Michael Macdonnell

Airlab @joinairlab
COOLIQ @mycooliq

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

I think the distinction is shopping vs procurement. People will happily delegate the stuff they just need to buy.

Discovery, taste and finding things you didn’t know you wanted feels much harder to hand off.

[Kelechi Onyeama @kelechisp]

you have to be extremely SF-pilled to believe most people want an AI agent doing their shopping for them

people actually enjoy browsing, comparing products, window shopping, discovering new things

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@benradack Wonder if the bigger shift is creators becoming more valuable upstream. Harder to fake authenticity with distribution once people know the creator had nothing to do with what was actually built.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@joecarlsonshow Do agents eventually get their own ad layer? Not ads they “see,” but paid commercial signals they can weigh when deciding what to recommend

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

Turns out the best storefront might not be a storefront.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

We are excited to announce we are partnering deeply with Muse to enable agentic checkout with Shop Pay on all Shopify stores, offering people an easy and delightful way to shop and check out with Muse.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@aiyeenpearlc Calling Muse a distribution flex is sharper than the product-launch framing. Same agent pieces, different pipe into billions of sessions. Curious whether that makes merchant agents a Meta surface problem more than a checkout problem.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@firatcand The readiness score is the easy part. Reworking registration, auth and payments so agents can actually transact is the real product work. Curious which of those three is the biggest blocker for merchants.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@therealmcnair Been here with @MyCOOLIQ. We had 1,000 customers on pre-order and pushed delivery twice. Learned quickly that early transparency beats pretending the original timeline still works. Curious how you communicated the delay?

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@rewind02 The AI UGC is the headline. The landing page doing all the converting is the actual system.

Curious how long cold traffic keeps converting once the hooks stop feeling new.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@askOkara Reddit as highest intent before a buy still feels underweighted in most brand plans.

People already did the argument in public. The brand just shows up late.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

That changed how I thought about collabs. The value wasn’t just the 5,000 units we sold or the new audience we reached.

One successful collab made several other products and launches more viable.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

One thing I learned building @MyCOOLIQ: the value of a 5,000-unit collab went way beyond the 5,000 units we sold in under 3 hours.

It gave us leverage across the rest of our manufacturing.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

That committed demand gave us leverage across the rest of the product line. It helped us clear MOQs, launch more seasonal colors and spread components across more SKUs.

We were getting more out of manufacturing infrastructure we’d already invested in.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@IstvanicMarin Such a small detail but it makes the product feel like it was actually made for the person receiving it. Personalization to the audience almost always wins my experience

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@Shopify The fact that merchants don’t need to build anything is the part that gets me. AR shopping gets a lot more interesting when it starts with the catalog that already exists.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@_raymondwill Golf feels like one of the few sports getting culturally wider without losing what made it interesting in the first place. So many different interpretations of the same game right now

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@_raymondwill The chapters framing is interesting. We saw this with @MyCOOLIQ too. By the third or fourth collab, you’re building on something the audience already knows instead of starting from zero.

Would be interesting to know how much their audience grew along the way too.

[Michael Macdonnell @mike_macdonnell]

@MarcusMilione This is how products develop a creative fingerprint. Eventually the detail becomes recognizable before the logo does