001 — The Thesis
Don't hire an agency.
Find out what's
actually broken first
Charge Media runs a fixed-scope Growth Audit for founder-led Shopify brands doing $300k–$5M a year. No retainers. No six-month contracts. Just where your revenue is leaking — and exactly what it's worth to fix.
Built by operators who've spent eight figures in Shopify ad budgets. Most audits find more than they cost — usually in the first hour.
Agencies want a retainer before they understand your store.
Here's how it actually goes. A pitch. A proposal. A six-month contract. Then an account manager learns your business on your dime — and 90 days in, someone finally looks at the thing that was costing you money the whole time.
You're not buying expertise. You're funding their learning curve, monthly, in advance.
The agency path
- → Discovery call
- → Proposal & pitch deck
- → Six-month contract
- → ~90 days to first real insight
The audit path
- → Apply (2 minutes)
- → Written breakdown, in days
Look before you commit a dollar.
$8,000 a month, sight unseen.
Or a single audit, with proof first.
A Shopify growth agency
- Strategy & "discovery"
- $2,000
- Paid media management
- $3,500
- "Creative & content"
- $1,500
- Account management
- $1,000
$8,000 / month, ongoing
$96,000 in year one
The Charge Media audit
- One fixed scope
- —
- Recurring?
- never
- Contract?
- none
- You keep the findings
- yes
One engagement , no strings
paid before we touch it
The audit pays for itself the first leak it finds. Most find several.
What we actually look at.
No vague "we'll dig into your funnel." Here's the exact checklist. If your growth is leaking, it's leaking in one of these.
Paid acquisition
Meta & Google spend efficiency, wasted audiences, CAC vs. payback.
Conversion & checkout
CRO, mobile checkout, and exactly where buyers drop off.
Email & SMS
Klaviyo flows, abandoned checkout, post-purchase, list health.
Retention & LTV
Repeat rate, subscription health, cohort decay over time.
Margin & discounting
Promo dependency, AOV, and where blended margin leaks out.
Attribution
What actually drives revenue vs. what is taking the credit.
Site & UX
Speed, mobile experience, and the friction killing conversions.
Offer & pricing
Positioning, bundles, and the money being left on the table.
What you get
A written teardown, your leaks ranked by dollar impact, and the specific fixes — prioritized. Delivered in 5 business days. No call required to get it.
What we've found.
Skincare · $1.2M/yr
$84,000 / yr
recoverable in a broken Klaviyo abandoned-checkout flow.
Apparel · $2.4M/yr
31%
of Meta spend going to audiences that never convert.
Supplements · $640k/yr
1 in 4
mobile buyers lost to a slow, heavy checkout page.
“We thought we needed a new agency. We needed the 40 minutes it took to read this.”
“Found more in one audit than our last agency did in six months of retainers.”
Findings shown are illustrative until real, anonymized audit results are
added in src/consts.ts.
Built for founder-led Shopify brands doing $300k–$5M. Not for everyone.
This is for you if
- + You're the founder, and you make the calls.
- + You're on Shopify, doing $300k–$5M a year.
- + You're spending real money on paid and email.
- + You want the truth, not a hand to hold.
This isn't for you if
- – You're pre-revenue or just launched.
- – You've already got a strong in-house growth team.
- – You want to fully outsource the thinking and never look again.
- – You're shopping for someone to agree with you.
Charge Media. Operators, not account managers.
[ names ] have spent the last [ X ] years inside Shopify brands — running the ad accounts, owning the P&L, shipping the fixes. We've spent eight figures in ad budgets and seen exactly where founder-led brands leak money, because we've leaked it ourselves and then plugged it.
We started Charge Media because the agency model is built backwards: it sells you a relationship before it earns one. So we flipped it. Look first, decide for yourself what's next.
Replace bracketed placeholders with real names, tenure, and credibility in
src/components/WhoBehind.astro.
But shouldn't I just hire an agency?
Why apply instead of just buying? +
Because we only take brands we can actually move. The application is a 2-minute filter, not a sales gate — if we are not the right fit, we will tell you, and point you somewhere that is.
Why pay for an audit when agencies give one free? +
A free audit is a sales tool — it exists to close you. A paid one is an obligation to be right. You get our real analysis, not a pitch dressed up as one.
What if I just want it done for me? +
After the audit, you can. Some founders take the breakdown and run it in-house. Some hand the work to us — implementation and ongoing growth. Your call, never a precondition.
We are only doing $400k. Is it worth it? +
That is exactly the range where one fixed leak pays for the fix many times over. Under $300k or over $5M with a full in-house team, we will tell you it is not the right time — see who it is for.
How is Charge Media different from an agency? +
No retainer, no contract, no account manager learning on your dime. You get the diagnosis first, in writing, and you decide what happens next. That is the whole difference, and it is the point.
The Growth Audit.
It's the first engagement, and it's selective. You apply, we look at whether we can actually move your numbers, and if we can't, we'll say so. No retainer. No contract. No account manager.
- → A full teardown across all 8 areas
- → Every leak found, ranked by dollar impact
- → The specific, prioritized fixes
- → Delivered in 5 business days
What comes after is up to you: take the breakdown and run, or have us implement it. No pressure either way.
Apply — 2 minutes
Local preview form. Set PUBLIC_HUBSPOT_* env vars to mount the live HubSpot form here.
We reply within 1 business day. If we're not a fit, we'll tell you straight.
010
Stop funding their learning curve.
Find out what's actually broken — then decide what's worth doing about it.