The last time Justin Bausch was on the show, in May 2024, he was leading CRM at Ryderwear and we called the episode The Power of Personalisation and AI. Back then AI meant product recommendations and a bit of personalisation. He’s returned as a founder, this time alongside his partner Felisha Mina, and the ground has shifted completely. In a year he’s grown Style My Wall to seven figures, and he’s built his own AI platform to run it.
Here’s what we took from the conversation.
The Side Hustle That Became the Business
Style My Wall started with Justin selling artwork on Facebook Marketplace while still working at Ryderwear. He was constantly busy shifting prints, realised he already knew CRM, paid ads and ecommerce, and decided to turn it into a real business. He bought his own professional printer, opened a small studio, built a Shopify site, and did all of it without quitting his day job first.
I didn’t want to throw all the eggs in one basket. My first ever employee that I hired was my nephew, so I saved him from being a dishwasher. Within two years that one staff member turned into 22 now.
- Justin Bausch, CEO ,Style My Wall
Seven figures in the first year, two warehouses in Melbourne, and a team of 22. The turning point was realising he was no longer running a side project, he was running a full-time business.
Why Print on Demand Was the Unlock
Two things set Style My Wall apart. There’s no dominant player in online art, so Justin isn’t fighting Kmart or Freedom for the category. And his ecommerce background meant he could keep everything in-house and pour what he’d have spent on an agency straight into ad spend, scaling aggressively but profitably from day one.
The print-on-demand model is the other advantage. He holds almost no stock beyond frames. He can find an artist, list a product, and only print and frame it once the order comes in, so a new SKU costs him nothing to add. For a small business, not tying up cash in inventory is the difference between scaling and stalling.
Founder-Led Content Opened the Door to Mattel
Justin is an ecommerce and CRM operator by instinct, so branding was the thing he put on the back burner. Felisha Mina, who spent nearly a decade training ecommerce brands at MI Academy, is the one who turned that black and white into colour, revamping his LinkedIn and pushing owner-led content.
That decision paid off in an unexpected way. Mattel saw Justin on LinkedIn and reached out, which turned into a licensing deal to sell their prints.
Had there not been a level of frequency and Justin’s face popping up on LinkedIn in that way, then that conversation probably wouldn’t have taken place.
- Felisha Mina, Co-founder, Style My Wall and InHaus Digital
In an industry where you usually have no idea who you’re buying from, putting a face and a family story to the brand is what made it stand out. Justin’s dad, niece and nephew all work in the business, and that shows up in the content.
Sell the Problem, Not the Product
Style My Wall’s best-performing ads don’t sell art, they pick a fight with the art industry. Justin’s two top ads lead with the line that the industry is outdated, that art is overpriced because no one knows what they should pay for it, and that you shouldn’t have to choose between affordability and quality.
He names the real customer tension directly. Rent is expensive, groceries are expensive, and he says exactly that in his ads. That honesty is what pulls in the customer who wants something good on the wall without paying gallery prices.
Building His Own AI Media Buyer
The heart of the conversation is the platform Justin built himself, using Claude Code connected to a Railway server that refreshes every 30 minutes and pulls in Shopify, Klaviyo and MailChimp data. It took him close to 10 or 11 months to get right, and he stress-tested it by taking every subscription tool he paid for, pulling it apart in Claude Code, and rebuilding the same capability inside his own app until the results matched.
What makes it more than a chatbot is the trading discipline baked in. A generic AI might tell you to pause an ad that’s spent $200 in two days, but a real media buyer knows it’s still in the learning phase. Justin trained that judgement in over months, to the point where it now recommends like a paid media expert, and it acts too: it can push extra budget into an ad with profit headroom, or pause a campaign, straight from the platform.
There’s that meme where someone jumps into the Meta ads business manager and it looks like a cockpit of a plane. I don’t have to go into that anymore. My profitability has never been better since I’ve implemented it.
- Justin Bausch, CEO ,Style My Wall
Crucially, the platform reads each business’s own margins, budget and history, so its recommendations are tuned to product-level profitability rather than the raw ROAS an agency chases.
It’s Really a Small-Business ERP
The platform long ago stopped being just an ad tool. Justin built his own inventory scanner into it, so every staff member logs in, scans a frame as they assemble it, and the app deducts stock while logging output. That feeds a weekly report card and a leaderboard showing who’s framing quickly and who’s dropping off.
It also runs customer service through a Gorgias integration, analysing a photo of a damaged frame, deciding whether it can be repaired, generating the returns portal, and drafting the resend order in Shopify. He’s honest that this took teething: it once told customers who’d bought framed prints that they’d only bought a poster, a variant-title bug, so he switched it back to drafting responses for his team to approve until they trusted it enough to turn autopilot back on. That staged rollout, never straight to autopilot, is how he manages the risk.
utally short, that direct connection is part of what turns a one-time buyer into a long-term advocate, and it’s why she’s building an ecosystem from milk warmer through to the Go-Box for solids to keep customers for years rather than months.
The Takeaway
Justin’s story is a preview of how a lean, AI-first small business runs. He kept everything in-house, poured the savings into profitable ad spend, and built his own tools instead of stacking subscriptions. The lesson underneath it all is the one he repeats: as a small business owner, do as much in-house as you can, keep your money in your pocket, and reinvest it into growth. AI just makes the surface area one founder can cover a lot bigger than it used to be.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Style My Wall grow to seven figures in a year? By keeping everything in-house and reinvesting the savings into profitable ad spend. Founder Justin Bausch tested demand on Facebook Marketplace first, then built a Shopify store while still employed, using a print-on-demand model that holds almost no stock beyond frames. His ecommerce and paid-ads background meant he avoided agency fees and scaled aggressively but profitably.
Do small businesses need a paid media agency? Justin argues that if you’re spending under roughly four grand a day on ads, you don’t need a dedicated paid media buyer. Larger businesses with big product ranges and heavy creative needs still benefit from experts, but a small owner focused on profitability needs someone who understands margins, net profit and AOV to CAC, which is a different skill from maximising ROAS.
Can you build your own AI marketing tool with Claude Code? Justin built his platform using Claude Code connected to a Railway server that refreshes every 30 minutes and integrates Shopify, Klaviyo and MailChimp. It took 10 to 11 months and required training in real media-buying judgement, like knowing not to pause an ad still in its learning phase, so it’s a significant undertaking rather than a quick build.
How do you manage AI risk in customer service? Through staged rollout. Justin never enables autopilot immediately: the AI drafts responses for the human team to approve until they’re confident it’s accurate, then autopilot is switched on. This caught an early bug where it wrongly told framed-print buyers they’d only bought a poster, which was fixed before it could do wider damage.
Based on Episode 656 of the Add To Cart podcast with Justin Bausch and Felisha Mina, founders of Style My Wall and InHaus Digital. Join the Add To Cart community for free.
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