GM, This Is Needs to Exist, sharing with you an idea that is the unfair advantage every DTC founder secretly wants.

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They rise, crash, and disappear before you can catch them. Riding one all the way in? That’s the skill. NTE Zero to One helps you turn passing waves into companies that actually stand.

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Here’s what we’ve got for you today.

• Daily Idea - Decode DTC Sales

• Coffee Shop Showdown

Spy on Shopify Rivals Monthly

The smartest brands don’t play fair.
NTE Zero To One can help you build the Shopify intel platform founders are secretly wishing existed.

The One Liner

Shopify spy reports that show you what rivals are cooking.

The 140 character tweet (or X) version

Want the playbook your competitors wish you didn’t have? Monthly intel reports reveal their sales, ads, and growth moves.

The Longer Story Version

The Problem
Running a DTC brand without competitor intel is like showing up to a basketball game blindfolded. You know your own score… but not if the other team just dropped 40 in the 3rd quarter. Shopify data is famously hard to crack, sales, CAC, influencer deals? It’s like peeking into Area 51.

Sure, you can creep on their Instagram ads or guess from package volume, but that’s founder astrology at best. You need hard numbers, clean reports, and trends that show you whether you’re winning or quietly getting smoked.

The Solution
Imagine getting a fresh dossier dropped into your inbox every month. The kind of thing you’d normally have to bribe an ex-employee for:

• Sales Benchmarks: Competitor revenue estimates, month-over-month growth, and who’s tanking.

• Ad Playbook: Screenshots of their best-performing Meta/TikTok ads so you can “borrow inspiration.”

• Influencer Tracker: Which creators they’re paying (and if those campaigns are hitting).

It’s like having CIA briefings for DTC. You don’t just see what they say on socials, you see what’s working behind the curtain.

How We’d Build It

• Stage 1 — Quick & Dirty
  Scrape Shopify signals (themes, checkout IDs, inventory drops) with Scrapy. Combine with Meta Ad Library + TikTok Creative Center. Package as slick PDFs and boom, instant $199/mo subscription.

• Stage 2 — Pro Operator Mode
  Plug data into Supabase with a Bubble dashboard. Enrich with SimilarTech + BuiltWith. Layer in anomaly alerts (“Your rival just doubled ad spend last week”).

• Stage 3 — Big Leagues
  Full SaaS dashboard. Benchmark peer groups. Pipe client data in via Fivetran/Airbyte so they can see “You vs. Market.” GTM through Shopify Plus agencies, DTC founder groups, and bundle as a perk for growth consultants.

Why It Needs to Exist
Because founders don’t want vanity metrics, they want ammo. Mid-size DTC brands are obsessed with spying on each other, who’s scaling, who’s flopping, who just launched a collab. With 4M+ Shopify stores out there, this is the ultimate cheat code.

Instead of flying blind, you get to play chess while your competitors are still fiddling with checkers.

Your idea isn’t starving for talent

It’s dying alone in Google Docs purgatory.

Like:

• That Shopify-killer spreadsheet buried 12 tabs deep.

• The group chat where everyone said “we should totally build this” (then ghosted).

• The domain name you bought at 2 AM that’s now just… sitting there.

NTE Zero to One is your co-pilot, your hype-man, your project manager who doesn’t sleep.
We pull your idea out of the graveyard, spin up a Launch Page, wire it with tools, and get your first real signups.

Not another brainstorm. Not another “someday.”
Actual forward motion.

👉 $49. Less than your Uber Eats order. Way more likely to pay you back.

☕ The Coffee Shop Confession

Scene: Blue Bottle, Tuesday morning. Two DTC founders are in line for $8 lattes.

Founder 1: “We dropped $50K on TikTok ads last month. CPMs are brutal.”
Founder 2: “That’s cute. My competitor spent $200K, I know, because I saw the Shopify intel report.”
Barista (leaning in): “Wait… so you can eavesdrop on brands without stalking their checkout pages? Genius.”

The room goes quiet. Everyone is listening.

The Debate

Pro Side:
DTC is trench warfare. Margins are thin, customer attention is expensive, and one viral competitor can eat your lunch. If you knew what your rivals were selling, who they were paying to promote it, and what ads they were scaling, you’d sleep better (or pivot faster).

This tool is like X-ray vision for commerce. You’re not just guessing who’s hot, you’re seeing receipts. Shopify sales estimates. Ad spend snapshots. Influencer maps. All wrapped in a clean monthly report.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and right now, brands are measuring themselves in isolation. It’s like running a marathon without knowing where the finish line is, or that someone just sprinted past you.

Con Side:
Hold up. Estimating Shopify sales isn’t easy. SimilarWeb, Semrush, StoreLeads, they all try, and they’re wrong half the time. If the data isn’t accurate, founders will roast this service alive. Nobody wants to make a million-dollar decision based on a bad guess.

Also, let’s talk scalability. Scraping ads and sales signals works until APIs get locked down. Then you’re stuck playing whack-a-mole with compliance. And what if the brands themselves push back? Nobody likes feeling spied on, even if they’re doing the same thing in secret.

Moderator’s Take

Both sides have a point. Accuracy matters, if you blow a call, your credibility is toast. But here’s the thing: founders don’t need perfection. They need direction. Even a 70% accurate pulse is better than blindly guessing.

And the appetite is real. DTC brands already obsessively stalk Meta’s Ad Library, TikTok Creative Center, and influencer collabs. They want this data. Right now it’s scattered across tabs and spreadsheets. Bundle it, clean it, deliver it monthly? That’s not just useful, it’s addictive.

Plus, it fits the subscription model beautifully: $199–$499 a month for recurring competitive intel. Agencies could bundle it into client retainers. Investors could use it to benchmark portfolios. Brands could finally stop gaslighting themselves about whether they’re “winning.”

Verdict

The coffee shop gets louder. Founder 1 sips his latte, suddenly sweating. Founder 2 smirks. The barista writes “DTC Spygame” on the cup.

Is it a little sneaky? Sure. But business is sneaky. The brands who win aren’t the ones meditating over CAC dashboards, they’re the ones armed with better intel.

Will it be hard to pull off? Absolutely. But if someone builds this right, it’s not just another SaaS. It’s the Bloomberg Terminal for Shopify.

👉 Who’s making it?

The Job Interview 👔

Visual: A hiring manager holding a resume, eyebrow raised.

Interviewer: “So… what have you built?”
You (panic sweating): “Uh… Integrated Prediction Markets as a Civilization Simulator?”
Interviewer: “Ambitious. Anything else?”
You (shuffling papers): “Well, I sketched out Real-Time Event-Linked Insurance…”
Room goes dead quiet.
You (grasping): “…and this thing called the AI Reality Check Index — basically a BS detector for hype.”
Interviewer (leans forward, smirks): “Okay… now you’ve got my attention.”

👉 That’s the power of NTE Pro. 5,000+ startup ideas with backstories, trends, and examples all waiting for you to claim and build.

$99/year. Cheaper than one ad test… and a way better answer when someone asks: “So, what are you working on?”

One More Meme