The New ‘Hero SKU’ Strategy
🧪Building Products for Channels, Not Just Customers, LLMS.txt Isn’t Robots.txt, It’s Your Map to AI Visibility and more!
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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
🧪 The New ‘Hero SKU’ Strategy: Building Products for Channels, Not Just Customers
🧭 LLMS.txt Isn’t Robots.txt, It’s Your Map to AI Visibility
🏆 Ad of the Day
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🧪 The New ‘Hero SKU’ Strategy: Building Products for Channels, Not Just Customers
Most DTC brands still design their flagship products for Instagram and ads.
But the smartest teams in 2025? They’re building hero SKUs for channels, not just consumers. One product for your TikTok shop. One for your B2B buyers. One for your retail intros. Not because it’s easier to market, but because it’s easier to sell.
What a “Hero SKU” Really Is (Now)
Historically, a hero SKU meant your most viral product. Today, it’s different: it’s the SKU that closes fastest for a specific target.
- A smaller, affordable SKU that HR teams can bulk-order as onboarding gifts
- A bundle that stylists or merchandisers use for display without needing to order full cases
- A single-flavor sampler that’s optimized for vending partners or corporate perks
- A mini SKU with zero shipping margin loss, designed for DMs and cold outreach
This is a channel-first product strategy. The consumer is just one buyer, not the buyer.
Why This Works Now
- Retail buyers want proof of movement, a SKU that already works in their context
- Corporate bulk orders want simplicity, not your full catalog
- Press and collab partners want something easy to talk about
- Events and pop-ups want compact, giftable formats
Instead of pitching your “best seller,” smart teams pitch the SKU built for them.
The Operational Layer You’ll Actually Need
This isn’t just product strategy, it’s orchestration across your entire org. Map your buyer types (gifting, retail, press, stylists, B2B), then build mini playbooks for what each one wants in a SKU. Track feedback by SKU, not just overall brand lift.
Align sales, ops, and marketing on when and how to deploy these assets. Most importantly, make sure the right people actually see the right SKU.
Turning Buyer Insight Into Channel Velocity
A hero SKU only matters if the right person sees it, at the right moment. This isn’t a DTC ad problem. It’s a precision distribution problem.
- Think: Who controls gifting budgets at fast-growing startups?
- Who curates retail assortments in boutique chains?
- Who decides what gets handed out at brand activations and summits?
These are niche, high-leverage buyers, often buried inside orgs under titles like “People Ops,” “Merchandising Director,” or “Event Partnerships.”
Apollo helps you surface and reach these exact decision-makers, the ones who turn a smart SKU into repeat revenue No spray. No pray. Just channel-fit product in the hands of buyers who get it. You can sign up here for Apollo and use free forever.
Design your next SKU like a revenue tool, not a branding artifact. Build for a clear buyer. Solve their specific friction. And distribute like you’re selling a solution, not just a product.
The best SKU isn’t the one that gets the most likes. It’s the one that closes the fastest.
🧭 LLMS.txt Isn’t Robots.txt, It’s Your Map to AI Visibility
LLMS.txt is rapidly gaining attention in SEO circles, but much of the conversation still confuses it with robots.txt. The truth? It’s not about blocking crawlers, it’s about guiding AI models to your best, most quotable content during real-time inference.
The Breakdown:
1. It’s inference-time curation, not crawler control - LLMS.txt isn’t a gatekeeper like robots.txt. It’s a plain text file that acts more like a curated sitemap, flagging high-quality, LLM-digestible content that should be ingested and cited during inference.
2. LLMS.txt vs. robots.txt vs. sitemap.xml, and why structure matters - Robots.txt blocks, sitemap.xml lists, but LLMS.txt curates. It’s only valuable if the linked content is clearly segmented, scannable, and built for comprehension, with short paragraphs, strong headings, lists, and semantic cues like “Step 1” or “In summary.”
3. Build your LLMS.txt like a markdown playlist, not a data dump - The file lives at /llms.txt and follows a markdown format: a single H1, a brief summary, H2 section headers, and bullet-linked URLs with short optional descriptions. Don’t include your whole site; focus on structured guides, evergreen FAQs, and authoritative resources. Your homepage? Only include it if it’s more than a branding billboard.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity are already crawling for LLMS.txt files, and they’re treating them as signals of authority and structure. This file doesn’t help you rank, it helps you get quoted in AI-generated answers. In the new AI SEO frontier, the sites that clearly mark their treasure will be the ones remembered.
🎥 Ad of the Day
What Works:
The fiery hellscape behind the screaming partner is aggressive, but intentionally so. It dramatizes a nightly annoyance into actual torment, using visual storytelling to echo what frustrated spouses feel but rarely express.
“Hostage Tape” already sounds intense, this visual tone matches it perfectly. The hostage metaphor becomes a punchline and solution. It’s extreme but purposeful.
All text is centralized and legible in 1 second. “SNORING is HELL” draws the eye. “Try HOSTAGE TAPE” is clearly the fix. Nothing distracts from the emotional arc.
Broader Insights:
This is category-breaking advertising. It uses humor, suffering, and theatricality to dramatize a very real (and widely shared) pain point. Instead of selling a product, it sells a moment of relief and revenge, a story the viewer wants to end. And that’s why they click.
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