Happy Wednesday.

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Meta: Prediction Markets & Mythos - Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly greenlighting a Polymarket-style smartphone app, internally called "Arena," that would run separate from Meta's social apps but pull users in from them, starting as a points-based game with no real money before cash potentially enters later. The move lands as prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi rack up tens of billions in volume and a wave of legal heat, with states suing the platforms and the current administration suing the states right back.

Anthropic Drops Claude Tag - Anthropic just launched Claude Tag, a beta feature that lets you tag Claude directly inside Slack so it follows your channels, builds context, and jumps in to write PRs, run analysis, or help fix incidents, with an ambient mode that lets it take initiative on its own. Anthropic says 65% of its own product team’s code now comes from it, and the tool is rolling out today for Enterprise and Team plans.

L Catterton Bets on Roz, and the Founder-Led Playbook - L Catterton just took a significant minority stake in Roz, the clean prestige haircare brand from celebrity hairstylist Mara Roszak, which is on track to quadruple sales to $35M this year with retail up 136% and a near 50/50 DTC-to-retail split. Is Roz the category leader in prestige haircare? Or is it Glimmr?

By Colin Dougherty

The accountants who win on Sam's List aren't the ones who say they help everybody. They're the ones who help exactly one kind of person, and convert nearly all of them.

Kimi Green (Co-founder & CEO, Sam's List) has cold-called and vetted hundreds of accountants and financial pros for her review marketplace, and the pattern she sees is blunt: hyper-specific beats broad, every time.

She points to one bookkeeper who works only with law-firm owners. Her leads come in warm and pre-qualified, and she converts close to 100% of them, because when a prospect gets on the call, the reaction is "oh, you get me."

The flip side is brutal. Green says firms constantly tell her they want everyone: "Sam Parr has the richest audience in the world, I want all of it." That's a mistake. She watched a founder who had just sold a company for over $100 million reach out to a firm that claimed on its Sam's List page to serve ultra-high-net-worth clients. He checked their actual website, found no mention of it, and never booked the call. Another founder signed with a firm that said it specialized in e-commerce, then discovered months in that they were quietly outsourcing the work.

The lesson generalizes far beyond accounting. The generalist wins a wider top of funnel and loses the moment a prospect realizes "we work with everyone" means "we don't really work with you."

The specialist who serves only your exact situation closes you almost on contact.

Being for everyone makes you the choice for no one. Pick a niche narrow enough that the right customer feels you were built for them.

Get in front of 1 billion new customers — inside the games they already love.

If you're running a DTC brand and you're not on AppLovin yet, you're leaving money on the table.

AppLovin puts you in front of more than 1 billion new customers inside games like Solitaire, Mahjong, and Candy Crush. More people play mobile games than you'd think — mainstream, financially comfortable household decision-makers. The unlock is the format: full-screen ads holding an average of 35 seconds of real attention.

And it converts. 80% of purchases happen within an hour of the click — incremental demand that turns interest into action fast. You can be live in under an hour and scale to $100K/day in spend within your first week. Wayfair, Dr. Squatch, and plenty of your favorite brands are already on the platform.

Get in before your competitors do.

→ Head to https://www.applovin.com/en/consumer-brands?ECOMMCOWBOY and tell them Ecomm Cowboy sent you.

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See you live,
Ecomm Cowboy Team