People are discovering your store. Here's how to turn them into customers - and keep them coming back
How to survive rising CAC and grow LTV in consumer.
Common Ground is Ground’s newsletter highlighting the most important consumer news, tech trends, artificial intelligence, in-depth analysis, along with a few extra thoughts from our team. Subscribe today to get the latest issue delivered to your inbox.
This issue comes from Sheida Mirjahani, Growth Lead at Ground, who writes about AI in commerce, ecommerce business math, and how brands are actually growing online.
I saw the IM8 news go by on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago and I keep thinking about it.
IM8 is the supplement brand David Beckham co-founded raised $1 billion, and gave up no ownership at all. It’s a rev-share deal: General Catalyst pays for IM8’s customer acquisition upfront, then takes a capped cut of the revenue those customers generate until it’s paid back. Once the cap is hit, IM8 keeps everything.
What This Deal Actually Proves
I don’t think the takeaway here is “celebrity brands can raise money.” It’s that can you prove your LTV: CAC making sense?
General Catalyst has published the criteria to qualify as a brand: you should be able to get your acquisition money back within 24 months.
Read that again. It’s all about can you convert visitors to customers? Are they coming back? How fast and why? Do you have a repeatable growth engine?
A few brands have quietly figured this out.
Getting More First-Time Customers From Traffic You Already Earned
Picture this: ChatGPT recommends your moisturizer as the best option for a woman in her 40s with sensitive skin. She lands on your site, sees your welcome offer within five seconds, closes it, browses for a few minutes, and leaves.
Based on our research, 95% of visitors never opt in - so you can’t capture them, and they never enter your email flows. All that hard-earned traffic walks out the door.
That’s what Ground’s Greet AI was built to solve. It sits on your Shopify store, observes every individual visitor, identifies the right moment, and re-engages them exactly when they’re ready to buy.
You don’t need new flows. You don’t need new creative. You just need more chances to talk to the customer you already paid for.
Getting Those Customers to Buy Again
Now the other half.
Someone bought a face cream from you 40 days ago. They finished it in 32 - faster than most people do.
On day 35 they came back to your site and looked at the same product. Then they left.
Your win-back email was scheduled for day 40. By the time it landed, they’d already bought something else.
ReBeat AI is our answer to that. It’s our AI agent that learns how quickly people actually run out, across your whole customer base. It notices when someone comes back to your site, knows which product they were looking at (maybe it’s a serum this time?) and sends the email or text on that person’s timeline instead of a set schedule.
It activates repeat purchase on it’s own in three ways. Replenishment, Cross-sell, and one-time buyer to subscriber conversion.
Brands Using Ground Convert 30% More ChatGPT Visitors Into First-Time Customers
(And 3-6x more repeat purchases!)
Most platforms you’ve added to your stack do one thing: they help you do something better. A pop-up tool captures more emails. An ESP sends better sequences. An analytics platform shows you what’s happening.
Ground is different. It’s not a tool you manage - it’s a suite of AI revenue agents that run autonomously, learn from your customers, and generate revenue your existing stack never would have found.
Curated Intelligence
The IM8 deal, explained. How the rev-share structure works and why IM8 gave up no equity. TechCrunch, Jul 2026. Read More
The numbers behind the raise. Prenetics’ updated guidance and the $1.44-per-dollar disclosure. GlobeNewswire, Jul 2026. Read More
Why funding ads separately is becoming a thing. General Catalyst’s own case for splitting growth capital from equity. Read More
What IM8 does with the money. Hydration in Q4, a premium gummies line in Q1. NutraIngredients, Jul 2026. Read More
Why your CPMs are up. The structural reason competitive categories are seeing 30–40% jumps. Threadpoint. Read More
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