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Hey Fastlane Insiders! š
Here's something most Shopify importers haven't noticed yet: a government refund portal quietly opened on Monday that could send six figures back to brands that imported goods into the US between April 2025 and February 2026. Once the setup is done, the filing itself takes about five minutes.
That's one piece of a bigger theme running through this edition. There's real money sitting in places most operators never audit: refund portals they haven't logged into, campaigns their dashboards misread, conversions their pixels stopped counting around the last iOS update. None of it requires a bigger ad budget. All of it rewards operators who look at what they already have before they try to scale what they don't.
This week draws from a conversation with Matt Raminick, who ran digital for a $400M portfolio at Pacsun before founding Sunnyside, a profit-first growth partner for $1M to $50M lifestyle brands. Plus, the BottleKeeper playbook behind a $60M brand built with a team of four, and the CBP filing most Shopify importers have never heard of.
Three places to look. Three audits worth running this week. Zero new ad spend required.
Hereās whatās inside this weekās edition:
š§ This Week's Podcast ā The audit Matt runs first when a brand's dashboards look green, and the P&L is bleeding.
š” Knowledge Drops ā The four-person team behind a $60M brand, and the government filing most Shopify importers are going to miss.
š„ Tool of the Week ā Wetracked closes the conversion gap your ad platforms already gave up on.
š” Industry Pulse ā Meta's one-click CAPI, Amazon's next Anthropic commitment, and Gallup's AI at work numbers.
Let's jump in. š
š§ New Podcast Episode! š§
The ROAS Lie: The Audit 7 Figure Brands Are Running This Week
Spending more on ads than ever. Watching contribution shrink anyway. Somewhere between the green dashboards and the bank statement, the math stopped adding up, and "add another zero to the budget" keeps feeling like the wrong answer.
This week I sat down with Matt Raminick, founder and CEO of Sunnyside, who spent two decades running digital for brands like Quiksilver, Volcom, and Pacsun (including digital strategy on a $400M portfolio) before building a profit first growth partner for $1M to $50M lifestyle brands. He audits merchant ad accounts constantly. The pattern is the same almost every time, and it's not what most founders think.
Here's what we unpacked:
The ROAS number that looks like a win on Monday and a loss on Friday. Matt shares the first place he looks, and why a "successful" campaign can quietly print negative contribution week after week without anyone noticing.
The Profit360 framework (and why it starts with finance, not media). Most growth frameworks run the other direction. Matt explains why that's been backwards for the last three years and what changes when you flip the flow.
The Brixton Q1 result, and what the team refused to do to get there. Beating the goal by 25 to 30% didn't come from spending more on winners. It came from a counterintuitive move most operators skip because it feels like pulling back, not leaning in.
The two signals Matt checks before he touches creative, channels, or spend. When he audits a new account, these are the first two lines in his diagnostic. They usually reveal the hidden losses inside the first thirty minutes.
Why creative velocity is now the bottleneck, not targeting. Meta's shift to Andromeda quietly changed the math on everything. Matt breaks down what "enough creative" actually looks like at different spend levels, and why most brands are starving their accounts without realizing it.
If you're running $10K or $500K a month in paid, this conversation reframes what "winning" actually means.
LISTEN NOW ā The audit that reveals whether your top ROAS campaign is quietly your biggest hidden loss.
How Jennifer Anistonās LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Anistonās brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
š” Knowledge Drops of the Week š”
The $60M, Four Person Playbook Most Founders Are Ignoring
Most founders still equate scale with headcount. Adam Callinan spent three and a half years proving the opposite. He took BottleKeeper from zero to eight figures before hiring his first employee, then cleared $60M in annual revenue with a team of four total, before exiting to Wind Point Partners in 2021.
What makes it worth a read this week is his 2026 update. Adam is now building Pentane, the profitability software he wishes he'd had while scaling BottleKeeper, and he walks through exactly what he'd do differently, drawing on everything he's learned from two exits and his current build.
Here's what's inside:
The single hiring question that kept overhead near zero through the fastest growth years. Adam asked one thing every time a problem looked like it needed another human. It sounds simple on paper. Applied consistently for three years, it quietly built the operating leverage that funded everything else.
The metric he builds every ad campaign around (and it's not ROAS). This is the same profit first lens Matt Raminick uses on this week's podcast, applied at the campaign math level. Adam explains how he starts with a number per order and works backward into the budget, instead of the other way around.
The pre launch signal that told him to push, not pull back. Most founders torch their first year of runway guessing whether a product has traction. Adam had a specific test on a specific platform with a specific result that gave him the green light. Every founder he works with now runs the same test before spending on inventory or ads.
The full breakdown digs into the automations that replaced hires, the referral structure that actually moved the needle, why he delayed retail on purpose, and the math that kept compounding instead of cracking.
READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN ā What Adam would do differently if he were building his next $10M+ brand in 2026.
The Five Minute Filing Most Shopify Importers Will Miss
This isn't a tax tweak. It's real money.
In February 2026, the Supreme Court struck down the IEEPA tariffs collected between April 2025 and February 2026. On Monday at 8am EST, US Customs and Border Protection opened the CAPE portal within the ACE Secure Data Portal, allowing importers to finally claim refunds for duties they have already paid.
The scale is the part operators keep missing. According to CBP, approximately $166 billion was collected under those tariffs from more than 330,000 importers. Phase 1 alone covers roughly $127 billion in claims. If your Shopify brand imported goods during the IEEPA window, there's a real chance you qualify, and once your ACE account is set up, the filing itself takes minutes.
Here's the skinny:
Who actually gets the refund (and who's quietly been shut out so far). Only one specific role on the import can file. If your supplier occupies that role, the refund lands with them, not you, and whether any of it flows through to your P&L is a conversation you need to start this week, not next month.
What Phase 1 actually covers, and what's still waiting for Phase 2. Not every entry qualifies yet. There's a specific window of entries eligible now and a larger pool queued for the next phase, which means the way you prep your records today decides how fast you get paid when the second wave opens.
The real bottleneck isn't the filing. It's the setup. Most brands that qualify will lose weeks on one prerequisite that takes longer than the refund claim itself. The article walks through exactly what to set up first, in what order, and which detail trips up the importers still waiting.
What the refund timeline actually looks like. CBP is signaling roughly sixty to ninety days after an accepted filing. The brands that file in the first cohort are the brands that already did the boring prep work.
If you imported into the US during the IEEPA window, this is arguably the highest return on a one hour project you'll touch this quarter.
READ THE FULL BREAKDOWN ā Who qualifies, what Phase 1 actually covers, and the setup step most brands are losing weeks on.
š„ Tool of the Week š„
Losing 60% of ad spend? Get every conversion back.
Most Shopify and WooCommerce stores are flying blind. iOS updates, cookie blockers, and poor data modeling mean that ad platforms capture fewer than 40% of your conversions. The result? You scale losing ads and wasting your budget.
Wetracked fixes that. Itās the only tracking solution that delivers adblock-proof, 100% accurate conversion data straight into your Meta, TikTok, and Google Ads managers.
On average, stores raise ROAS by 50% in just one week and cut wasted ad spend by 64%.
5-minute setup
No coding required
Trusted by 7,000+ merchants
Rated 4.9/5 from 1440+ reviews
24/7 real-human support
ā” This Weekās Industry Pulse ā”
A handful of updates land that actually move the needle. Here's what made the cutā¦
Meta rolled out an AI-enhanced Pixel on April 15 that auto-enriches events with product data and finally offers one-click Conversions API setup, collapsing the developer work and server costs that kept most Shopify merchants from ever running full CAPI. Advertisers on full CAPI average 17.8% lower cost per result, and existing Pixel users have a 30-day window before the AI feature auto-enables around mid-May. This is the week to decide whether you let Meta host your server-side pipeline or keep a first-party setup that also feeds Klaviyo, Google, and your BI stack.
Amazon committed up to $25 billion in new funding to Anthropic on April 20, with $5 billion going in immediately and Claude becoming natively available inside AWS for every enterprise customer. The quiet read for Shopify merchants: Claude is now the only frontier AI model running on all three hyperscalers (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure), which means the AI surfaces your customers are already using to shop are about to get more capable, more integrated, and harder to opt out of. Your product data, policies, and Answer Engine Optimization discipline matter more this quarter than last.
Gallup's April 13 workforce study shows half of US employees now use AI at work at least occasionally, with 13% using it daily and 41% saying their company has formally integrated AI tools. Only one in ten employees say AI has fundamentally changed how work gets done at their organization, which is the real signal for Shopify founders: individual productivity gains are widespread, but the operators actually redesigning workflows around AI, not bolting it onto existing processes, are the ones pulling ahead this quarter.
Until Next Thursday
Here's what I want you to sit with after this week's editionā¦
Every brand I talk to is focused on getting more.
More traffic.
More ad spend.
More automations.
More launches.
More AI.
But the operators that actually compound over the next twelve months are the ones who first plug the leaks in what they already have. Profit hidden by vanity ROAS. Refunds are sitting in a government portal. Conversions your pixels stopped counting somewhere around the last iOS update.
Every one of those is money you already earned, quietly walking out a side door.
The BottleKeeper playbook works for the same reason Matt's Profit360 framework works. Neither one scales by adding. They both scale by refusing to spend a dollar that can't be proven with math. (read that again, itās important)
This week, please pick one door. Run one audit. Close one leak.
If you've already caught a leak I didn't mention, or you're wrestling with how to apply any of this at your stage, hit reply. I read every response, and those conversations shape what I dig into next.
Happy Thursday and enjoy the rest of your week!
Steve
P.S. Missed a previous edition? Browse the Fastlane Insider Archive for past strategies and playbooks.
