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Well, hello, and welcome to this week's edition of the eCommercer, the official newsletter of the eCommerce Podcast.
Most of us have had a go with AI by now, right? We open a chat window, ask it to write something, nod along, and then carry on exactly as before. We get a bit of help and wishfully think of something better, but we just haven't got a clue how to get there.
This week's guest figured it out. He runs five businesses with zero employees, and he's never written a line of code in his life. Not one. Which gives me hope. He's not a developer. He's an entrepreneur who got curious and didn't stop.
So let's talk about where a founder actually starts
My guest this week is Dmytro “Dima” Negodiuk, who calls himself a Fractional AI Officer. He's based in New York and runs businesses across ecommerce, B2B distribution, retail, education and AI consulting. All of them sit on top of one AI agent. As he puts it, you have to be the orchestra.
I asked Dima the question most of us are asking, which is “where do I even start?” His advice was simple. Start with Claude Code. Don't be shy about it. When he watched his first tutorial and it said “open terminal on your MacBook”, he asked ChatGPT what a terminal even was. No embarrassment. He just asked.
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[The] main word is deploy. You need not only to know how to create it, you need to know how to deploy it.
Dima Negodiuk
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I think that's the real barrier for most people, and it isn't technical. It's the feeling that the train has left without you. Dima's answer is blunt but also reassuring. Open YouTube, search “Claude Code for dummies”, and start from the basics. One small caveat from him that's worth knowing. He reckons the cheapest plan won't be enough if you're going to build properly, so start a tier or two up rather than getting frustrated on the entry level.
Then point it at your actual problem. Not a toy task. The real one. If you've not got a product, ask it for product ideas. If you've got a product that isn't selling, ask it for marketing ideas. The biggest thing in front of you right now is the best first conversation to have.
Toy, therapist, or something else?
According to Dima, a lot of people use AI as a toy, as well as a sort of psychologist to chat with. He builds and deploys. That word deploy is doing a lot of work. It's the difference between a website you spun up in five minutes that Google will never find, and a system that's actually wired into your business and running.
And I know Dima's right because I've watched it happen in my own business. A few weeks back, in my solo episode, I walked through a mobile conversion project on one of our sites. The mobile numbers had been quietly drifting. We'd had Adam Pearce on the show talking about mobile optimisation, so I took the transcript of that episode and fed it into Claude. I asked it to pull out every key idea, research each one, find real-world examples, and score them — was this genuinely good practice, or just something that happened to work for Adam in his context.
From all of that we built a piece of software that scores any website against the best practices for mobile optimisation and hands you a number. Ours wasn't great, which was humbling. The tech team have been working through the report methodically ever since. Mobile conversion on that site is now up by something over 400%, closer to 500% depending on how you measure it. On a real ecommerce site, that's hundreds of thousands of pounds of difference. And it all started with a podcast episode, a problem we already had, and a back-and-forth with Claude.
And that's the whole thread, really.
Dima and I came at it from completely different starting points and landed in the same place. You start with the problem in front of you, and you let the AI help you chip away at it.
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