Happy Friday!

We’re live on X and YouTube — let’s ride!

Anthropic: Claude Mythos - Anthropic is launching Claude Opus 4.8 — but the real story is Mythos, the market-moving model it's pushing to all customers within weeks. Its advanced cybersecurity capabilities already have executives and world leaders rattled.

Oasis Health App Overhaul - Oasis is overhauling its platform — new scoring algorithm, better ratings transparency, and rebuilt architecture — so most listings will temporarily go dark while its team re-reviews products. Categories will roll back out weekly with the upgrades in place, and the company is actively asking brands and the community to send reporting requests and feedback.

Meta Partners with Marpipe - Meta has partnered with Marpipe to cover half the cost of Marpipe Enterprise for new brands — a rare, limited-time move tied to Meta's push toward video-first catalog ads, which are reportedly driving an average 20% lift. The catch is that the format only pays off with a unique video for every SKU, which is exactly what Marpipe auto-generates and tests for you.

Going viral isn't luck. It's a machine.

I’v spent a lot of time talking about viral brands like they got lucky. Right video, right moment, good timing. After having Lauren Huttner from Pebble explain how she actually does it, I don't buy the luck story anymore.

Her clients hit 50 million views on a campaign. Then they do it again.

That is not an accident.

What flipped my thinking was the accounts. Her creators don't post from big established profiles. A fresh account is a blank slate, and for its first few days the algorithm is busy trying to figure out who you are. So Pebble tells it. They feed each account who to follow, what to repost, what to search for. By the time the platform decides who should see the content, it already believes the account is designed for the target audience of the campaign.

No follower count. No “influencer” fee. Just an account built to win from day one.

This is what most operators get wrong. They go find the creator with the big audience and pay a premium to rent it. Lauren is doing the opposite, and her brands are reporting CPC cut in half.

So if your plan is still to get lucky with one big creator, know that someone already figured out how to rig this game. Virality has a method now. The brands winning are the ones who stopped waiting to get picked and started building the machine.

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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team