I Built a Daily Ecommerce Briefing So I'd Stop Skipping Industry News

I’ve been in the ecommerce space for over a decade. I’ve built agencies, worked with hundreds of online retailers, and somehow accumulated more industry newsletters than I can actually read.

The problem was always the same: I’d wake up, see 47 unread articles in my feed reader, and think “I’ll read them this weekend.” I never did. The news kept coming, and I kept falling further behind.

So I did what any impatient engineer would do — I built something to solve it.

The Problem With Industry News

Ecommerce moves fast. Shopify announces new AI features. Amazon changes their fee structure. A new payment processor emerges. A major retailer announces a acquisition.

But here’s the thing: most of what crosses my feed isn’t actually relevant to my work. Crypto regulation updates. AI conference announcements. Geopolitical analysis. Random tech news that has nothing to do with selling products online.

I didn’t need to read everything. I just needed the 2-3 things each day that would actually impact the decisions I make.

Enter Insight Stream

Insight Stream is my solution: a 3-5 minute daily audio briefing that covers only the ecommerce news that matters.

I set up a pipeline that:

1. Monitors 20+ trade publications (Retail Dive, Payments Dive, Modern Retail, Shopify Blog, etc.)
2. Uses AI to summarize each article and filter out anything not directly about ecommerce
3. Compiles the best of the bunch into a coherent briefing
4. Converts it to audio and publishes it to a private podcast feed

Every morning, I get a new episode. I listen while making coffee. By the time I sit down at my desk, I know what’s happening in ecommerce — without spending an hour reading.

Why Audio?

Text summaries exist. Newsletter services exist. RSS readers exist.

But I found that I couldn’t actually read them during the day — too busy actually doing the work. And at night, I was too tired.

Audio works because it fits into the gaps. My commute. My morning walk. The 5 minutes while I’m making breakfast. It’s passive consumption, not active reading.

The Technical Bits

For the curious: the whole thing runs on AWS Lambda with Python 3.10. The pipeline processes RSS feeds, uses OpenAI (GPT-5-mini) for summarization, Amazon Polly for text-to-speech, and Transistor.fm for podcast hosting.

It’s fully automated — no human intervention required beyond the initial setup.

Try It Out

If you’re in ecommerce and feel like you’re always behind on industry news, give it a shot:

Subscribe: https://subscribers.transistor.fm/859d8fb651d644

Add that to any podcast app. New episodes drop each morning (US Central time).

Let me know what you think — I’m still refining the content filter to make sure it’s genuinely useful.