily, and then the onus is on the founder to implement them. Once we have a call and outline what they are and the potential impact, people are generally pretty motivated to get to work.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, this is amazing. I know the StoreHero platform has a lot of data and a lot of parts to it, and I think merchants can approach it with a crawl‑walk‑run mindset. You don’t need to fully utilize the entire platform at once. More advanced operators doing 5, 10, even 50 million can see full value because they have the business acumen and processes, but they don’t have the framework. You have the framework for all the divisions inside an ecommerce brand.

סטיב האט:
One thing I found interesting is the sales and profit reporting. That’s very compelling—it’s not just sales, but the profit side. What I also thought was interesting, especially for C‑suite and founders, is how they think in QBRs and quarterly views: “What are we doing next? What’s our forecast? What are our goals? What are we working toward?” Can you talk about that part of the platform? Goals and forecasting are interesting in that you can forward‑think, offer insights into where you’re headed—or not—and then course‑correct as needed.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, more than happy to. We have a forecasting product in StoreHero. It’s funny—it wasn’t something we built because people were screaming for it.

סטיב האט:
ימין.

Thomas Gleeson:
It came from a problem we kept seeing. A lot of founders will relate to this. You log into your dashboard and reports and see 50 different acronyms that all mean different things. They’re all going red and green. I’m an ecommerce founder dealing with support tickets, inventory, customer service—I don’t have time to upskill and understand what all these acronyms mean and why they’re important.

Thomas Gleeson:
It was born out of necessity. We needed a mechanism to hold each number in StoreHero accountable to a commercial goal for the business. As a founder, I want to log in, see what’s working and what’s wrong, work on what’s wrong, and do more of what’s right. I don’t want to spend a full day trying to figure out what a number means and how it relates to another number on a different page.

Thomas Gleeson:
When you log in now, we’ve aligned the forecasting with the profit‑first approach. A lot of forecasts for ecommerce brands start with picking a revenue target for the year, a marketing budget, and then costs. Profit is whatever profit is. It’s never really a target at the start of the year, and we thought that was wrong.

Thomas Gleeson:
For context, a good ecommerce business today generates about 8–12% net profit, and it’s a very cash‑intensive business. Margins are pretty thin. It doesn’t make sense to consistently optimize toward revenue targets in a thin‑margin game. So we flipped it on its head and broke it down into four key areas. We don’t ask businesses for a marketing budget. We think that’s the biggest variable you shouldn’t set up front. You should work backwards from four key things you know to be true.

Thomas Gleeson:
First, your net sales target for the year. If you don’t know that, you definitely should. Second, your cost of goods—this is the one everyone gets wrong, and when we hook a brand up, this is the one they usually say “this isn’t correct.” Cost of goods for an ecommerce business is your products plus packing, shipping, transaction, and 3PL fees, all bundled together as one. It’s not just your product cost; it’s all those extra variables.

Thomas Gleeson:
Third, your fixed costs that you need to cover: payroll, rent, insurance, fees, software, and so on. The last piece is the one brands usually don’t know, and I love asking this question: what’s your profit target for the year? You’re a founder, you’ve set this business up to be profitable, and you have no target for where that needs to be at the end of the year. It just is what it is once you get to December.

Thomas Gleeson:
We force people to pick a profit target. Once we have those four pieces of information, it shows you what your marketing budget can be, the efficiency rate you can run at, and it does a quick check of the last two to three years to see if that efficiency rate and budget even stack up or if you’re being overly ambitious. We’re helping founders create a profit‑first forecast that aligns with their commercial and seasonality goals.

סטיב האט:
I see. It comes back to the old saying—whatever it is—that what you don’t track, you can’t affect.

Thomas Gleeson:
One hundred percent. It’s crazy. But yeah, to your point, it was born out of necessity. People log in and can see the good, bad, and ugly, accounting for seasonality and commercial goals. To be honest, it was probably one of the best features we ever launched.

סטיב האט:
I saw it and thought it was notable. It’s something that’s always on my mind too. I think a lot of founders would never set a yearly profit target. They always talk about revenue and use a lot of the other acronyms you mentioned, which are important, but at the end of the day, you’re right.

סטיב האט:
Sometimes a business can have 4x ROAS but is barely breaking even. You’re saying a good business is running 8–12% total net profit. It’s pretty scary. The other thing I want to talk about is AI. It’s on a lot of people’s radar, and a lot of people are using different tools. I see you’ve connected two parts of the platform I want to talk about. You have an MCP server now going over to Claude, and from within Claude you can bring in data or pull data out of StoreHero as a chat solution, query it, and show artifacts. I think that’s really neat.

סטיב האט:
I want to talk about that in a second. But you also have AI Insights. You’re clearly using a few different large language models to understand all the data you’re bringing into your data warehouse from within StoreHero. You have AI Insights built into the platform for people who don’t want to use an external tool like Claude connected to StoreHero. Can you talk about what AI Insights is as a solution, and then we’ll transition to the new MCP server you’ve built?

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, no problem at all. We just spoke about the forecast. We built that out, and it goes deeper than just showing you financials like sales up or down. It goes deeper into new customers, whether we’re on or off target for revenue, and so on. We put that in front of customers last year and they were happy with it, but the next challenge and pushback was: “Okay, this is great. Now I know I missed my new‑customer target by 23% last week. What am I going to do about it and why did this happen?”

Thomas Gleeson:
People don’t want to do the heavy lifting. We have all the data, so we decided to make it as easy as possible to understand exactly what went wrong, support it with data, and give them next steps. The AI Insights in the platform essentially triangulate between the forecast and what actually happened last week—sales targets, revenue targets, all the way down to bounce‑rate targets, conversion‑rate targets, AOV targets, and new customers. It compares what should have happened to what actually happened.

Thomas Gleeson:
Then it breaks it down into two key areas: what’s working and what could be improved. It tells you, of the metrics that worked well and the ones that didn’t, why you hit or missed that target and backs it up with the data supporting that number. For example, if you miss on new customers, it shows you your Meta spend, Google spend, bounce rates, efficiency rates, CPMs, new‑customer AOV, gross margin, discount rates, and so on. It contextually understands the numbers related to the miss on new customers within StoreHero.

Thomas Gleeson:
Then we give you baseline recommendations. On the new‑customer front, you missed by 20%—think about increasing that discount code, bundling two products together, or dialing up a Meta campaign where you’re more efficient than you need to be.

סטיב האט:
I get you. That makes a lot of sense.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, it’s good. It’s a really easy layer for anyone who’s a bit apprehensive about AI and their ability to get set up. There’s no setup needed for that. It just works out of the box.

סטיב האט:
Right. Now let’s flip over to this MCP server. Maybe explain to listeners what an MCP server actually is, and why you created one and connected it from Claude—either with Claude Code or Claude for work—over to StoreHero. What is it, and what early use cases are you finding exciting right now?

Thomas Gleeson:
Sure. For anyone listening who’s not sure what MCP is, you’ve probably seen it floating around on LinkedIn or Twitter. It’s essentially a connector that allows you to chat to Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini about whatever you’re connected to. We built that over the last few weeks and released it about six to eight weeks ago. It’s been the most positive product feedback we’ve ever had. The highest amount of referrals in the last couple of weeks has come from this.

Thomas Gleeson:
People are using it as a second business brain. A lot of the metrics I’ve spoken about will resonate with people listening, but there are also people thinking, “I don’t fully understand those numbers. I don’t know what all these metrics mean.” They feel that’s holding them back, which is understandable.

Thomas Gleeson:
When we onboarded customers over the last couple of years, there was an enablement layer to educate users not just on how the product worked, but on how all the numbers related to each other. The MCP now understands all that context deeply. We built a bunch of custom skills which, for anyone listening, are essentially prompts to get the most out of your StoreHero data in Claude. The most powerful part is that people are asking questions in language they understand and getting extremely comprehensive answers in layman’s terms that clearly explain why something happened.

Thomas Gleeson:
It provides really interesting causal insights into relationships between numbers, and most importantly, it helps you make decisions about what to do next to make your business more profitable.

סטיב האט:
It’s interesting. Over the years I think of other analytics tools like Grow or Glew and others that have been around for a while. The challenge they always had—and I think this MCP fixes a lot of it—is that they created default dashboards based on what they thought were generally acceptable use cases. But every business is different, and the team member responsible for a certain area had to spend a lot of energy and time figuring out dashboards so they could analyze data and make decisions.

סטיב האט:
With MCP, you’re bringing in data from Shopify, social channels, GA, and other inputs. Now you have a central repository of data plus your own underlying processes, and you can query against that and create artifacts instantly based on what you need in natural language. It’s a completely different departure from building dashboards in the past.

Thomas Gleeson:
I think the proof needs to be in the pudding. There are a lot of people—myself included not too long ago—spending hours in Claude where everything’s cool, shiny, and fun, but nothing overly material comes out of it. The proof is in how teams are now using it.

Thomas Gleeson:
One quick example: a client I spoke with last week gets their StoreHero profit‑scale report sent to them each morning. It aligns with the forecast they have. Their 30‑minute daily standup is all about where they’re on track and off track for every number, and they interrogate it. For example, if they missed on repeat customers, Claude goes in and looks at the Klaviyo flows, the campaigns sent, email signups, and so on. She told me they’re less focused on individual metrics and Claude has helped them understand the levers that improve those metrics.

Thomas Gleeson:
On dashboards and other tools of the past, we’ve moved from a world of spreadsheets to dashboards to AI. The need hasn’t changed—everyone is still trying to understand their business—but the interface has changed dramatically, especially in the last six months. That business in particular is now interrogating things they never would have looked at before.

Thomas Gleeson:
She also said they feel much more empowered to push back on their agencies. Agencies and software companies aren’t necessarily in the merchant’s shoes every day. We often speak a slightly different language, sometimes intentionally. She told me they feel a lot more empowered to push back on the agency in language the agency understands. It’s created a much better agency relationship because the agency is delighted the client is now up to speed on how decisions are made.

Thomas Gleeson:
The brand is delighted because they have a much deeper understanding of their business and what’s driving it. She told me StoreHero used to be the place they checked every day to see how they were doing, and now it’s becoming the way work gets done. Their task list every morning for each team member is a derivative of the daily standup. It’s been the first month of the year where they’ve massively crushed their forecast after a previously bad year. She said it would have taken months to get to that level of insight before. For me, that was really encouraging to hear.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, it’s interesting seeing that habit forming with a team that goes to StoreHero as the starting point every morning. For me, I’m in the media business. I have a daily planner and think about what’s on my schedule, what the high‑value “eat the frog” task is. Today was newsletter release and podcast recording, so I knew what I had to do. My source of truth lives in Claude right now. I can see how people would be in StoreHero because that’s the pulse of the business.

סטיב האט:
I want to pivot slightly. You made a good comment about the agency side. There are a lot of agency partners and smaller self‑employed partners that manage accounts. They could be managing ad accounts or overall strategy. I find it interesting that you have an agency option available, and I can see the long‑term benefits for larger agencies. I think of Milk Bottle and a few others I researched. It’s interesting how these agency partners are differentiating themselves and finding better clients by positioning their offering.

סטיב האט:
They’re not necessarily saying they use StoreHero as the product, but their positioning is different. They use it to attract and retain better clients because they have a better process. Can you talk about successful agency partners and how they use your platform and the marketing that comes from that? StoreHero can run in the background while the front‑end makes the agency look like a true business partner.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah. It’s no secret that profitability in ecommerce is a huge, very topical issue. The challenge over the last couple of years has been that some agencies and brands found it difficult to get up to speed on what all the acronyms and numbers mean. That’s evaporated now. It’s table stakes. Every agency needs to understand this at this point.

Thomas Gleeson:
You’re right. A number of our agency partners have been on this podcast—not too long ago, including Matt from Sunnyside. Those guys are crushing it. But it’s changed completely. For most brands today, the heaviest line item on the P&L is Meta and Google spend. Whoever is responsible for deploying that capital is essentially the largest investor.

Thomas Gleeson:
In a world where margins are getting compressed due to all the factors we mentioned, brands are more conscious than ever that the agency or media buyer they work with needs to understand the commercial objectives of the business. In no other industry would the largest investor not be held financially accountable each week. Contribution margin is the ecommerce equivalent of that.

Thomas Gleeson:
Agencies using this in their pitches are winning more business and holding on to clients. I actually got pushback from an agency a few months ago. They said, “What if we plug this in and the client doesn’t like the profit numbers?” I said, have that conversation now, because the churn is coming—you’re just kicking the can down the road six months.

Thomas Gleeson:
Agencies that surface numbers, even when they aren’t great, have an honest and transparent conversation up front. They become a domain expert not just in ecommerce and marketing, but also in commercials and the business itself. Clients will find that difficult to replicate if they go to another agency.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, I know. That’s really cool. I’m glad you have that service and that positioning. At the end of the day, honest feedback to your potential client, if you’re an agency founder, makes complete sense.

סטיב האט:
I love that because of the platform you have different options—plain‑language profit briefs, forecasting, goal pacing. I don’t think agency founders are using that kind of language at all. They’re still stuck in 2022–2023 dashboards, thinking about revenue and ROAS, which are important, but not as much about profit‑first. These are extra slices you can add to your marketing so clients say, “Oh, you’re different. You do things differently.” That helps them acquire better customers.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. It’s a conversion booster. It’s becoming table stakes and a bigger part of the conversation. When we started StoreHero in 2022, trying to get anyone to talk or care about profit was more trouble than I’d like to admit. In an increasingly difficult ecommerce environment, it’s becoming table stakes to focus on it.

Thomas Gleeson:
Again, going back to that point: the signal you build your business around is the business you build. You have to make sure you have the right North Star. In a world where, as you mentioned, you live in Claude every day for your media business, I think that’s where everybody is going to be living. Right now, anyone can connect their Shopify and Meta to Claude through an MCP.

Thomas Gleeson:
The challenge is: is that going to give you the right answers on your actual economics? If you’re pulling from multiple data sources, we’re seeing hallucinations. It doesn’t have all the cost data. It’s like giving someone a car with no fuel—how far is it going to get you, and is it reliable?

Thomas Gleeson:
We’ve moved from spreadsheets to dashboards to AI helping us make decisions. We’re quickly moving to a world where agents are going to start making more decisions on your behalf. I think it’s absolutely critical for those agents to understand your costs, margins, and forecast so the agent knows your economics. It knows when you’re flying, when you’re crushing it, when it needs to pull back, and that it’s not flying blind. If it is flying blind and you have an agent running your store, then you are too.

סטיב האט:
Yeah, I think that’s the advantage of your MCP versus connecting directly to just a paid‑media account or just Shopify. It’s not that the data is bad, but it’s siloed. You’re not seeing the full scope of the business from a profit lens.

Thomas Gleeson:
Exactly. It’s going to lack context over time with spend changes or margin changes. If it’s all in one place, the MCP can leverage the work we’ve done over the last few years. The AI part we’re doing now is actually the easy part. The hard part has been building a rock‑solid ETL—fancy name for an elaborate dashboard database—that combines ecommerce, marketing, and finance.

Thomas Gleeson:
Claude isn’t going hunting for all the data; it’s surfacing the data already in that connector quickly, accurately, and on time.

סטיב האט:
I think the term for what you’re building on top of these frontier models like Claude and OpenAI is a “harness.” You let the model do what it does, but you have this harness plus the MCP, which really makes the difference. I think that’s your superpower now.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah, it is. In terms of user numbers, we’re modeling out usage. The MCP stuff is new for us, and it’s a really interesting time to be in this business. We’re seeing dashboard usage down from our power users by about 70%, but tool calls within the MCP versus dashboard usage are up by five or six times, which is incredible for us to see.

Thomas Gleeson:
We’re quickly getting into a situation where everybody will be living in Claude all day, asking it questions. Claude is going to become your business brain. We have all your ecommerce and marketing data, and we’re even seeing brands throw left‑field questions at it around things we never did in the past, like persona mapping.

Thomas Gleeson:
The orders page we built, honestly, was never really looked at because nobody is going to scroll through 10,000 orders from last month. But it’s a perfect use case for Claude. It has timestamps on orders, cities, discount codes used, products purchased together. The persona mapping it’s able to do with that—when it can causally pull in GA4 and Search Console data—builds a really detailed persona map of what clients care about, what they search, what they purchase, and when they purchase. It’s becoming that business brain, and we’re only getting started in terms of what this will look like over the next few months.

סטיב האט:
I know, it’s wild. I’m glad we’re chatting today. It’s so interesting; I love being on the forefront of this technology. Another question: I always get warm and fuzzy when I hear success stories of brands using different platforms. I’ve gone to your website and seen a lot there.

סטיב האט:
Is there any merchant you’ve worked with whose life was one way pre‑StoreHero, then after implementing the platform, things changed? What does “great” look like for them today? You can call them out specifically or speak anecdotally.

Thomas Gleeson:
Yeah. There’s a case study on our website—I won’t name which one—but it was a brand we took on early. It was more about education. He was very much in the ROAS world but had a great brand, doing maybe two to three million dollars a year.

Thomas Gleeson:
We started working together, got all his numbers plugged in, and I could see he was highly over‑efficient, which is probably the best possible problem you can have. We did some education on that signal piece: what signal are we going to scale this business on and where do we want to get?

Thomas Gleeson:
He was conscious he didn’t want to scale for the sake of scaling and end up in a cash‑flow hole or put himself out of business. He needed the business to be profitable and sustainable. He didn’t have external capital on board. The business today is at about 30 million. I visited last year in Australia and he told me about the big new house he’d just bought. For me, that was incredible because we were obviously not the only reason he grew, but we were a big part of that early success.

Thomas Gleeson:
Being able to help him reevaluate how aggressive or non‑aggressive to be at different times of the year was huge. We were a very small and scrappy startup—and still are to some extent—but seeing that journey, where he changed his mindset from just looking at sales and ROAS every day to focusing on profitability first, was powerful.

Thomas Gleeson:
To give a quick explainer: he was able to spend almost ten times more money each month at a worse ROAS than he had in the past, but the absolute profit dollars were infinitely higher. He had a perception he needed to hit a certain ROAS target each month, and if he fell below that, he’d pull back ad spend. That sounds logical and reasonable, but it was the biggest blocker in getting from A to B.

Thomas Gleeson:
He has a phenomenal team and product—you don’t get to that scale without that. But there are hundreds of brands in that position with great product asking why they can’t scale and push on. The main question I’d ask is: what are you tracking each week? Does the North Star you make investment decisions around actually align with being a profitable business? If it does, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, take a harder look and understand why you’re optimizing for that number.

סטיב האט:
I see. That makes complete sense. Another question: the connection to Shopify. I see you have a Shopify app. Talk about the onboarding process when someone installs the app. What’s going on in the background, and what are steps A, B, C, and D post‑ingestion of data? Then let’s talk about the sweet spot of merchant. I see you have a free option and then rates based on annual GMV that scale up accordingly.

סטיב האט:
So let’s talk about the onboarding process and what people can expect, and then pricing and the ideal client.

Thomas Gleeson:
Sure. You can download it in the Shopify App Store—just search “StoreHero.” It’s very quick and easy to onboard. We made a big effort to make onboarding as easy as possible because if you don’t make it frictionless, nobody will do it.

Thomas Gleeson:
You can onboard Shopify literally with one click. It then asks you to authenticate and log into your Meta, Google, GA4, and Klaviyo accounts. You can get onboarded in about five minutes. Shopify data typically takes about 24 hours to sync, depending on store size—smaller stores maybe four or five hours.

Thomas Gleeson:
We generally jump on a call with every merchant to answer questions. It works well out of the box, but as anyone listening knows, their business is probably very different from every other ecommerce business. We just want to make sure everything is configured correctly. We’ve onboarded over a thousand stores at this point. I won’t say we’ve seen it all, but we’ve seen a lot, so in 99.9% of cases we can find a workaround if something is a bit different about your business.

סטיב האט:
Okay, very cool. And as far as pricing and the sweet spot of merchant?

Thomas Gleeson:
We have a free tier for marketing platforms—some brands don’t want Shopify connected; they just want to see all marketing metrics in one place, and that’s completely free. For paid plans, we have two models. One is software‑only with full email support. The second is Elite Support. It’s the exact same product for everyone, but we’ve found many clients want us to act as a quasi‑consultant.

Thomas Gleeson:
We’ve done thousands of calls, so we see a lot of patterns. Clients often want us on calls to explain what we’re seeing in the market, how to train their team, and how to use it in weekly meetings. We do quite a bit of this during onboarding for everyone if they want it. Some clients want us to stay on for another couple of months or even years as a consultant and extension of the team.

סטיב האט:
I see. Very cool. One question I didn’t ask, which I think is important—you mentioned Klaviyo and such. I always like to hear from the founder about the intentionality around playing nicely with other technology. As you know from being an MSM, one of the first things we did when we got a new account was an app audit: “Why did you choose all of these? Let’s go through them from top to bottom.” There are instant savings when you do that.

סטיב האט:
So many times you find a forecasting tool for 500 bucks a month that no one uses because the person who installed it left the company. It’s funny how quickly you can find savings. There’s the app‑audit side and private injections into Shopify from other sources. What’s your view on apps in general and playing nicely with your solution?

Thomas Gleeson:
I think the vast majority of brands have far too many apps, probably for the reasons you just mentioned. Shopify is an incredible product. People don’t always have time to watch Editions every year, but a lot of what they’re paying for in apps is being released by Shopify. Not all of it, but more and more.

Thomas Gleeson:
From an integration standpoint, if it makes sense to integrate, we’ll look at it. We’re evaluating bringing in support and reviews to enrich Claude. We want to give Claude the maximum amount of data at all times. Those two are probably next on the list.

Thomas Gleeson:
We’re looking at a few other areas you’ll probably hear about over the next few weeks. We wouldn’t integrate, for example, an add‑to‑cart app—it doesn’t directly fit what we’re doing each week. But if we think something will enrich the data set in StoreHero, it’s definitely on the table.

סטיב האט:
Lovely. This is really cool. What do you believe are some next steps? There’s the free option for early‑stage brands just getting product‑market fit. They can try it by connecting ad platforms. For those firmly mid‑market to enterprise—which seems to be more your wheelhouse, given the amount of data, incrementality, and current ad spend on social, plus COGS and other details—what do you believe the next steps are for listeners? I understand you might have a special promotion for my listeners.

Thomas Gleeson:
Absolutely. For anybody still listening, thank you very much—I hope you’ve enjoyed it and got something out of it. If you’re interested in learning more, we’re going to offer a 20% lifetime discount for anyone who comes on a call with us and mentions they listened to this podcast or emails us with the word “Fastlane.” On top of the 20% discount, we’ll do a free AI training session for you and your team. We’ll give you a look under the hood at what we’re working on, what we’re seeing in the market, and, like we were talking about before the call, workflows and habits—how to make sure your team is aligned on using AI weekly, not just to look at numbers but to make decisions and improve results.

סטיב האט:
This is amazing. Thank you so much for that. I massively appreciate it. You can’t see video right now, and I joke on the show that if you listen to my episodes, you know how many pages of notes I take while I’m chatting with somebody. I’m more than two pages in—I actually went onto my daily planner page and wrote a few things down.

סטיב האט:
It’s been a great episode. I’ve learned a lot. I think you’re building something really impactful. I want to thank my friend Adam Finan, who’s a friend of yours and a current MSM. He made the warm introduction today. Shoutout to him for introducing me to you and what you’re building. I think it’s a really neat product.

סטיב האט:
I love that you’re progressive enough to say habits are changing with these frontier models. If you’re a ChatGPT user or a Claude user, it’s interesting that you have an MCP now. I know it’s iterating, but that’s where a lot of the use cases are coming from, plus the platform itself. I think you’re building something really neat and impactful. Thank you for coming on the show, offering the free AI training and 20% off. It’s been very eye‑opening for me and I want to wish you continued success in your business.

Thomas Gleeson:
Massively appreciate your time, Steve, and thanks very much for having me on.

סטיב האט:
All right, have yourself a great afternoon. Well, that’s it for today’s episode. I’d like to thank you personally for being a loyal listener of eCommerce Fastlane. It’s my hope that this podcast is offering you a ton of value through growth strategies, tactics, and exclusive insider tips on the best Shopify apps and marketing platforms, all with my personal goal to help you build, manage, grow, and scale a successful and thriving company powered by Shopify.

סטיב האט:
תודה שהשקעת מזמנך היום והאזנת לתוכנית. אני כל כך גאה ומתרגש שיש לך חשיבה של צמיחה ואתה לומד כל הזמן. אני באמת מעריך אותך ואת המסע היזמי שלך. תהנה משארית השבוע ותמשיך לשגשג עם Shopify.