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Get a Demo“You don’t have to be first to be the best.” What does it take to scale a brand from $20M to $140M in just 12 months? Luka Kvatchrelishvili (CMO, True Sea Moss) joins hosts Connor Rolain (Head of Growth, HexClad) and Connor MacDonald (CMO, Ridge) to break down how he took a bootstrapped, product-led superfood brand … and scaled it into a nine-figure DTC powerhouse. Luka shares his path from practicing law in Georgia to drop shipping foosball tables to leading a 33-person marketing team. The conversation digs into how Luka diagnosed and fixed True Sea Moss’ data infrastructure before touching a single ad, and how a surge in creative volume gave way to a more methodical, outcome-driven testing system. He also gets into the halo effect between Meta spend, Amazon, and retail performance; the power of the LTV-to-CAC cohort report; and how True Sea Moss went from Telegram groups and Trello boards to a marketing-led operation scaling toward half a billion. Powered By Motion Creative Benchmarks 2026 https://motionapp.com/thumbstop-pulse/creative-benchmarks-2026?utm_campaign=marketing-operators&utm_medium=sponsor&utm_content=creative-benchmarks-2026&utm_source=marketing-operators-podcast Saras Analytics https://bit.ly/9OP-Ytdesc Haus https://www.haus.io/operators Richpanel https://9ops.co/richpanel Aftersell https://9ops.co/4i3bb5 Operators Newsletter https://9operators.com/ Chapters 00:00:00 Law Dropout to Ecommerce 00:06:00 Agency Life Origin Story 00:11:30 True CMOs First Walk-In 00:17:30 Mushrooms Go Mainstream 00:23:30 Scaling $20M to $140M 00:29:00 LTV With Saras Analytics 00:34:00 Halo Effect on Amazon 00:38:30 Fix the Meta Account 00:42:00 Volume vs. Craft Debate 00:47:30 Funnels by Value Prop 00:54:00 CRO & Post-Click Wins 01:00:00 Finance as Growth Partner
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Welcome to episode 113 of the Marketing Operators Podcast. Today we have Luka on the show. He was the media buyer at Rise Superfoods and now he leads marketing at True Sea Moss, and he has helped them scale from $20 million to $140 million in just 12 months. Today we talk about how he did it. Plus we get into his story going from agency to in-house brand operator, why he joined True Sea Moss in the first place, and how he structures a Meta account for hypergrowth. And most importantly, he's a big fan of the Marketing Operators Show. Special thanks to our sponsors, Motion, Haus, Richpanel, and AfterSell. Luka, I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last name. Can you say it for the listeners though?
Yeah, absolutely. Kvatchrelishvili. It's going to—
So just add Luka on LinkedIn spelled exactly like it sounds.
Yeah, that works. That works.
You're Georgian, right?
Correct. I'm from country Georgia, Eastern Europe.
And where are you at right now?
I'm calling from New York City.
So the first time I met Luka was a couple years ago, a year and a half ago. And one of our vendors was nice enough to get us tickets to F1. It was the second F1 in Vegas. And Luka's a huge F1 fan. And I'm like, I like it, but I'm, you know, Luka like knows all the drivers. He's really into it. And we get, they were like sitting, they got us really nice tickets. So we're like sitting in this, in the paddock club in Vegas. And Luka every night had his backpack with him 'cause he was doing some like, some sort of like manual bid jockeying, I think, at the time. So Luka's just like, there's all these like people wearing crazy stuff, like really fancy setup in the paddock club. And Luka's just like laptop out, like optimizing his ad account in the middle of the paddock club. So that was my first impression of Luka. And it was, it was probably the best first impression I could have ever had. It was, I'm like, this, that's how I know Luka's a real one.
Well, there will be a lot of F1 references today. Prepare.
Yeah. I'm trying to remember when that was too, because I think it's like right around Black— it's like, yeah, so it's like mid-November, right? So it's like the few weeks leading into Black Friday. So it's a pretty busy time.
Yeah, it was phenomenal time at the same time over there. Um, but yeah, can't wait for this year.
Honestly, there's not a lot of things better than your brand scaling while you're doing something else that's fun. I was at an Indian wedding a couple weeks ago. We talked about it, but like one of the days we were just hanging by the pool and we were having a great day. We were up like 60% year over year. And I'm like, dude, this is it. This is what it's all about. So the F1 evening with the laptop sounds ideal in many ways.
Oh yeah. It was, I think it was a week before Black Friday and me and Connor were chatting that, you know, our sales went live. It's just, we're just ripping. And it was just total bliss. And you have F1 cars literally, you know, driving 200 miles in a corner. So it's quite a scene.
Guys want only one thing and it's disgusting. Scale budgets while at F1 races.
There's your meme. There's your meme, Aaron and Mike. Yeah, Luka's like out on the railing watching these cars zoom by. He's like, hold on, I need 5 minutes. I'm gonna go run back to my computer real quick and make some adjustments. It was amazing. But you know, that is, That's the fun thing about e-com, right? Like the, the, the work keeps working when you're not. And it's like, I think why I also think it's why e-com folks are like embracing AI so hard and like the agentic side of AI, because we're already used to like all the work you do and then you're sitting out there by the pool on a Saturday and like it's, it's working, it's ripping, you can track along. So it's, yeah, I mean, that's at least one of the reasons I got into it. But, uh, all right, Luka, let's, uh, I wanna jump into it cuz you have a, pretty insane growth story at True Sea Moss. I'm like in, not super in, but like I like to keep aware of all like the trending, you know, health and wellness and food products. And I have not tried the True Sea Moss yet. I've heard of it, but I didn't realize it was growing as much as it is until I saw the show notes in preparation for this. So, I'm excited to dig in there. But before we do that, like what like, who are you? What's your background? Like, what can you kind of give us the, you know, the couple-minute story on who you are and kind of what led you to your current role at True Sea Moss?
Yeah, absolutely. So, uh, almost 8 years in the marketing space, um, and of course started— I was actually the founder. That's kind of how that was my entry to this world. And after my third company brand that I started. It was kind of the dropshipping thing, which successfully I sold slash got rid of to work with the bigger brands and got very excited, can see what was under the hood with those, you know, who are the founders, what was the team looking like, all of that. And of course started freelancing, bunch of, bunch of agencies. And my my goal was to just like work with the bigger brands, like be close to that group and to understand how they think and all that. So got very, very lucky to work with Rise, of course, Rise Superfoods, and joined in 2022. And of course, seen a lot of growth and it was a lot. It was just total bliss, of course, to see how team was getting bigger and seeing all the growth. And after taking, you know, short pause after Rise, I thought, okay, what's next? And kind of weighing my options and kind of ended up at True Sea Moss with a bigger title, but at the same time was super stoked to kind of take over the huge team. It was, company was growing, it had that trajectory to surpass last year's growth, but of course nothing that we ever imagined had happened. And now it's roughly 30, 33, I think 33, 34 people team right now in a marketing team. Entire company is roughly 100 people. Of course, we sell sea moss products online and retail, DTC driven, of course, which is the part of this pod that we're going to dive into. And yeah, that's pretty much it.
So what— so I have a note here, you were a lawyer before getting into e-com. Is that true?
Yes, that's very much true. I, I'm, again, I'm from Georgia, Eastern Europe, and I finished, I had my law degree and practiced law for a couple years. Definitely wasn't my thing. I quickly realized that and thought like, hey, I really need to think other ways I can make sense of this thing called life and kind of dabbled into other things and kind of experimented. And luckily I was living with a roommate back then who was an engineer. And then my, I guess like my IP address picked up and recommended me a lot of YouTube videos about, you know, what the e-com world was all about. And in a couple days I'm asking him like, what's this thing called Shopify? And that literally was the question. And then he kind of told me, hey, here's this thing called SEO. I never opened an admin panel ever. Back then. So I was just like fascinated by the fact that you could do this. Um, so I could already imagine that those companies were this, uh, like every, every online business was like this huge company. But actually, no, you can, you can, you can make something work. And I just saw an opportunity and then of course learned a ton. And of course started listening to podcasts, all of that. And then, um, kind of slowly but surely moved away from that world, which I was very happy about.
What were your early resources for— I want to ask two questions. A, like what were some of the early resources if you can remember that, like presumably you were figuring out how to set up a Shopify store, maybe how to run some Facebook ads, like what were those early resources? And then what was your most successful dropshipping company? What was the product and like how big did you get it?
Yeah, so nothing as exciting Nothing that will sound as exciting as Drusimoz, but, um, the early resources were, for the most part, it was just YouTube videos, just like hearing. But of course it was very hard to understand kind of what was right, what was wrong. Um, so I just had to buy some courses or pirate some courses. Uh, but of course at the same time, uh, there were a few podcasts. One of them I remember that I still occasionally plug in and listened to is Perpetual Traffic. I think Molly Pittman was over there as well, who, yeah, still, I think she was on e-commerce roundtable recently, also presented there. So still very relevant. And then from there, like, of course, Nick Shackelford and many others kind of came to the surface. And of course there's, okay, there's Twitter over there and then And then slowly but surely, kind of, that was my world. In terms of business, so very first one was print on demand, of course, made just one sale, but the fact that it actually happened was, I was so super stoked. Still remember that feeling, one of the best feelings ever. And after that, got into dropshipping and the high-ticket dropshipping, kind of selling foosball tables and air hockey tables and all of that stuff. So you kind of were, you were going to manufacturer, kind of signing the deal, and then kind of you were sitting on a very tight margin, running some ads on Google or Meta, and it was mostly just search terms. And that helped to get an understanding how the business works because you're running the whole thing.
And did you actually develop a brand for that? Like, no, you're, so how, so where were you So no brand, but you're selling like foosball tables. Like what's the, I'm trying to like picture the web experience or like the digital experience here. If there's like old, I mean, this is probably what, 2020 or 20, this is the 20-teens I imagine, right? This is like, is this 2015? What year is this?
This is 2017, 2018, I think. Yeah, I think it's about that time. It was, so essentially you have this, online retail store that you sell a bunch of brands. Think like an electronic store, but like for game tables. And the brand was called gamedribble.com. It no longer exists. And you just had like a bunch of those brands over there. And yeah, you were kind of bidding on their, not branded, but like their category keywords, and then maybe driving some traffic through Meta. And from there, because I was introduced to some groups, some people would ask me, I would just be in a group chatting and then they would ask me, hey, can you do this for me? And then all of a sudden started freelancing for out of nowhere. Of course I was doing it for free, but at the same time they're like, hey, I can pay you for this. I was like, you're willing to pay for this? Really? And it was like, yeah. And so like, okay. And then, and I was doing that on the side. So, but slowly but surely kind of when agencies got introduced, the whole world changed because the brands became bigger and that was more exciting. So I had to make that decision to let that company go for a small amount, but nothing flashy. But the fact that I landed that plane is very rewarding feeling.
[Sponsor Content] Motion just dropped their 2026 Creative Benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same 4 questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate and which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over $1 billion in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings, like the fact that only 4 to 8% of ads actually become winners and over half of ads actually lose. And for Motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your Motion dashboard with their Runneth AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionapp.com and tell the marketing operator sent you. I, I have a question about the, the move from Rise, um, to True Moss now, cuz I think it's like what we've got a lot of marketers who listen to the show and I think a lot of people would be interested in the path that you went down. You're a, a paid media manager or director at Rise, extremely big, very successful brand. You go to a much smaller brand, take a much higher position as you mentioned, and then that brand scales 7x. You guys are now doing a 9-figure brand now. Oh, you're the CMO at a 9-figure brand. It's like, okay, perfect. And it only took like 18 months. That whole transition, uh, is like really impressive. So I'm curious when making the move out of Rise, what were the attributes you were looking for in your next role? And like, um, what was it about True Moss? How certain or like what was your thought process on, hey, True Moss has all the makings of a brand that I think I can help scale further.
Yes, that's a, yeah, that's a very good one because I, I got a, I was weighing my options and I was kind of trying to understand, okay, I have a plethora of options, but then again, like I really want to work with a brand that has a little bit of, you know, future for let's, let's say next 5 to 10 years, right? And what I can, what my impact will be, what's my job there? And so what I was doing is like I was requesting a lot of, interviews from companies. Like I wanted to audit, like what is your gross margin? What's the LTV looking like? Because I was, what I knew was like working with subscription brands. So I was like, okay, let's repeat that instead of going to the peril or anything like that where I have to relearn everything. Why do I want to deploy what I know, all the mechanics and everything? So I was auditing a lot of the stuff. So TruSemos right away struck me as like, hey, this brand, is vertically integrated, big plus, right? So great margins, is made in US. Second, it's a brand that has a presence in retail. It's in Sprouts, okay? And there's a lot more demand to get into other retail stores. Okay, great. TruSimos was born Amazon. So Amazon team was already, you know, bestseller badge for years, okay, there's a lot of presence over there. And then the, the, the D2C side, the website side, was, um, was good, but like there was a lot of potential over there. So I thought, okay, this has a very good chance, um, I can— I have a very good chance of like creating and generating a lot more demand that will then trickle down to all other demand capture, uh, channels. Whether that can be other online sales channels or retail. And that's exactly what happened. And that's, um, and of course the team and the founder. Who is the founder? From agency days, what I've learned is the biggest constraint of companies' growth, hands down, is the founder. Um, it's, it's like their limitation of like what can be done, the risk tolerance, and are they willing to take bets? Because there's like, back then, the decision that we had to make was in a range of like, you know, $50,000 to $100,000. Now it's multiple millions of dollars. And then you kind of, you operate from a very different mental space when you do that and you have to grow as a person. And then I saw the founders and saw the partners and they were that team that had no egos. They were very clear direction. It was very result-driven and felt really it felt absolutely the right choice to do that.
That's fantastic. Okay. So I, and I love that little list here. So founder, one, um, unit economics, another, I think that's a good one, getting in on gross margin, things like that. I like the distribution point a lot. I don't think that's always a requirement of like identifying a potential high growth brand, but I do think it's like surprisingly common. I just spoke with someone. I met them at an event last week. They do $6 million a year in cookie sales, all wholesale. They're in 3,000 doors and they're like, I forget what it is, but they're expensive cookies. They do something that's cool and people are excited about. Right. Um, and he was like, yeah, we're thinking about like building out the marketing team. And I was like, I was like, dude, you have to build out the marketing team. I'm like, you have everything that you need. Not only do I think this could be a really strong D2C business, cause I think you could drive $60, $70 order values on these really unique cookies. But I also think that once you're growing brand awareness, the 3,000 doors are just all of a sudden you're going to double sell-through rate everywhere. And I just, yeah, I think that's a really interesting one. The Hex Cloud's a little bit like that. Like way back in the day, you had this big Costco business, like you had this foundational sort of distribution. And then as soon as they got good at performance direct response marketing, there was like, there was just more sort of kindling and wood for the fire to burn on.
Totally. No, it was honestly like when you were saying that, Luca, you were like, every single thing you hit on were things that I was considering when I was deciding to join HackSky, like we had, because a lot of brands don't, a lot of brands are in the reverse, right? Where it's like, hey, we're going to prove this out with.com and then we're going to use that data point to go to Sprouts and say, hey, Sprouts, look like we have something that people want and like this customer is not in Sprouts yet. Like we can bring that customer to Sprouts, but which is not a bad approach, but your bucket is leakier when you're doing it that way. So I think I like that you guys had that like distribution, um, like you had that, that bucket was pretty tight. So then when you come in, it's like, all right, like this is all just going to halo really nicely into all these other distribution channels, which I think makes a ton of sense. And I, I'm curious, the, I want to add, like, let's get into the growth here, but before, like right before then, like the founding story here, I want to like dig in here because like true CMOS is, is having a moment obviously where like How did the founder end up producing this product and like where do you guys stack rank in the market? Like were you guys first movers? Were you into the game a little bit later than some of the first movers? Like where does TrueCMOS fit into the market broadly?
The story started in late 2019, so right before COVID And the story goes like this. So essentially the founders, wife is a nutritionist and would always look for new natural ways, natural superfoods. And so she flagged like, hey, this is something that I would like to buy, but it looks very difficult to get and there's a lot of sugar in a lot of products. So what can we do? Can we buy some raw sea moss from somewhere? And it was for internal use. And then they actually started taking it and they saw a lot of benefits from it. And of course, founder is very entrepreneurial and then kind of saw an opportunity on the market, saw that there was, you know, there was not a lot of competition on Amazon. And of course, that, you know, it's shortly after it started its life. And yeah, and then the founder is a product guy at the same time. So it started with the raw CMOS and then of course there was a demand for CMOS gel, this product jar that you see in a very interesting format. We can talk about that as well. And it literally first, I think roughly around like 1,000 gel jars he was mixing himself in the kitchen. I have some pictures that I can send to you guys as well. We can— you can show a flash on screen as well. But the— it was truly inspiring how much passion there was to make this thing going. And when CMOS Gel started looking got introduced to Amazon. It shortly after became, you know, best-selling product because it was arguably just better tasting product. It was made more, much more naturally. No sugar, no bad additives. And after that, of course, he started entire production, who took a lot of risk throughout the process. Everything is made in LA. He is from LA and Yeah, that's, uh, that was kind of the backstory of it all.
I mean, that was the other box I was like, that HexClad really checked when I was deciding to join. Like, Danny has two decades in cookware. I'm like, this guy knows this market in and out. Like, I, he's in a like produce really high quality products that I feel I can go and sell online. And it seems like the same thing here, like founder's wife, nutritionist, like sounds like she was just making a product that she would want to take. And then her husband kind of turned it into more of like a consumer-facing product, right?
Yeah, 100%. And then there's also another big part that I miss actually. The CMOS itself, you asked about this, we were not first, hands down, right? And from Rise days, I've also learned you don't have to be first to be the best, right? So, and then he is a product guy at the same time, of course wearing a lot of hats including marketing, but he's constantly perfecting the product. Customers don't necessarily see it, but constantly perfecting the flavor. And then of course we're tracking retention because of that. But that was his world of like, how can I make the best product that is out there? Because as I was kind of auditing everything, as I was moving in, okay, what is this thing, right? This CMOS. So is it like a new thing that kind of got introduced in the market for the past 10 years? But actually no, the CMOS itself, has been around for many, probably a century, even more. I don't know, of course, how far it goes back, but in different cultures, in Asian culture or in Europe or Africa, people are taking it, the raw sea moss, blending it and making a puree or making a smoothie or anything like that for the benefits that it had. So there was already an audience for that product. and then, and the benefits of the product, of those products are not made up. They're already confirmed by the history. So how can I now take that and amplify that, um, to wider market?
All right, that's what I want to get into. Like, I'm looking at, I'm looking at Google search trends here. It looks like, it looks like 2020 it really started to pop off. Actually, it had its highest moment in, in, uh, April of 2020, which is interesting. So like right as, right as COVID was hitting, and it's really like it was almost nonexistent in Google search trends prior to 2020. And now it's really, you know, a lot of up and downs, but, um, cool. Well, let's, let's, uh, let's dig into the growth here because the growth, the growth story is pretty insane. You came on when the brand was low 8 figures, scaled to a nice 9-figure size now in about a year, um, which is pretty wild. So I want to dig into that growth story. Like what, what has unlocked growth? Like if you could hit on maybe like the 2 or 3 biggest levers that have really unlocked this exponential growth for TrueCMOS?
Absolutely. Just to quickly address that 2020, there was another company that went on Shark Tank and it just exploded everything. Yeah, so—
So they rose the tide and okay.
Yeah, you could say, and then they were doing, of course, demand generation a little bit, but I don't think it's at that scale. But now for TrueCMOS, I wish I could tell you very comprehensive, hey, we did like this 5 to 6 things, but What I realized walking in is that, hey, clearly we need a demand generation engine and you don't need to look far to know what that thing is. And that's Meta. And it was already there. It was doing well. But okay, how can we amplify this by a, how can we increase the spend and implement the measurement so we hold team accountable for the numbers? And then how can we increase the creative input, right? Just coming from experience, that is of course one of the biggest levers. And but Trucemos was on a bunch of other sales channels. There was, and then there were like two big demand generation machines, of course TikTok Shop and Meta. But of course Meta was taking the lion's share of that, north of 90% of that demand generation. Now, And so there was, of course, I very much like, hey, let's focus on this one thing and it's working. And then of course, month over month, it was kind of starting to grow and grow. And so, okay, then the question is like, how can we keep this ship going as much as we can? And then as we were in different sales channels, now the measurement became a very big, big thing. Of course, understanding the data, having it more accurately. A, having accurate data and then measuring the impact of that dollar that you spend on demand generation to how it halos everywhere. At least get a directional. You will never get like accurate results over here, right? I think Connor, you mentioned that as long as you can have the directional understanding, that's more than enough to you to drive meaningful assessment of that. So, and whether that placement is incremental or not.
Can you just speak to that? Like at True CMOS's level of growth from a from a low 8-figure brand to now a 9-figure brand, like how are you making sure the data you're relying on is accurate to make big decisions and not have any like questions in the back of your head like, oh, is this data right or is it not?
Oh yeah, I've been asking that question for first few months, like not getting anywhere. So, which was a natural growth working with Serres. This is not my first time working with Serres at the same time. So was super stoked to kind join working with them. But yeah, walking in, like I was asking for some of the reports and I was trying to pull reports as well. It was just a mess. Like wherever I looked, like there was like hundreds of SKUs for practically for like 10 products. And it was like, why do those exist? You look at the cohort because it's a subscription business. It's just complete mess. Like somebody would re— Somebody we would go and win back, they would not get assigned to that original order and it would start as a new subscription. I was like, why is that happening? And then just the share of headache that we had to go through before we started looking for a partner was just, yeah, I was imagining just as you, Conor, just going in, Okay, I'm just gonna get Supermetrics and just like gonna map it out and then okay, I'm gonna pull those reports and maybe assign someone. It was like, nope, that's not how, that didn't work. So first it was the accuracy problem, big problem to kind of deal with when you're growing really, really fast and you need to make decisions, like drastic decisions week over week when the spend is high. And the second is of course, okay, how can we now deploy wider measurement across this? So like, and then of course when the AI came into the conversation, Sarah definitely took a lead of like, hey, now you can apply, like you can use so many prompts to actually pull that data a lot more easily. And it was like that just music to my ears because wow, now the game has changed for us. From here on. And so when you are especially into multiple sales channels, and we're not plugging in only just website data, right? Just that's— yes, that's very important. You're plugging in Amazon data, you plug in the retail data, and then the big factor here is that how you can capture that demand is your pricing, for example, other than the ad spend. So you change different pricing, your demand capture changes. How much you capture in one channel, second channel. So you're working with them to hypothesize with all those scenarios and it worked really, really well. Of course, we went through a little bit of crisis as well earlier this year with the recall. We can talk about that as well, but that was also a very interesting point where Saros came up front and said like, hey, let's imagine, let's hypothesize on scenarios that we can What's the plan from here? Because it was just panic all over the place throughout the team. And so what is the game plan from here? If scenario A happens, B happens, but all of a sudden we had 10 scenarios and then having that just gave us so much peace and only way we could achieve that is just to have data in order. So do you—
Chad talks a lot about like gold standard for a subscription brand is 3x lifetime value to CAC ratio and they basically optimize their business off of that and they have enough cohort data where they know like, all right, if CAC's here today, like this is going to back into this lifetime value, not revenue, but like actual, I think he looks at it as like a 3x, like actual lifetime contribution margin to CAC ratio. So not, not even not revenue even. So how, how are you thinking about your, your business, Luca? Like what's your, like if you had to choose 2 KPIs to make decisions off of for TrueCMOS, like what are those KPIs?
Chad, yes, I mean, there's LTV to CAC is the holy grail for the most part. It can be deceiving in certain cases, but like for the most part, like that's kind of the golden ratio is that. And also everything, the most important chart other than just like daily growth spreadsheet or, you know, Sarah's dashboard is the LTV to cohort report. So the cohort report is, say we have like 50,000 new customers this month. from D2C, um, just, just D2C website. What are we doing with what— how much we have spent, how much we had paid for the product fulfillment? What is our contribution number 3, which is after product fulfillment? You strip out some of the chargebacks, refunds, merchant fees, all the variable costs, and then the ad spend, of course, and that's your contribution. So you're in negative for the most part. Subscription-focused businesses are in negative. And then where do we break even? What is that point? And then after 12 months and after 2 years, where are we going to, we're going to be there. What's the point? Is that a good scenario? It's a good, what's bad? And that's just D2C website. You overlay some Amazon on top of it into a different tab, right? You overlay some of the retail and all of a sudden what you see is that your break-even point through for the whole business for that, for that acquisition is actually goes even lower, right? You gotta be careful there of course, just to not get super excited because all of a sudden you just like went from 4-month breakeven to like a 1-month breakeven. But you want to hold the website accountable for its own metrics so that it can survive without those channels. Although there's a leakage over there, right? We go to Costco, we go to Kroger, Walmart, that AMER will deteriorate. But now the conversation more leads into, okay, how can we assist the business even better? But the cohort report is of course the holy grail. LTV to CAC, AMER, of course business MER, CAC, AOV, first returning, all of that good stuff. Of course it's a Taylor Holiday school of hierarchy of metrics in the end of the day. So, and listening to the marketing ops. But of course we had like very big two demand generation channels, which is Amazon and retail, which was kind of fueling back the Meta. And then of course we were holding our website to its very, like it has to survive on its own. If none of this existed, it has to survive. So like what is that break-even point where we can keep this ship going as much as we can and we can capture all of that contribution margin from other channels and then we can readjust how we can move forward from here. So I think that's kind of the, if I could point out one thing, that's the one. But of course, I walked into already set up team. There was already, and we were hiring really, really fast because company was growing, hiring out of desperation because we needed to fill in a lot of roles. And that was very, very challenging. And we made fair share of mistakes over there. But of course, learning, still learning.
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So on the, on the scale test, just quickly, I'm curious, like, what that looked like in practice. You come on board, you're like, hey, this is the big opportunity. We need to scale this. And while we scale this, we need to understand what is the impact across other channels. Is that just an observation? Did you say, hey, I'm going to double budgets and then we're going to look at sell-through across Sprouts and on Amazon and on D2C and sort of triangulate the impact there? Was it more scientific than that? Like, I'd love, I'd love like just a few more details on how someone listening might be able to action what you did.
Yeah, so the first thing, like A, we were seeing it already halo. So for just, company grew 7 times, right? It went from $20 million to $140 million. And then saying that Amazon meantime also grew a lot, also 5, 6 times. No category grows that fast like in terms of search volume and the demand on that, query or queries that fast unless there's external traffic coming to that, coming to that channel. So we were already seeing that halo effect.
So you're just mapping it out. You're saying, hey, we're spending up 3x period over period in Meta right now, and we're also seeing our Amazon sales in search queries and traffic grow 3x. So you're kind of just setting up like a, All right, I'm gonna pull this lever over here and then I'm just, you knew which data points you were looking at. Like you went into that saying, hey, I think this is gonna halo in this way and here are the data points indicative of that. You didn't need any, don't get me wrong, we love our measurement tools here, but I think this is like a great case in point. Like you don't need too much fancy measurement tools for all things. Is that correct how you were thinking about that?
Correct. There's, I did some, back then there was not that much, there was no cloud, I would say, to do the same type of regression analysis, but I was trying to basically map it out together. So I was taking several data points, of course, spend being the number one, but of course, as you know, Cody mentioned this number of times as well, like reaching new people is a very big challenge over time. So I was taking that new reach and rolling reach and applying that on top of it so that I can then guesstimate, okay, if I'm reaching X amount of people more and I'm spending this much more, how much I'm actually will will be able to capture more on those channels. And then that's just Amazon, right? We have retail bigger, like there's 450 stores. We were adding a few, now we're in Whole Foods as well, and then soon to be in many others. Now that being said, okay, that channel is also generating a lot more demand over there. So, and then we have TikTok also doing its own thing, um, in and of itself for a different type of audience. I think it's still a separate corner of the internet that is over there. But so then that's kind of was like basically trying to put that in a, you know, back of a napkin. Okay. Because we needed to move fast, like really fast. Like every week we had to have answers of like, what is our next target? What if we move faster and lower our, increase our CAC threshold, what will change? And let's look at, let's test those out, right? And what does account looks like from AMER perspective, from MER perspective. Total revenue to total ad spend and all of that. Because in certain cases, we were thinking like D2C was not necessarily doing good, but actually like business was doing good. So then the question is like, okay, why don't we hold it there? And then we'll see the fruits of that labor in other sales channels. But then let's hold back and then what else we need to do to, in terms of like setting targets to make this business grow faster.
So phase 1 here is just like, a new lens of analytical rigor. Like how, like what does good look like? What are we making decisions off of? Which is amazing. Like you can't scale as aggressively and as fast as you have and as GrooveKart have unless you have a, like a well-informed yet simple decision-making framework. And like, it sounds like that was one of the first kind of like foundational things you laid down. But what about from a marketing perspective? Like you said, Meta and TikTok were existing demand generation engines that already existed within the business before. You got there, but you also at the same time were thinking, hey, yes, these exist, but they can be better. They can generate more demand. We can put more fuel into these demand generation engines. So, from a marketing standpoint, so step 1, like dial in how you're measuring, then step 2, you presumably really scaled Meta. What did that look like? Like the actual tactical notes on how you scaled Meta?
Yeah. So, there was, Walking in, just looking at the account, like, I'm a Facebook guy at heart, so I'm still Meta at account is my number first, the first tab that is pinned on my Chrome, right? So looking at the account, of course, okay, what we can change here and what we can, how can we set up the account so that it actually grows naturally? And then because like, okay, okay, let's not introduce any new channels. Let's say YouTube, which came around a little bit later, or any other channels for now. Let's just like focus in on Meta. But then that's account, but then you need the fuel to that fire, right? So that's your creative. And walking in, what I had noticed is that although account was growing, it was growing on the back of the, strategy that was not necessarily dialed in towards a kind of, it was not as strategic to kind of create a UGC or static. It was there, but like there was, we got lucky a few times with a few ads. I was like, okay, this is very, very risky right now. If we can only rely on those like 4 to 5 ads and hired 30 people because of this, no, no, don't, let's not do that, right? Let's have put a, strategy behind it. So, looking at the creative strategy piece, I looked at it, okay, volume is definitely low, right? Which aid was something that we need ASAP, and then diversity for sure. But like account was every, like every new concept that we're introducing to the market, it was net new to the account, so it was like rewarding us. It's like, okay, so how about we take as many shots on goal and see kind of what sticks essentially. So let's reduce our expectation in terms of quality. Let's get lucky more times. Let's increase the odds of this. So within a quarter, our creative input, I think like 4 or 5x. And of course what we did is like, A, I believe in in-house, love agencies. I'm from— I worked at agencies a lot, but I definitely believe that people in-house do take a better care of the business. So, so what we did is that, okay, let's take, build our in-house team, but also continue working with agencies when it comes to creative, right? So that, A, we create a little bit of competition, but also create that, take those, some of the leading creative agencies and input those creative into our ad account as well. So all of that was working all together to create more winners for us. And that luckily kind of worked out. But at the same time, building internal team is a whole different beast after you surpass that getting lucky phase. All right. So once you kind of hit your number of winners by just pure random, that I'm messaging that or X messaging or Y messaging, now you kind of have to build a methodical system of like how we can create more predictable measurement on like what we're doing, what variables we're testing, which where we're at right now. And now we're actually dialing back on the volume and putting more pressure on like the pieces that we're testing and the kind of what exactly were the, what are the exact answer questions that we're trying to answer here when we're talking about growth for the business.
How many ads are you launching Uh, like on a weekly or monthly basis?
Every day, I think— I look at the daily basis, uh, every day I think 6 ads go live at a minimum right now.
Okay, yeah, so that makes sense. Call it 30 ads a week. Yeah, 40 ads a week.
Yeah.
Have you guys seen this being discussed on Twitter? I feel like— I feel like people are absolutely split. You've got these people— I think Alex Hormozy said this week in an interview. I think he's doing 1,500. He might've said 1,500 a week. It was some obscene amount of ads, just extremely high volume. And then you've got this growing sort of faction on the other side who's like, volume is a myth. Doesn't help. What you need is like finely crafted ads. And like, it's actually the people not producing all that many that are winning.
Yeah. It's just a phases thing. It's just like, depends on the phase of your business. Like it's, it's kind of crazy, Luca, hearing you talk about your, your first few levers you pulled, because I like those, that was actually like maybe the same exact playbook in my first year at Hexocloud, not like in 2022 is like step 1. How, what does good look like? Like, why are we making any decisions we're making? And like, there was no framework for that. So it was like, what are our blended merge targets? Like, how do we measure ad channels using like a multi-touch attribution tool? Like that was phase 1. And then phase 2 was shots on net, like Cool. This is a, this is like a $20, like a $30, $40 million brand, but like, and the ads are okay, but they're not launching that many. So like, I think in 2023, when HexCloud or 2022, when HexCloud like became a 9-figure brand, like it was the same playbook. It was like, we need to be producing more ads. Like Connor talks about this a lot of like unlocking new, like peaks that you can, that you can kind of maximize. And it was the same exact playbook. It was like, we need to produce a lot of creative. And get more ads in the ad account. And now over time, we've realized that it's like, no, now it's like the new unique stuff that really unlocks those new peaks. Like it's this new influencer ad that we spent a month scripting and another month producing and editing. And then we finally launched it with like 10 versions and now we've spent a million and a half dollars on it and we paid this creator $200,000 or something. Like it's, it's just transitioned over time, right? Like where it was analytical rigor. Volume and then creative intentionality. And like, not that now it's a balance between volume and being intentional and taking big swings. Um, can, can I want to ask you about some of the specifics in your creative testing? So like you were throwing a ton of creative in the ad account. Do you remember like any that really took off or like, holy crap, like, like we just launched this new creator ad and we, it just immediately overnight is getting like insane engagement, insane CPAs. You're like, okay, we can, We can triple spend. I think we've all had that experience as ad buyers, at least me at the agency and probably you at the agency where like you and Connor, I mean, you had that agency background too, where you like toss a new ad in the account and like you look at it in a few days and the CPA is half of what it is and you're like, and you kind of get that, like those goosebumps, like, all right, we're going to be able to like triple spend in this account in the next month or two. Like, do you, do you remember any of the ads that unlocked the account for TruSemas when you were playing this volume game?
Yes, and my appetite is very high when it comes to, like, coming from Rise. Like, there's, I mean, you can go to Rise's ad library, there's thousands of ads over there. So, um, I had that luxury, uh, of course, seeing those come in often. So when Khatim would get excited, like, he getting those winners like once a month, let's say, I was like, no, I need like 6 of those a month. Uh, that's kind of how it's how it needs to go. But yes, we just had the one for our CMOS electrolytes 3 days ago and I'm just buzzing how fast it's going. CAC dropped, AMER improved, you know, spend is up 25% last 3 days versus previous and week over week is like massive jump, of course, and month over month. And that being said, like, okay, yeah, like how can we generate more of those? And I do think that volume, hands down, if you playing the volume game is a great proposition, right? I don't think that is wrong, but I don't agree with the fact that you just have to detach from the reality of like what Meta wants, right? We had this huge update. If it's going to think that 80% of your 1,500, what Hormozi says, Meta thinks it's the same ad. Guess what's going to happen? It's not going to reach new people because it's going to think it's the same ad and it's going to start looping in your funnel. But funnel, I'm not talking about the funnel of people who visit on your website. There's a whole other funnel of people, right, we're talking about who have never even clicked on your ad, right? So it's going to circle around there. It's never going to reach new people. So what you actually need to do is like be more strategic. It's just the game has as always, it has evolved again. So now just focusing on the volume is just not good enough, what I'm saying. And I think, you know, Connor, you mentioned something that you, a lot of episodes back, that how you guys changed that strategy.
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Yes. So the— we talked about Meta, kind of what drove— like when we're talking about Meta, it's like 80/20. We haven't even touched, like, which is the, we're about to talk about, right? Like landing page testing, CRO, that has been going on, which was never done before to an extent that we're doing right now. So building those landing pages that are specific to the audience, like whether that's gut or supporting your GLP-1 journey or helping with your stress, whatever that is, supporting you in all sorts of ways. That is a whole different part of the business that marketing team is taking care of. All right. So that is going on for sure. But when we're talking about scaling the demand, yes, the Meta is going to do the heavy lifting over there. But there's what we look at is I'm going to quickly jump to the back to the Meta conversation. What we look at is in the account, let's say for said product, right? What, like, are all the ads that we have? Then of course naming conventions is a very big deal, as always. So like, what are the message, like if we take like $100,000 yesterday, right? So like how much percent we spent on like this messaging versus that messaging? What was the hook rate on that? What was the hold rate on that on a weekly basis? So that we can then assess Okay, from that funnel that is going on right now, impressions that we're generating, what is the leading line? Who's taking the lion's share of those impressions? And like, what are the messages that we're leading with, right? So who is getting us new people into our funnel? And then how are we supporting that with the landing pages, like educating them throughout their journey? Because like, what on earth is CMOS? Like, not a lot of people, I don't, yes, it's great to reach people who've been taking CMOS a lot, you know, when they were a kid, when their parents have been giving them as like a natural remedy or whatever. But at the same time, like if I'm going to build this thing like from $140 million to $500 million to $1 billion, for sure I need to reach out to people and take some wallet share, share of wallet from other nutritional brands that they're spending their money on, right? If you're taking your greens powder, if you're taking your colostrums, like, well, I'm for that dollar reaching for that dollar as well. So I need to do that education piece for sure. It's because it's going to be very polarizing to a lot of people because what is this thing? Imagine this right now. We're very— we're native to what is a green powder. 15 years ago, what on earth is green powder? Right. And then you look at AG1's first website, they had to go through a journey as well. But now every— if you go to Whole Foods or any type of store, green powder has its own shelf, right? So our goal right now is how can we make CMOS products, and especially TruCMOS, a next mainstream health and wellness product, and what it would take us to do that. A lot of education, a lot of demand generation, and then reaching the right audience with that.
So I love the, I love your approach to optimizing destinations. Like you're, cause you're, cause basically what you're saying is you build your funnels and your ads really around outcome. Hey, I want to improve my gut health. Hey, I want to, I'm on GLP-1s and I need nutritional support. So you're, you're reaching different consumers by the outcome that your product can provide. I mean, like Zach Stock talks a lot about this with Holo, right? He sells alpaca fiber socks and there's like 6 or 7 different kind of use cases that people would use that for. And like, that's how he scales. Those funnels. So you guys take the same approach, but you're saying, hey, we see that gut health took up 30% of our budget in the last, in the last 30 days. And like, that's the biggest percent of spend by outcome. Let's go start there because if we can optimize that destination with like a lander and improve the conversion rate by 10, 15, 20%, like that has the most upside compared to like GLP-1 that only had maybe 10% of total spend. Is that what you're, is that what you're saying?
Yeah. And then there's also the other layer. You can layer in some incrementality testing behind it as well. And I would speak with Nick from House and think of some of the successful tests that he has done. And it was like, okay, there's some very good case studies over here. And then so, okay, so if this angle messaging is taking 30, 40%, and that's kind of our leading message, and we see the new visitor percentage also on that messaging is very high. Okay, I do think that the acquisition cost or the return that we're seeing inside our NTAs, attribution tools, it's giving us like X output. But I do believe whatever it's telling me over there is actually not that— not actually true. It's actually far more incremental than what we think, what it feeds to the account. So because like this winner that we're just seeing right now on with CMOS Electrolytes, great, it's— we're seeing great performance on it, right? But There are other ads are not as good in terms of numbers, but there we much rather spend money on those, take a maybe 10% hit on the return inside MTA, what it's giving us, but it's gonna bring a lot better people to your entire account and it will rise entire, increase the account velocity in the end. So then now we're layering in of course some incrementality testing within you know, inside Meta so that we can better understand what is the message that we should be leading with. So it's not only— so we come from like, you know, throwing a lot of creatives and then just like scaling whatever in whatever ways. Now being very methodical of— because now of course reaching new people is becoming more challenging and data and measurement, of course, which is a whole nother conversation, becomes more and more challenging as well.
Okay. So that's, that's really interesting. Like very actionable, tactical. Honestly, you said you didn't really have like a, I did this first, this second, this third, but when you were actually saying it, it, it kind of did come across that way. I think that was actually some really good actionable stuff on how you like thought about improving the Meta account from the ad level and then moving down funnel and saying, all right, great. We've got a bunch of winning ads now. How can we optimize the post-click experience?
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I think if I remember correctly, Chad, Chad just said, is that, that like 3x, uh, lifetime value to CAC? Like that's a lifetime, like a true lifetime. Like that's not even 12 months, that's like our average lifetime of, of every cohort is trying to hit that 3x. Do you, do you have a good finance team at TruCMOS that like is so that way, you know, like their contribution margins are super buttoned up, like you're really able to dial in very specifically, like true cost of goods, true cost of fulfillment. And then obviously you have CAC dialed in. So like you feel really confident because I think that's at least in my experience sometimes where you you run into like figuring out where do the KPIs need if you don't have that like finance function that like a solid finance function in-house, it's like, where does CAC need to be? It's like, well, we don't really know because our data is messy and like we don't really have our cost of goods and our cost of fulfillment buttoned up. And like we don't have a, like a per order calculator built out that allows us to see those things. So what does that function look like at TrueCMOS? Like, have you, have you spent a lot of time with, with that team?
Oh yeah. I meet with CFO every week. Um, and just so that we can, uh, ideate on the priorities. But yes, from the beginning, right, I just showcased like, hey, this is the cohort chart. If I have those metrics, I can assign the success metrics, what's good, what's bad. And this is kind of the scenario number A. If I don't have those numbers, I cannot set my payback period target, cannot set my CAC targets, all of that. So it's just explaining like, hey, why that matters. And the CFO didn't come from the D2C background. I was like, again, okay, this is kind of why it's important. And we quickly became an important point that we need to work really, really close together. And they're phenomenal. Just to give you guys a background a little bit more about True Sea Moss, it's a bootstrapped brand and it's making its own product. And we were out of stock last year 2 times, I think for like a couple of days. Just the fact that the team has managed that somehow. Of course, I'm not as much in the weeds of what's happening in the production procurement side, but, and the COO only joined, phenomenal COO joined 3 months ago at this point, but that team pulled off just insane amount of work just to keep the ship going. And then of course the CFO understanding kind of how things are and what are the metrics that we need to look at other than just like P&L statement and the cash flow statement, right? And looking through the marketing lens. So I provided whatever is feasible, and then we then adjust, like, okay, we can actually go harder. You can actually spend extra $100 grand on just experimenting with whatever you want. Okay, I can take that, experiment with YouTube. I can, I can buy this software, and then that deal that I'm negotiating over there, I can, I can do that with them. So it becomes a very collaborative work with finance team.
The three pillars of an e-com brand, finance, product, and you were the third infinity stone with growth.
Yeah, yeah. The interesting thing is that True CMOS was for the very long time like a product-led company. Founder is a product guy, of course wearing a lot of hats, but production was, our manufacturing was making all sorts of products and it was kind of, in a way it was kind of thrown at the marketing team. Hey, just go figure out, right? So there was no go-to-market strategy, there was no marketing calendar, nothing, right? There was nobody was using Slack, by the way, just, just set the scene. Like, there's Trello and Telegram groups, and that was it. And there was no Notion, no ClickUp, nothing last year when I walked in. So it— company went through just throughout insane transformation throughout this journey. Super proud of the team, of course. But yeah, making, shifting from product-led company to a little bit of like a marketing-led company, it was a massive shift. Of course, there was some conversation we had to have, like what's realistic, what's not realistic. But we don't want to lose that leverage of making products on demand pretty much because CMOS Electrolytes, we launched it last 4th of July. 4 months ago it was just an idea over the kitchen counter, and then all of a sudden we have the product, and then now we can— it's a $15 to $20 million business all of a sudden, uh, as of this point. So you want to keep that while overlaying some of the expectations and visibility, what you can do, uh, with the market and what's worth doing, what's not worth doing in terms of product launches.
And like when you say the shift from pro, like being a product-led company to a marketing-led company, like I think you already hit on this kind of throughout some of the other questions, right? It's like, hey, we have a product that has some demand. Like let's just throw a few ads into Meta and see what happens versus let's actually be intentional about the angles and the personas we're going after. Let's build a process around how we launch ads, how we measure ads. Let's actually like have a flywheel for optimizing landing pages and like conversion rate. Is that what? Is that what you're referring to when you say the shift from product-led into marketing-led? Is there anything else you would add when you're saying that?
Yes, the bare bones we're talking about just basic infrastructure. Let's just align on like when we're doing sales, right? And then what we're doing, what are those gift with purchase, what are discounts, how we're structuring those. Let's not figure out what we're doing for 4th of July. On the 3rd of July, right? Basics. And after that, okay, let's align on not launching 12 different products because we had CMOS green powder, we had CMOS soaps, we had a ton of CMOS tablets, drops, whatever. And it's okay. Is the cannibalization a thing here, right? Is it worth continuing doing and spreading ourselves way too thin or just let's focus on the one thing? Right? Because the company, we were growing so fast that we got very— we got a shiny object syndrome of like doing everything because we thought we're just gods of like growth. And so going way too horizontal because the questions came out, okay, let's go to Germany, let's go to UK, let's do all of those things. But then, yeah, that's great. But then I'm the one who's like asking those— you could say those questions like So we're going to UK, but why are we going to UK? What is this problem that we're solving? It's like, oh, we're gonna sell more product, but do we lack demand? Is that the demand is the problem? Or it's like, why are we going there, right? So let's launch this product. It's like, we're doing this product, but like, what's the intent? What's the positioning? This product, unless it's like a $20 million opportunity right now, we shouldn't get into it essentially, right? So we're getting distracted. And I was a big proponent of like eliminating noise, just like let's zero in like what's, what's, what's working and there's like grow that. But doesn't mean that we should discount all the opportunities that come our way and using that leverage that we have with production, making products very fast, iterating on flavors, product benefits and all of that stuff.
I love the discipline, by the way. It's just so easy to like do too much at too, too much too early. And you came in and you're like, no, Meta's gotten us here, but it's clearly unoptimized. Like, I'm gonna like focus on maximizing Meta and like pointing all of your guns at Meta as opposed to having like, just you're too spread thin. And I just, I love the discipline. We talk a lot about like the when and the why behind expanding channels. And I think this is like a great episode for folks to listen to because you were just like so disciplined on like, no, I know we can get more outta Meta. And clearly you have, right? Like clearly it's taken you to, from a whatever $20 million brand to a 9-figure brand and beyond. Um, and I know you've expanded channels now, but I would guess that your focus on optimizing meta has allowed you to, you know, now vertically scale it and get you to where you are. So I just love the discipline. And I think it's like a really good point for listeners to, to take home is there's often more to get out of the channels that you found product market fit with in the first place.