Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Elon Musk just built a new city.

It's in Texas. It's called Starbase.

What started as the home of SpaceX’s launch site is now officially a city, with its own mayor, Bobby Pedden, a long-time SpaceX employee.

It's a 21st century company town.
You don’t apply to live there, you get recruited!

According to the new official X account, Starbase aims to "build the best community possible", for "the future of humanity’s place in space."

Is Starbase a living prototype of a Martian colony??

We’re officially in sci-fi territory here 🚀

Back to earth, establishing Starbase as an official city makes it easier to get around bureaucracy, when dealing with launch permissions road closures etc.

Elon desperately needed a win, and he got it.

Key takeaway:
Elon is mad serious about space and about everything he does.
The mantra still holds: never bet against Elon!

Ai broke the labour productivity equation.

Pre-Ai:

Technological innovations →
Higher productivity →
Higher output per worker →
Same number of workers →
More wealth for all.

Post-Ai

Ai innovations →
Higher productivity →
Esponentially higher output per worker →
❌Fewer workers →
Same output →
Lower costs →
❌More wealth for few.

Employers are realising that Ai is cheaper than many of their employees, especially in fields like coding, content, graphic design and customer service.

By replacing humans with Ai, companies can save money while delivering the same output.
It’s as simple as that.

Sometimes they can deliver even higher output with fewer workers!

The shift is happening so fast that many employees don’t have time to transition to other careers.

This time it’s different.

ChatGPT knows you better than anyone else.

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They recently introduced two new memory features:

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· Saved Memories

· Chat History

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➤ Saved Memories

let you save and view any information you want GPT to remember about you.

You can simply ask GPT "remember this" and it will save it in your memories.

You can edit or delete memories at any time.

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➤ Chat History

let GPT learn from and reference all your previous conversations.

You don't proactively save memories. Rather, GPT will automatically remember what matters most.

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Unlike with Google or Meta, you have great control over what GPT remembers about you.

You can delete saved memories or start a "temporary" conversation if you don't want GPT to "remember".

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GPT is becoming your truly PERSONAL assistant, who knows your needs better than anyone else.

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Now, the performance marketer in me can't help but think of the ENORMOUS advertising value this information has.

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It's only logical GPT will start selling these "memories" to advertisers.

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It'll be a whole new era of performance marketing and audience targeting.

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💡 It won't be about inferring what people want based on their browsing behaviour, it'll be about knowing exactly what they want because they explicitly told their assistant!

Tomorrow, the world of e-commerce and online marketing will be turned upside down.

What’s happening tomorrow:

The U.S. is revoking the de minimis regime.

For years, any imported parcel under $800 was exempt from tariffs and custom duties.

Chinese giants like Temu and Shein built their empires on this loophole.
They send their parcels directly from China into the US, each one usually under $800 given their extremely low prices.

De minimis is actually common practice in several countries, but the US has the highest threshold. For comparison, the Uk applies a de minimis of just £135.

From tomorrow this will change.
No more de minimis in the US.

Temu and Shein will be subject to custom duties and tariffs like anybody else.

And now tariffs are over 100%!

The effects are already visible.
Shein prices in the US are up by over 10% in just a few days.

Also, several reports indicate how Shein and Temu already retreated from Google Ads and performance marketing, dropping massively their App Store ranking.

This is a seismic shift in the industry!

Suddenly, American retailers will have much less competition.

At the same time, inflation-sensitive consumers will have to look somewhere else for cheap products. Will they switch to more expensive American products?

Let’s not forget, tariffs apply to everyone, Amazon included, which still imports bulk of its inventory from Chinese suppliers.

Interesting times to be in e-commerce!

Amazon just committed a "hostile and political act", and even "partnered with a Chinese propaganda arm." 😂

What happened?

Amazon hinted at showing price hikes on its low-cost Haul platform due to new tariffs.

Fair enough, Temu is doing the same in the U.S., displaying tariff-driven surcharges at checkout.

I guess you do what you gotta do to compete.

But in reality nothing happened.

Trump already spoke with Bezos and declared:
“Jeff Bezos was very nice, he was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly. He’s a good guy.”

But just before that, Bezos was portrayed on live TV as some kind of a criminal, scheming against America in partnership with an enemy! not very nice 😅.

Power games aside, one thing’s clear:
E-commerce is seriously bracing for the trade war.

▸ UPS it’s cutting 20,000 jobs and shuttering 70 buildings, in preparation to halve Amazon shipments.

▸ Amazon itself is putting more pressure on suppliers to lock in larger discounts and protect margins.

▸ On May 2nd, the "de minimis loophole" will close and we'll see huge effects of the business of Temu and Shein. They're already pulling out from Google Ads.

Meanwhile, is this an opportunity for more premium and/or European brands?

🚨 Breaking: OpenAI is adding Shopping to ChatGPT.

RIP Google Shopping?

It was only a matter of time, especially after Perplexity made a similar move last year.

Details are still unclear, but according to Adam Fry, it will be “a shopping experience that’s more personalised and conversational, rather than keyword-focused.”

That one sentence says everything about where AI chatbots are heading.

ChatGPT is not, and never will be, a search engine.

It’s a personal assistant.

In this case, a personal shopper.

And just like a real human assistant, it won’t find products based on keywords, rankings, or affiliate deals (at least an honest assistant 😅).

💡 It will recommend what’s actually best for YOU.

With new features like "saved memories" and "chat history", ChatGPT already knows you better than anyone else, Google included.

Unlike Perplexity’s “Buy with Pro”, you won’t be able to checkout inside GPT. Instead, it will redirect you to the merchant's site.

Good news for retailers and publishers, at least for now.

Also, no sponsored products yet.
But how long until that changes?

OpenAI is chasing a massive revenue target:
📈 $125 billion in revenue by 2029 (vs <$4 billion today).

Ads seem like the most logical next step.

Long live the ad-supported internet and performance marketing!

Long live the ad-supported internet!

While every platform is building paywalls (I wrote several posts about it), YouTube is doing the opposite.

I just found thousands of movies free to watch in high quality, with ads.

So I canceled Netflix!

I don’t like TV series (they’re designed to be addictive), but I love movies.

I go to the cinema regularly for the good stuff (yes, in 2025!), but I won’t pay a monthly subscription for a back-catalogue of B-movies I'll never watch.

Free with ads is exactly what I need when I'm in the mood for an easy rom-com not worth to paying for.

Too bad it’s US-only 😒 (VPN does the trick)

Meanwhile, the likes of Netflix and Spotify are stuffing their catalogues with rubbish just to win on volume, while increasing prices. I'm out.

Although, both are boosting their ad offering, surprise 😅.

YouTube got the model right:
→ Rent or buy the content you love and keep it forever.
→ Get ads for all the rest.

If this sounds like a dejavu of the 2000s (Linear TV with ads and Blockbuster for buy/rent) it's because it actually is 😂 .

As the wise man says, "history runs in circles", business too!

Sunday thoughts: are you willing to die to win?

Last week, an 18-year-old skier died during training in France.

Just a few months ago, another athlete, only 20, suffered the same fate in Italy.

Even Federica Brignone, this year’s champion, got injured in the worst possible way, just weeks after claiming the World Cup title.

It’s a worsening trend, despite more advanced safety devices.

So why this is still happening!

Simple, athletes go faster and take bigger risks than ever before.

The competetive level is so high that risking your life is literally what it takes to win.

Skiing is my favourite sport so these stories hit hard. I wasn’t spared either, I once got a free helicopter ride off the slopes (too bad I was unconscious and missed the view 😅).

I feel the same principle applies to our careers.

Competition is so strong that grinding until burn out seems to be the only way to succeed.

Is it even worth it?

Depends.
If your goal is to win, this is the only path. And many people like to win.
Although many more get injured on the way.

But maybe there’s another path.

One where sport values health and fun over extreme competition.

One where “winning” isn’t the only measure of success.

One where professional relationships are human-relationships first and not a mean to “win” the next promotion, the next role etc.

One where hard quality work is more valued than winning at all costs.

But I guess the idea of winning is so embedded in our society that we rather see another 18-year-old die than changing our perspective.

SEO in the age of AI

Make your About section an FAQ.

That’s what I did on my new website.
It describes me in the third person, just like a chatbot would.

That's the experience I want to replicate: a conversation between the user and an AI assistant.

Even the UI looks similar to a ChatGPT thread.

Next step: structured data markup, to make it even easier for machines to read it.

We have to face the reality we’re not marketing to humans anymore.
We're marketing to machines.

Any SEO experts here who want to share their opinion?

Spotify = Spot - ify

as in, "spot ify" my music, "add spots (ads) to my music".

Never thought about it! so smart :)

Still very true in 2025, when Spotify is pushing ads like never before, by creating their own SSP, ad manager etc.

Credits Max Ciociola