Two $100M+ Operators Get Honest About Launching a New Brand

Welcome to episode 131 of Marketing Operators. Today, we are talking about going from running a 9-figure brand to building a new brand from zero. Connor talks about his experience with gut culture, and I talk about my experience with links. We talk about the unique challenges of starting with zero credibility, how media buying works when you're only spending a few hundred dollars per day. And if you stay till the end, you can hear what I did to get CPMs down from $200 to $30. So if you're starting a new brand for yourself, if you just started, Or if you're at the 7 figures range, there's going to be a lot of lessons that I think you can take away from this. Oh, what's up, Connor? Just you and me today.

Just you and I. Classic Connor Cody show.

This one will be good because we're talking about, uh, zero figures versus 9-figure brands. I don't think Connor Roland knows what that's like or remembers it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're doing like 11 figures, I think, is the last I heard.

Yeah, the 9 versus 10 figures that he'd be good on that one. I wouldn't know a thing about that.

They have so many figures over there at HexClad that we actually asked him, we said, Connor Roland, we don't even really want you to be a part of this conversation. It's been so long since Exclads thought about just single millions of dollars. We put them on the bench.

We're going to talk about what it's like going from 9 figures back to, we'll call it zero figures. It's the first time I've heard that term, but essentially starting over. You know, you've talked about it a little bit a long time ago with Gut Culture. I think it'd be good to dive in again and then to compare notes on, on, you know, Gut Culture versus Winx and just what we've learned.

Let me just like, for quick context for those listening, Ridge launched a fiber and hydration brand earlier this, earlier this year called Gut Culture. And it was just Ridge for the last few years has had a number of like swings that we've taken. A lot of our new category development has come from just like rapid experimentation in terms of like, what can we get live and figure out whether we can scale ads or whether our existing customer base wants it, things like that. Gut Culture was our first example of a net new brand. Um, so I'm, I'm super stoked to kind of dive in on the weeds here. I will say we've basically completely shelved it for now. It's very much on the back burner. We gave it a really solid effort for 6 months. The big thing is just the opportunity cost of running Gut Culture right now is too high. We're wrapping up Q3 now and we're up 50% year over year. We're growing in international markets, we're growing in retail. We've got our time and attention to spend on much higher leverage things right now. When we decided to experiment with a new brand like Gut Culture, it seemed a little bit more advantageous. The risk reward seemed better at this moment in time. We're really focused back on the core brand. Um, but you know, Sean and I have been here 10 years. Over the next 10 years, we'll take many more swings at new brands, I'm sure. So just to like level set, that's, that's where we're currently at with Gut Culture.

Love that. Love that.

We kind of carved out 10, 15% of our team, our internal team's time. So we, we were almost approaching like, what does it look like if Ridge were to act more like a holding company? Or if we treated our marketing department as more of like a growth service that could be used across different brand properties. Um, whereas Winks is, there's no internal team. It's you, it's Matt. Um, you guys are able to—

Occasionally Sean.

[Sponsor Content] Occasionally Sean jumping in. Yeah. You've got to kind of build it from square one. So I'll just also note that, like, not only are we in different positions in terms of how much are we prioritizing the brands, but in terms of what bandwidth is available to each brand, it's also pretty different. Everyone is talking about AI, but few operators are actually using it to speed up their marketing and make better decisions. At Ridge, we use Runneth. It's an AI brain for the whole marketing team. It watches every creative you've ever run, knows what's inside of each one, and connects it to what actually drove revenue. You can plug it into your Klaviyo, Shopify, Northbeam, your whole Google Drive. It reads all of it. So instead of asking what worked last quarter, anyone on your team can ask for 10 evergreen concepts worth testing before Q4 and get them back within minutes.

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I was gonna ask about that. So website photography, stuff like that, was that all done internally? Ridge employees?

Good question. 'Cause I did just say we use so much of the internal team. Um, what we used the internal team for largely was creative strategy, media buying. So what did we do? Uh, standing it up, we actually use, I have them written down here. We used a handful of agencies. We used Bottomless to design. It's ba— the entire website's basically 2 pages. We have a homepage that clicks to a PDP. Um, we used Unit 203, who I've talked about in the past, to develop the site. Um, and then we used, and I've never worked with them before, uh, Like We Are Friends was like a really cool email agency that I worked with. All they did was the flows, and that is what I would call like the core product. Obviously designs, dev, email, no photography, all AI-generated imagery.

Pretty good. I, I'm impressed. I mean, I mean, how different is your site now compared to when you launched though?

Not, not very different.

Okay. I'm impressed. Really, really good then. I, for, for being very lean and bare bones, I actually think it's very solid.

All AI-generated stuff. We didn't take a single photo throughout the process. Um, we do have some really talented designers, so we do have internal designers who took some of the AI-generated renders and just like different product photography, and then it gets treated a little bit further. So that's how we landed where we did. Um, and then the internal team on a day-to-day basis, iterating on landing pages, providing creative strategy. So we did pull in a couple agencies. We did a lot of AI-generated, uh, video for Gut Culture. We didn't even really seed it. We seeded minimal product. Like a lot of it was done via AI. And then, um, a lot of static imagery design and then the media buying. And that was kind of like the core. I think that's the 80/20 of growth. Um, 'cause the last thing that I'll say is I was trying to be really, we've had a great year all year. Team is already at capacity, I would say, in many ways. And we were facing direct trade-offs where if my retention team, or, uh, obviously we have CX rolled into, so we had like an agent dedicated to answering tickets, things like that. Um, but like, if my internal team focused on Ridge is spending any time on gut culture, that's directly being pulled away from focusing on wedding bands or travel or wallets or anything like that. So I wanted to be extremely thoughtful about that. So our goal was to say, hey, let's take the 80/20 of growth, the performance creative, the landing pages, the media buying, let's get like sort of a small pod system built out around that. We can iterate quickly. We launched hundreds of ads, we did dozens of landing pages, we tested a lot of different funnels, and that was a team that was working on it on like a, I'd say day-to-day, it's more like every other day to every other day sort of deal.

Operators Build, Winks is the new brand that we launched, Myself, Matt Bertelli, Curtis, he's like 20-year wellness veteran. He's like the product guy and really like the vision behind it. Who else? Mike Beckham is involved kind of leading finance for us. Sean's involved as well. Operators involved as well. So we launched it. It's been like 2, 3 weeks. Very similar where it's pretty much been Matt and myself on marketing. Have not gone with agencies for websites. So like, again, models are better now. So pretty much Matt started the site and Claude Code and Claude Design, and I kind of took it over and I've been getting it live and all that stuff. We just hired our first employee through Propel, so overseas designer/editor. Again, we're trying to do as much as we can with AI, but you need real stuff. And very similar, she'll do AI mockups, but then add some real imagery and design in there, which looks a lot better. We have a growth agency currently. We're using Tribe for a lot of content, doing some whitelisting as well. We're starting organic seeding with Sirol, who's a sponsor as well. But it's really like us 2 day to day. My assistant chief of staff is like helping me, who is from Propel as well. But it's, again, it's very lean, which is, I think we can talk about, 'cause it's quite a learning to get back and, you know, very humbling to do it publicly and get all this feedback. But yeah, it's extremely lean, but we are relying on some partners. Like we're just gonna start working with Homestead, who's gonna set up our flows. I tried to do that with Claude and Fable and stuff like that, and it's just not quite there. And I also want to spend all my time on acquisition, but it's extremely lean. We did a few photo shoots. I am looking for a photographer. Like, I do want, we're still going to do obviously a lot of AI stuff, but I do want some real lifestyle photography. But we did one or two and I just wasn't thrilled with them. So we are looking for a little bit more. But yeah, right now it's just, it's offer and messaging and obviously creative is where our focus is right now.

Can you go through one more time? You said Tribe, some of like the ad creative stack.

So we have an agency, a growth agency who is doing like AI statics. They're doing some videos, mostly AI, not, you know, creator stuff. We are working right now on getting like a, which I think we will definitely talk about, like a scientific advisory panel who obviously we will want to do some whitelisting from for credibility. I reached out to a bunch of, I'll call them influencers who I knew were strong performers. A lot of them we work with at Jones Road for whitelisting deals. So we haven't gotten any live yet, but we'll do a little bit of that. They will post organically on Instagram and then we'll whitelist those. That was something Jordan Menard at Instant did in the beginning and highly recommended. Obviously you can get a lot of really good signal and credibility in the beginning. And then Tribe. So, you know, Tribe is, people call it TikTok. I feel like everyone's talking about it now, but people call it like TikTok Shop for Meta. So essentially what you can do on Tribe, it's just a way you can discover creators on it, but people also pull their TikTok creators over to their Tribe. But you can facilitate getting whitelisting or just content And makes it really easy. And Tribe automatically tracks the spend. You can either do a percentage of spend or a retainer or a, and I can share what we're doing, or a percentage of GMV, essentially percentage of revenue from the ads. And a lot of brands are doing that for their creative supply chain, which, you know, I highly recommend. And so what we are doing on Tribe We're doing 2 things. We just started Discord. We're starting weekly calls next week that I'm gonna lead. And we put 5 creators on retainer, $3K a month. This is what Tribe team recommended. Instead of just going volume and trying to get like thousands of creators, really wanna start with like from the ground up, like really purposeful. 5 creators, they're doing 2 videos a day. So 60 videos a month. And we brief them, but mostly it's about coaching. And then we are supposed to, and again, I don't know this from experience, but from what they told us, do everything we can to actually help them make as much money as possible. You don't want to be cheap and like just do, you know, like cap them. Like it's all, it's the Hudson method, but it's all about helping them see the vision and change their life and do everything you can to help them be successful. So that's really our goal and where we're putting, you know, a ton of, I guess our eggs in that basket. Are you guys on Tribe for Ridge?

We're on Tribe. Yeah. And we did, Connor Rowland and I talked about it a bit. I was tweeting about it recently. I think Tribe's the best example of, um, the unbundling of TikTok Shop. Uh, TikTok Shop is like, I've mentioned this many times on the podcast, at its core, TikTok Shop provides the best native tools for activating creators at scale. And I think Tribe is just a great example of that being decoupled from actually having to sell products on TikTok Shop and all of the sort of hoops you have to jump through in order to do that. The live selling, the fulfilled by TikTok, the contest, the volume, the GMV max. It's like at the end of the day, brands want great content. So I do hear that from people constantly now, that it's just a tribe or just like the, again, the ability to activate creators so that you can get that organic content early, you can train them up and you have people who are talented at producing content thinking about your brand every week. Delivering some amount of assets.

[Sponsor Content] Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's not about the technology. I've talked to people that have built their own or use Yuka or Refunnel as well, but just having this creative supply chain. And I think that's, this is one of the biggest differences. And, you know, there's, there's so many disadvantages of a new brand that we can talk about and you don't have the credibility and brand and cash and all that. Um, but, but speed. And one of the things that I really wanted and know that is really important is, you know, be able to get tests live instantly. And I think we're able to do that with Tribe because you don't have to go and brief, find creators, contract them, brief them, send them products. We now have people who are kind of starving for direction and inspo and ideas that we can just be like, hey, I had this idea, can you make an ad for this today? Or, you know, saw this, can you do it? And I think that's incredibly helpful. We're also— so Tribe is one. We have our designer who will do, you know, she's kind of a designer editor, so she can do web design, she can do email, you know, she can do ads, right? Beginning stages, you need a jack of all trades, but she'll definitely do that. And then we have Runneth, and I've been extremely impressed by Runneth. They're one of the sponsors of the show as well. You know, I spent a lot of time, probably too much time, building like an AI static engine workflow with, you know, Claude and Codex and like, so much back and forth, trial and error. Why did you do that? Mess it up, change the skill, whatever. Runneth just like out of the box works like whatever they did to train it. It's awesome. So Runneth is in our Slack and so I'll just take an idea, you know, and be like, hey, I like this ad, make it for Winks and whatever. And it's very good. And so I have Runneth doing that. I have it, once I approve it, I save it. It does the multiple formats and then Runneth is also uploading ads for me. 'Cause dude, I don't know about you, if you were ever like hands-on media buying yourself, for Gut Culture. I spent like 2 hours uploading ads the other day and it was the worst experience. Like it was so buggy. Like back when I used to run ads, I feel like I'm so old saying that, like it was not that bad. Like I feel like the platform worked. Like I could not actually, it was just the biggest waste of time. So it's pretty sick that I can just be like, hey, upload these ads. Most brands treat customer support as a cost, but with AI, every support conversation is now a chance to increase retention, recover revenue, and grow your LTV. Richpanel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets. They allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different win-back offers on refund requests, subscription save offers during cancellations, and product recommendations that turn chats into sales. Plus, they guarantee you're going to save money. 50% of your support volume automated in 30 days or your money back. That's a pretty good offer if you ask me. So go to richpanel.com/demo. They'll build an AI support team live for your business and show you how it can drive incremental revenue for you.

Okay, cool. No, that's a super interesting stack. Let me ask you a different question here. So, you know, I would say one of the advantages Ridge felt we had with Gut Culture was access to a high-performing team, like an entire team. We had expertise across the board, fulfillment and whatever else we sort of like tap into whenever we needed. That's, I think, how we would've described our advantage. Um, also, if we were to have really scaled it up, we could have funded Gut Culture to be unprofitable early in order to build the cohorts quicker and, and create more You know, lifetime value and allow that to compound at a faster rate than a brand who's trying to bootstrap themselves. Um, you know, Jones Road was started because Bobbi Brown gave it an advantage. What would you call, how have you thought about like the advantage that Winks has?

We have an advantage in one way, a huge advantage in one way, obviously because of our networks and our public profile and stuff like that. But we don't have an advantage in the market. And we have a lot of people that have offered to help and definitely, I'll be honest about it, we have good rates on stuff that we wouldn't have otherwise, whether it's our sponsors who are obviously pitching in services in addition to their sponsorship, or we're using the 3PL that Simple Modern uses and we have very good rates of that, or we have, I don't think it's helped that much, but with a contract manufacturer, right? Where we're able to say, hey, we're these We're, we, you know, here's our background and stuff, or get a, get an intro, you know, from a 9-figure brand who, who uses that 3PL. That being said, no one in the market knows us. So it's, you know, nothing really matters until you have product market fit. Yeah, our OpEx is a little bit lower, but, you know, nothing, nothing really matters. We don't have a celeb founder and stuff like that. But, you know, it does help in some ways. Like when I was doing, you know, influencer outreach, you know, I crafted, and even tribe outreach, I crafted a really good email. It was like, hey, I'm Cody. I'm the former CEO of Jones Road. We are a 9-figure brand, uh, you know, together with the CEO of Ridge, president of, you know, CEO of Simple Modern, like we're coming together building this public, like there at least is credibility there I can pull from even for a new introduction. So that has definitely helped. But, um, but obviously there's no, you know, no one knows us. We have 16 reviews on our site right now. And so that is personally one of the larger obstacles that we're, we're trying to overcome right now.

That last point is an interesting one with tribe, with creator communities. I think the sleep supplement space is competitive, but maybe a little bit less competitive than like apparel or creatine or something like that, like a more saturated market. But retainers are important because you have to, a creator has to expect that they're gonna get value in return for their time. And if you're like day one competitive market, no background, like there's just no reason to believe as a creator, like, hey, I'm gonna produce 30 pieces of content for this month for some guy I've never heard of with a brand that has no customers because like the likely, the expected value on my time is really, really low. So you being able to say that, I think does provide some amount of value, but it does like thinking about both Gut Culture and Wings and like, this is such an obvious take, but the advantage that you want more than anything is with distribution. And that's why like creator brands are so popular today and people who can launch brands with POs from Target, if you have some sort of relationship preexisting there, um, like that's the one that actually is like business changing, especially for a subscription business where revenue can really compound over time. If you can quickly get to your first 1,000 loyal customers, that is just a massive advantage.

So neither of us have had that, but I'm sure you were to do it again, take another swing doing it with distribution creator, somebody like that behind it from the beginning.

Well, yeah, I mean, we'd have to take the swing in a different way. We'd probably have to be a little bit more committed from the beginning. We launched Gut Culture with the idea that like, we can very easily pivot out of it. Like it was such an easy sort of risk-return calculation for us to say, hey, we can put in 6 figures, like low 6 figures, and like we could take a shot at like building something that could potentially be really valuable. We decided, hey, spending our time and attention here is not worth it compared to the other things. the other opportunities we have in our business. If we were to bring on a, uh, some sort of distribution advantage, a creator, a celebrity, something like that, there would need to be more buy-in from the beginning, I think. Um, what I will say is we talk about this with Marques all the time. Marques Brownlee, uh, chief creative partner at Ridge, biggest tech YouTuber, that the synergy of Ridge developing and manufacturing, uh, products and having like best-in-class DTC marketing. Marques having, you know, he just launched his, um, iPhone 18 and Duo review and it's going to get 20 million views. So he has this like massive built-in distribution and we've got the integration at the, at the back end of that video. Um, and then we also have MKBHD products or Ridge products with MKBHD fixtures in Best Buy. That's a very powerful trifecta that I don't think a lot of brands are getting today, but it's just a marriage of. organic creator distribution, brand execution, and then the Best Buy component being like traditional retail expansion. The only other brand that I've talked to like that, which I thought was really interesting, not the only other brand, the one that I talked to most recently was Tone, Kai Cenat's deodorant brand. And I forget the founder's direct background, but like, I think it's a, I think they might've been funded by Knight Media and it's the exact same idea. It's like bring in experienced operators. Bring in someone who can get you immediate free online distribution. And then they launched with like a PO from Target because they had that relationship early on. And it's like, that's a trifecta to nail. And if I were launching a brand today, I would, to the best of my ability, try to set up some situation like that.

Yeah, I have talked, uh, to, to a few funds who, and I don't, maybe it's this one, I don't know who's doing them, but who have done similar things and have, you know, a team that has talent networks, you know, oper— they bring in experienced operators, you know, stuff, stuff like that. Granted, they're probably raising $5 million to, you know, just to put into the business to do that. 'Cause you like it. So it's definitely a different playbook. Maybe that's the right way to do it, but I agree. But I mean, I feel like the next topic I wanna go is like, all right, like what's go-to-market to launch? And I guess this is what we didn't do, but I would strongly consider it. You know, there's this one brand that Sean keeps talking about, Sunpowder. You know, they're just, you know, small bootstrap brand, but I don't want to out anybody if they're not public with who it is, but they did it really well. They have credibility on their site. One of the co-founders is a doctor and he's not a huge well-known doctor. Maybe he has a social profile, I don't know, but at least there's something. I know that he's been on podcasts, that gives you a little bit of credibility. So I think even if you have something like that, it's not a must, but I would strongly consider it. Even like Wild Roman, Sahil's brand, Sahil probably has a few million on across different platforms. And I don't think they're spending, they're not huge, but they're not spending a ton on Meta. But like, I know when he posts on Twitter, like there's a lot of distribution and acquisition that he does get from that. So yeah, if you can, like definitely I would, I don't want to say I would only do it that way in the future, but I would definitely seriously consider it and giving up a big chunk of equity for it.

Totally. Yeah. I mean, look, the only distinction I would make there is someone like Sahil posting for Wild Roman is an example of distribution, which is great. I would say with Sunpowder and they're like, um, I don't know who it is, like a dermatology co-founder or something like that. That's probably less about distribution and more about credibility, which like, to your point, it's like, it's, that's actually advantage in the auction. You're more credible. People will convert at a higher rate. You can bid higher in the auction. You can win more bids basically. Um, and that's the only like small distinction I would make there. And that is it. That can be extremely valuable, you know. This is like IM8, I think is an example of this. Like, I don't know if I've seen, I haven't heard about IM8 because David Beckham's constantly posting about it or talking about it or doing interviews about it. I hear about IM8 because they spend a bunch of money on ads and it's because people converted at a higher rate on their website because David Beckham's all over it. And it's like, that is actually probably a little bit less about distribution, more about credibility, which just gives you an advantage in the auction house.

[Sponsor Content] Yeah, yeah, you need, you need both of those things. And those are the 2 biggest things you really have none of at the beginning. And, you know, you can, you can manufacture either, um, but you, you definitely don't know what, I guess what I'm saying is without either of them, it's, it's very challenging. You have to be, you either have to be that or you have to be doing gray hat is my opinion. 'Cause there are brands that are scaling without it, but they're, they're going very aggressive on that stuff. People are the most important part of your business and finding real A-players is hard and incredibly time-consuming. That's why I want to tell you about Propel. Propel is honestly the best recruitment agency that I have personally worked with. They are marketing and operations specialists. They source talent from US, LATAM, and beyond for top e-com brands like Jones Road, like many others that you know and love. At Jones Road, we've hired over 12 people through them. We've hired video editors, graphic designers. We have multiple retention managers, creative strategists from them. What I love is not only are they easy to work with, they're quick, but they work on performance. So you only pay a one-off fee. Only once you hire somebody, you don't have to pay, you know, any retainer, no ongoing fees. Plus every hire comes with a 3-month guarantee. So I highly recommend them. They've worked really great for us. We have a really great team that they've helped us source. Head to the link in the show notes and submit the form to get 10% off of your first hire. All right. So what, what was go-to-market like for you guys? What did you do? I know it wasn't the biggest push, but what did you do? How did you get your first 1,000 customers?

Yeah. So our, like, the thing that I'll say about our go-to-market approach is like, I don't know, did we ever even really officially launch? I think that's like worth a question. I talked about it a little bit on the pod. Sean never did a big post about it. We never said like, oh, hey, we want to, we want to acquire a bunch of customers on X from our friends and family and things. We avoided all of that. It was more like a skunkworks project that was like just a heavy experimentation. Um, and again, I was going back to like, At no point were we running the business in full force. Like, if we thought about what were the KPIs that we were shooting for, I mean, we wanted to be able to acquire customers at a reasonable rate and see retention rates that would pencil out over time. None of that leads to like a beautiful 3x LTV to CAC in an 18-month period. Like, we weren't doing email campaigns. We just had flows. We were doing no organic social. We had no product seeding. And it's like, And we had conversations internally because it's like, oh yeah, we could be like, we could be posting on social and like trying to like really like a full-throated launch and execution of the brand. But that really wasn't the point that we were at. So like our go-to-market was really small, stealth even, like, let's just figure out what, what does CAC look like? What does retention look like? Um, and then let's kind of stop there. Uh, I don't know if I would have done it any differently. To be honest, if we had come to the conclusion that we, that this is actually a great use of our time and we're going to scale this up further, then I would have done a lot of the things that you're talking about. I would have gotten like, I would have invested in more credibility, brought on, what did you call it earlier? A chief science board?

Uh, yeah, like a scientific advisory panel.

Scientific advisory. Yeah. Something like that. Really strong. Obviously we were talking about gut and hydration and like the benefits of that. I think that would have gone a long way. We would have done more product seeding. We would have tried more influencer. We would have done more channel expansion. Again, I'm just discussing the Ridge playbook at a smaller scale and we would have slowly kind of done that over time. So yeah, I guess I would kind of leave it at that.

One question, this will be actually helpful for me. You, was one of the reasons you didn't post on X because of the pixel and you thought it would hurt, you know, more immediate and longer term like pixel? Because I, do you think we hurt ours? I mean, our, our, we've joked about it before. Our podcast audience or X audience is like largely guys, right? Ecom bros. I think for Winks, we had the hypothesis, this is where we're currently at. We had the hypothesis that's, you know, largely a female brand, right? Uh, at least that's who the decision maker is. That's who probably not, you know, it's not going to be exclusively them. What we found so far, we're using Outer Signal as well, who is a sponsor, about 73% of our customers are male. So far. And I don't know if that's because, you know, first of all, again, our, our X audience and podcast audience is, is very male leaning. Um, did that then take our pick? Because even now our Meta ads are acquiring more male customers, you know, since then.

Yeah.

Is it now our pixel or is this more of a men's brand? I don't know. The problem is we have pink, purple on our website and only females on our website right now.

73% of customers are male. Um, yeah, I mean, that was one of the, we thought about that. We definitely thought about that. And that was one reason where it was like, that's not our scalable strategy. And frankly, it's also not, uh, you know, it's not going to make the business in any way. Like, you know, um, if you think—

50 orders on day 1. Yeah. It doesn't really— Yeah.

If I'm Wild Roman and I've got the ability for Sahil Bloom to test, it's like, yeah, I could probably drive hundreds of orders. Like that's a, I'm talking about millions of impressions. Um, When, you know, when I'm posting and I'm telling all my, all my online marketing friends about it, yeah, I might get like a few dozen. I think it has to mess up the pixel. For how long does it mess up the pixel? I'd probably say not that long. Like that would be my gut is like, depending on how much you're spending, you could pretty, I think you pretty quickly, I think Meta pretty quickly figures out, hey, these are not the people clicking the ads. These are not the people converting from the ads. And it would sort of hone in on who your quote unquote true customer would be. So that'd be my, that'd be my perspective. But what do you think? I mean, do you think those initial 50 customers coming from operators, listeners made a big difference on who Meta then targeted afterwards?

I do think so. I mean, we'll talk about it in the CPM tax and all that stuff. Like there is just a bunch of weird signal and data when launching a new account, especially when performance isn't very good. So I do think so. So what we're going to do is go a little bit more unisex, go like IMA AG1, you know, and then again on main website, and then we'll have more specific funnels, right? We'll have perimenopausal funnels and, you know, tired mom funnels. But on main site, we'll, we'll do a little bit of that. So at least maybe that's just what our brand is and we're just a unisex brand because sleep could be either way. Or maybe for now it's just better because it's closer to our signal. And then as our pixel kind of can hone in a little bit on who our customer is, because I think right now we have the signal that's, you know, 73% men, right? All of that. And all our ads are women. And I think it's just such a mismatch that it's probably not doing us any, you know, helping us win any bids. So at least we can go closer and then we can pivot. That is my current hypothesis. So we're going to, you know, add some guys to the site and do things like that.

And you, so you guys have a great like single page website now. Are there landing pages built?

We have landers. Yeah. So we launched with, um, so yeah, we went with like the Groove style single page website. I am changing it actually in the process right now. We're gonna go double page website. We're gonna double the number of pages we have. Um, more of like a Mars Men, you know, I guess Sunpowder as well. So it'll be homepage and PDP. I think just based on some of the feedback that we've gotten so far, I think it'll allow us to educate a little bit more on the ingredients and the clinical stuff and just give us a little bit more real estate. But yeah, we built landers. I would say we, everything I feel like we did, we kind of overbuilt quantity and I think we have to go and actually improve messaging and quality, which is really where we're trying to focus right now.

And then how are you going about testing new messages? And this is, I don't know, is it an intelligence question? Is it onsite testing? Is it a media buying question? Is it campaign structure? Like you've obviously got these different hypotheses as to How you can acquire customers over time? What does that look like in execution?

That's a really good question. So, I mean, again, traffic is so low, so we're not, you know, we're not really able to, I don't know when we can actually start doing split tests, but kind of thinking it, you know, by funnels. And I know you've talked about it as well, and you've kind of, you know, set examples where, you know, some landing page didn't win in an IntelliGems test, but it did perform ads coming from it. We're just doing that. So sometimes we're, I mean, we're just changing live site as we get feedback. Like not even a test. We're just doing that. And then as we get more traffic, obviously we will get more measured with it and run tests. But if it's a messaging thing, usually it'll be, let's test ads to this. Again, it depends if this is like, hey, we think the melatonin angle could be one of the angles. Let's build a funnel for that. Let's see if there's any traction. It takes a day to do that. Like I did it last week where I built a melatonin, 10 reasons why, plus a batch of static ads and just wanted to see if there was any traction there. Wasn't, but— with that specific one. But if it's a site one, we'll say for offers, we're going to test some offers right now. I think I will just build a few and just run ads to a few different offers and that's probably how we'll do that. And then whatever does best, we'll probably update our main site.

Totally. Yeah, that makes sense.

How do you think about it?

Yeah, there's this really interesting question when you're starting from zero figures, when you're starting from zero figures, That like, how do you test anything? Because, and I'm actually totally fine with this, statistical significance kind of goes out the window where I'm like, I'm not going to sit around for 9 months to like do a headline test.

Yeah, exactly.

So, so, so I'm not going to sit around for 9 months doing a headline test. Um, what we ended up doing, we installed intelligence from day 1 and we did a couple of different things. One, we looked at, um, I guess this wasn't with IntelliGems, this was with Microsoft Clarity, um, but just like looking at the heat map of what people were interacting with most on their site. And this is how we identified like one of our earlier, more efficient funnels, which was just around energy. There's like, we launched with like 6 different reasons why, you know, a healthier gut can be beneficial. One of those was energy, and we just saw like a small sign that people were engaging with that little widget at a higher rate. So then we built out a product page around that, built out the ads, and that ended up being like a pretty consistently well-performing funnel from a CAC perspective. So I'm all for, I guess it's not necessarily a form of experimentation, but it is a form of like just taking really statistically insignificant details and observations and just forming hypotheses around those and then testing. So we found that one way. And then what we would do is we'd run like split tests on that. energy page, for instance, we built out the 5 reasons lander. We're running a split test on that landing page. And we would look at things like time on site, like add to cart rate. We wouldn't get to the point of like purchase, the purchase objective becoming statistically significant one way or another. But if I just want to verify, hey, is this like at all better? I'm fine making the almost editorial decision of, or it's a subjective editorial decision to say, hey, we're just getting more engagement on this new variation, let's just shift towards that and then we'll keep it moving from there. So we ended up really looking at far more upper funnel metrics and KPIs to make some of our like A/B test decisions.

Yeah, I like that. I think that makes a ton of sense. And even in Meta right now, I'm looking at, you know, cost per add to cart a ton, right? 'Cause it's like, hey, we just need a little bit more data.

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Were you looking at like heatmaps? Is that how you're looking at engagement or you put like GA4 events on there?

We would use, uh, in the case of like looking at, there was this like modal with 6 reasons and people were clicking on the energy one. We used Microsoft Clarity to look at that, which is just a heatmap tool. Free heatmap tool. So that was really good. And then what we would do is we'd basically just try to really stack those wins over time. So that was one indicator that became a campaign. And I don't know from a media buying perspective if this was the right way to do it or not, I'd go back and forth on it, but we'd have campaigns built out around funnel at that point where it's like, okay, this energy funnel was, and I'm not going to get this super correct, but like, I think it was male leaning. So we had a male-focused landing pages page for energy. And then some of our other more successful funnels that we like slowly identified and tested into and supported on a creative and landing page basis was the GLP-1 stuff, which is a very common talking point for any sort of fiber-related brand. Groove does it all the time. That ends up being more women's leaning. So we had kind of built into that. And then, um, and then the third one was, uh, pooping. We tried, we tried to do like just healthier poops. I really wanted to work. I thought that was going to be like a more I thought it'd cut through the noise a little bit. Um, we got it to work moderately well. Um, so those are kind of our 3 things. We had those broken up by campaign and that's kind of how we continued to, to feed the, the acquisition funnel.

Okay. Okay, cool. I like that. How, how did you come up with those ideas? Was it reviews, post-purchase survey stuff, doing research, or just like good, good, good hunch?

GLP-1s for sure, just research. Groon's was doing it. We heard it from some other brand directly though. Like it was Ritual or someone else that they were like, oh yeah, like all of our ads are basically just GLP-1 based. So that's how we ended up launching that one. And then the pooping one was more of a hypothesis, like a, just a, just like a raw, like, hey, we're launching this fiber brand. We think people are going to care about this more over time. You can kind of see it. You know, there's a, there's the founder of Throne Science is pretty active on X and they're like the Eight Sleep of toilets. Have you seen this?

Yeah, I've seen them. Yeah.

Yeah, super fun. Um, super fun is a, is a funny way to describe that. Um, but I just think culturally we might be thinking about the quality of our stools at a much higher rate, and I can't wait for Zane to clip this out. Um, but that was, that was part of the thesis of, of the fiber brand as a whole. Um, so anyway, that's how we, that's how we identified those. So really 3 different ways. One was onsite engagement, one was research, one was like a homegrown sort of theory.

Yeah. Yeah. I like that. I know for Seed, I've seen that the pooping stuff has done pretty well for them.

Maybe that's who it was. Yeah. Yeah.

Never had it work for Jones Road as well.

Unfortunate. Uh, you know, fast forward out 2, 3, 4 years. We're just early is the thing. 2, 3, 4 years, everybody's going to have a poop funnel.

Hey, we got magnesium and winks. Maybe that's a good angle for us.

Dude, give it a shot. So what are you guys doing? Um, are you using heat maps? Like, or do you just have a list of things that you want to be testing? Like, what does the identification of potential messaging angles look like?

Yeah. So in the beginning, right, we started with 3 personas that we just, we just thought these would be the ones, right? And so we went with it. I think one of them, one of them, and obviously there's angles, you know, attached to the personas, you know, we call it a mental load Maya. That's just your mom that's just extremely busy. And when she goes to sleep, she's just like, to-do list is off in her head and she just can't get to sleep because of cortisol, you know? And so that's one of them. So obviously the cortisol angle, You know, going into the unique mechanism of that is a big one. You know, we have the perimenopause mom as well who, you know, they've got hormone changes as well. And one of the things that does is it just wrecks your sleep. We even tested a GLP-1. Some other people wanted to. I never thought it was going to, you know, work because I don't think that's known to be sleeping as much. But again, that's another one. And then, so those were just, you know, you're just coming up with it. Obviously, you can do what a kind of whatever kind of AI research, Reddit research you want to do. Like, That's really important. Anti-melatonin is a little bit more bottom funnel, but that's obviously a really big one. And I think a big one for us because people don't like that. And I think it's, in the beginning, you really just need one, right? Like you don't need to scale horizontally like Zach Stuck talks about. That's later on. But so we're just trying to crack and test one. And now obviously you get some reviews, you look at customer feedback, you can have some surveys, set up, like big fan of that. But just trying to kind of understand and continuing to update the website as we hopefully get closer to understanding who our customer is and what they care about. And that's product market fit and we're not there yet by any means.

Yeah, 100%. So I'm curious, one of the things that we would look at, 'cause at some point, like you have, again, you have these different hypotheses, you have these different theories, you can build ads and landers for them. Um, you can launch them in the ad account. It, you're far from the point of saying, like, uh, identifying anything to be statistically significant. Um, so I was bringing up these, like, looking at upper funnel metrics. There was a very popular tweet from this week about Pocket FM and one of the things that I think—

I read that. That was, that was wild.

It was really good. Yeah. So he, I mean, they're like heavy AI creative. He said they're launching 17,000 pieces of creative a month. It was pretty crazy. But the one thing that I liked And I love this, like, it's like far left, far right curve thinking is he said, we identified that if we could drive a 2.2% click-through rate, that our CACs would be profitable. And it was like that simple. They're not overthinking, you know, uh, PDP view to cart rate, cart to, to, uh, you know, begin checkout rate, begin checkout to, to thank you page. Like they're not looking at these deep funnel metrics. They're saying, if we can get people to our site at a 2.2% click-through rate, then we can make these things work. And I think that there is a, there's a really valid strategy to that early on where if you just say, regardless of what the conversion rate is, if there is enough interest that people are taking action at that sort of rate, that, that is a funnel worth further building into. Like I would, and we, we saw examples of this and we see examples of it at Ridge where I'm like, there are, there are times where we get like, ads will work with like a 0.3% click-through rate and men's click-through rate with men just like skews much lower. Um, 0.3, 0.4, it'll like technically pencil based on like everything that we look at. But I say that doesn't feel particularly scalable to me. I'm like, clearly this isn't all that interesting to most people if we're seeing so low of a click-through rate. But if we haven't, and we have funnels like this now for Ridge, and we saw them for Gut Culture where we could be driving 1% plus, it's like, oh, the interest is there. The intrigue is there. We can probably figure out how to make this work once we're getting people to our site cost-effectively enough. Um, we can make this work. The other thing, like, and this just brings up so many like small, like anecdotal memories for me over the last couple of years. I remember talking to a 9-figure men's apparel brand, the CMO. I'm over here like working my ass off at Ridge. Like this was, this was years ago. I'm running all the ads. We're doing all this complex stuff. He goes, yeah, I just want 50-cent clicks. He's like, if we just get 50-cent clicks, like it works. And I'm like, dude, I, I wish. Maybe I should be just embracing this like very simplistic strategy. So anyway, that's an example of it. Same with this Pocket FM guy. Are you guys, are there, do you have any early examples of that where you say, hey, it's not working at all from a CAC perspective, but like this messaging funnel really seems to have some potency to it?

For sure. I mean, and that's why we can talk about, you know, Meta ad account structure if we want. That's why spend, right? It's just what's getting spend, what's getting clicks, right? Obviously this is what Meta thinks. Melatonin. has spent pretty heavily in our account. I would say subpar CPA, even relative to the rest of the account, which is not good, but, you know, relative to that. So that's one's like, all right, cool. There's clearly something here. Let's go analyze it. Let's go set up some tests and optimize. But, you know, melatonin was an easy one that clearly got spent.

Yeah. And that makes total sense. And like, I think you guys will just identify more of them. And I think that's a good like rule of thumb for people going from like, Literally zero up to, you know, their first few orders is like really just being more, I don't know what word is correct here, but just like a little bit more loose. You got, you have to be playing fast and loose. And this is what I talked about with gut culture months ago when we discussed it on the pod is I don't think there's any way you can be methodical and scientifically rigorous when you're trying to drive 50 orders a week.

[Sponsor Content] No, not, not at all. And, and it's just, it's such a learning and again, it's like, fun. That's why I'm doing it. But like, there's just so much that I took for granted and it's just such a different playbook. 9 figures going to zero. I'll give you a few examples. Like, I posted something on X last week where I was looking for creators and somebody, this guy who was Gen Z, he hopped in my DMs. I'm like friendly with him. He's like, hey, you should run this in a much more like dropshipper type way. He's like, He's like, you're totally being unk. Like, he's like, don't just like manually message people, like set up an automation, set up a form, like stuff like that, you know, where like there's just so much that like when you have a large team and you do things like, and then you don't have it, you just have to do things in such a different way, you know? So there's a lot that I took for granted, but testing is absolutely one. Like before we launched, I had all these ideas. Well, we could go, we could go 90-day and that's what IMA and they're doing is what Groove is doing. And you see it all the time. People will be like, hey, don't look at Groove or AG1 or Ritual for ad Inspo or even Ridge or Jones Road look at the dropshippers. It's right. It's correct. Like it is very much, there's just so much that I think you take for granted and then you realize when you have no credibility, no trust, no market awareness, you know? So like we scrapped our 90-day offer from the beginning. We scrapped our client. Like we've adjusted our offer many times and we're continuing to because we don't have that credibility and those problems. We have a very different problem that we need to solve. So that's been like, I don't know, it's hard to run a brand for 5 years and have it turn into a 9-figure brand with, you know, 20% market awareness. Like you can get away with stuff that you can't get away with at a brand new brand. You know the difference between hitting your numbers and missing them? Clear signal on what's actually driving growth. It can get really, really noisy. There is so much noise. You got platform data, you got blended data, MMM, acronyms, MTA, experiments, all of it, all pointing in different directions. The more you're spending, the faster you move, the more bad signal can cost you. That's why we use Houzz and we've been using it for years. That's why the other marketing operators do as well. They're the best tool on planet Earth for measuring what we call incrementality, which we talk about a lot on the podcast. What is the true impact of your advertising dollars on your business? We have causal MMM for channel-level budget calls, causal attribution down to the ad level, and Architect, their AI agent, tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. And the results speak for themselves. StockX saw a 41% lift in IROS using Haus. And you're not stuck with a help desk. You get an embedded measurement strategist who actually helps your team make better decisions. Their whole team is great. We've worked with a lot of them. They are world-class there. Go to haus.io/operators, haus.io/operators, and start backing your budget calls with real causal data.

With that in mind, say, okay, we're gonna move away from thinking about the IMA or Groon's playbook to looking more like a dropshipper. And that could even be like, I like the point around, hey, as I'm onboarding creators, I should just think about a very easy way to automate this, that like my spending my time on this is not scalable. So that's a perfectly good answer here. But are there any other strategies that you, that you plan on implementing? With this in mind?

Yeah. So for offer, we just need volume. I think we need signal and volume and we, I think, have to go to a pretty aggressive discount and just have the understanding that, you know, we're probably not going to be profitable from the beginning. Right. And so we can either have better gross margin, but worse CAC or lower CAC and better gross margin and then get more volume, get more signal, more spend. And so that's what I'm going to do is just lower the offer, go much more aggressive. And then, you know, raise it over time as we need to obviously increase our allowable CPA and stuff like that. It's just, it's the wrong thing right now. So, so that's one. I mean, even like, you know, everyone has different opinions on this, but like how, how much you force subscription versus not, everyone has a different opinion. Some people think you should push one time, you know, some people think you got to go subscription, but make one time really expensive. Some people think you gotta hide the, you know, not make it super clear that it's subscription, you know, obviously a lot of like the dropshippers and e-com brands, like they're doing that and it's gray hat, but there's a lot of white hat brands who are doing that. Even, you know, I Am Aid, it's not super clear where it is. So I think things like that all needs to be tested.

Yeah, 100%. That makes sense. I, here, let me share my screen. I pulled this up as I was thinking more about this. We'd like roughly, this actually isn't, I, I changed a lot of these numbers. Um, what I'm pulling up here for those just listening is like a super simple cohort, uh, analysis. Um, because what you said earlier makes a ton of sense to me. So we could actually plug in some of these numbers, but you guys right now, what is this? $48 initial order value? And then do you rebill at the same rate? Yeah. Yeah. So like, if you're collecting $48 at the first value, I put it in an AMER of 40%. And it's like, and I hear this across the board. I spoke with someone recently who had an AMER of 1, like basically at launch and it wasn't really at scale. Um, but like there's a massive difference here. You hear about the Hims of the world and they're running at a 0.2, IM8 running at a 0.2. Um, and this just like dramatically changes your payback period. If you can collect $48 and rebill at $48 over the first 12 months, and you have this, like, what I think is this would be like really strong retention. This would be within 1 month, 15% people churning and then 12%. And then I just put 10% for the remaining 9 months of the year. Really, really strong. This is what I've heard from like some of the best-in-class, um, supplement brands. Uh, you have an LTV to CAC of $5. So it's like, obviously if you are able to have these unit economics, you wouldn't be sitting around at the 1x AMER, you could take this all the way down. Let's see where you could run at probably a 0.55 or something, and you end up at a 3x LTV to CAC in the first 12 months. And the, I, what I'm actually doing here is I'm actually looking at gross profit as well. I assume 20% COGS, that's $258 in gross profit over the first 12 months. If you are able to get a 55% AMER, then you have a 3x LTV to CAC. And all you're saying is like, hey, we should be, we might need to be way more aggressive. This might need to be $29 and this might need to be 0.5. All these numbers get way worse. Your retention's probably not this good. Uh, I hate to scare you with some of these numbers, but it's like, yeah, all of a sudden this stuff gets much worse over time. And that's even with a 50% AMER, I think is like pretty strong for a retention business. I've talked to many people who are less than this. So this is the equation that you guys are talking about, just Maybe being a little bit more aggressive with early on. Yeah, exactly.

And I don't think that that is our end outcome or offer. I don't think the business works there. It's what problem do we need to solve in this stage of the business? We need customers. All right, cool. Let's fix customers. We got that. Yeah. Customers and volume.

Cool.

We got that. Now we need to fix, I'm making it up. Either you obviously have to fix LTV, we have to fix margin on the product and go and improve our COGS. We have to fix AOV likely. It's, it's probably a combination of all of those 3 things.

100%. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It reminds me a little bit of, um, we think about this at Ridge all the time with new categories where we, if you look at, we have 4 categories. If you look at our revenue makeup, if we launch a new category, we end up having to spend much more time on that category. Then its contribution proportionally to our total revenue. That makes total sense. It's like we just started. We don't, we don't know to all your points, like we don't know what the right messaging is. So we have to spend more time on it. And that is just like, it's almost like a CapEx investment of time now that's going to pay off in the future. We can't possibly get this new travel category to be a larger percentage of our total revenue unless we're overinvesting in it now. And I think that even matters from like a CAC perspective. Where it's like, yeah, just invest the dollars, gather the learnings, rapidly speed up. If, if for someone like Ridge or for someone like Winks, we have cloud cover because we have other profitable parts of our business. Winks has cloud cover because you guys have sponsors and you've got money in the bank and, and you get no points for precision. It's like, you don't need to be really small and have this perfectly mapped 3x LTV to CAC cohort. It's like, let's get the learnings now. That's the advantage. Let's speed up the process. Let's acquire people less profitably or unprofitably early on. And then that will allow us to have a bigger, more profitable business sooner that will begin compounding more powerfully quicker. And I just think, um, I just think if like, I would have to think someone like Chad at Grooms approached it with the same perspective where it's like, hey, let's, let's kind of get gas on the little spark that we have versus trying to like slowly, you know, build the kindling in the wood and like build this fire up slowly over time.

I wonder, actually, I wonder what they did. I don't, I don't know. Like, I know they just brought their prices down. I wonder kind of what they did and how their offers and, and everything changed over time. I don't, I don't totally know.

You know, they're, they're at a more mature point now. And when you see like AG1 launching gummies, like they're in a more PvP era of, I think, like wellness gummies. Um, but like Chad early on spent like $300,000 on raindrop videos. Like early, early on. That's why, that's why Jacques has like equity in Groons is because they were so early to invest in like really high production value content. And I just, I would find it really hard to believe that if you were trying to be profitable early or like trying to really run this like beautiful P&L at an early stage, like I don't think you make that investment. I think a lot of brands wait to say, oh yeah, we can't possibly afford This, but I think like some of the more aggressive entrepreneurs, when they have that advantage, when they have the ability to raise capital, can maybe be a little bit, you know, fast and loose early on.

Yeah. I mean, he also, he thinks big. He's, you know, seen it. And my guess is he planned, you know, the end result. Obviously, I don't know him, but Danny from IMA, it sounds like the same way, like just thinks really big, you know, Zach Stuck, I think thinks really big and is willing to take risk. I am definitely not that. I'm definitely like, Jones Road was profitable month one. Obviously we had a huge advantage, but I'm like, it's very different and new to me. Fortunately we have Mike and Matt who are kind of leading the strategy and finance side and they can just tell me what numbers we need to hit. And obviously I can put input on the offers and stuff. But yeah, I agree. For subscription brand, I mean, a few people have bootstrapped Some, you know, and are doing it super lean. So there definitely is a way to, you know, just do what you did at GoCulture and build some AI stuff and do it super lean. But I think in hindsight, if we were to launch again, and it's, again, it's not too late, but we need more creative. We need, I'm not saying we need, you know, raindrop videos from the start, but like we do need a little bit more proof credibility. Like, The stuff that is going to help to legitimize us and drive the business. And so that's what we're kind of working on getting going.

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We're running out of time here. Let me ask you one more question. We've talked a lot about acquisition, messaging, testing, like thoughts around running the brand. I want to hit getting the second purchase. Um, what I know you guys are extremely early. I don't even know if you guys have hit one rebill period. So like, give me a sense of like, are you seeing any data on the retention side? Um, and if not, like, what will you be looking for? Because you'll begin to get it over the next 30 to 45 days.

We have not. Uh, it's probably been 2 and a half weeks. So, you know, we're on a 28-day subscription. Last night we did have our first repeat buyer, which is very exciting. So, you know, he was, he was a one-time purchaser, not a subscriber, bought one time again. Um, no, but that was, that was a first. So we're not there yet. Um, I also think our initial, like most people talk about your initial cohorts being really strong because, you know, they're your golden cohort. I actually think ours are going to be pretty weak because we had a lot of, uh, our friends buy and stuff like that. So I don't think—

I think they might be the, I mean, honestly, I think they'll skew it to the upside. If I'm, I haven't bought any Lynx, so I'm, I've been a terrible co-host to you. But I'm one of those people who I'm like, as soon as I buy, I've been a Create subscriber for like 3 and a half years or something. And it's like, I've got way too much Create at home. So I just, I think some of the friends and family from the web are going to actually be extremely valuable cohorts for you guys.

you like lifting, you like training, like you benefit from creatine. I don't know. Well, we'll see versus I feel like a lot of our— maybe I'm wrong, maybe everybody needs, you know, better sleep, but a lot of our, you know, a lot of the DDCX crew, I don't know if they, you know, are active sleep supplement takers, but we'll see. I hope you're right.

I hope so too. And if not, we'll have to remind our producer, Mike Blankenship, he should be a subscriber. Aaron Orendorf, he should be a subscriber. I don't want to see these guys canceling their subscription either. We should be able account on $48 per month from the podcast network at the very least.

Yeah, that is your tax for listening to the podcast. We don't charge you for the podcast, we just charge you for wings. All right, last question I have for you, the CPM tax. So that was the first issue that I felt like we had, you know, and talking about just like series of problems and fixing them. Our CPMs probably started at $200, came down, you know, $150, whatever. I had a long list of things that we wanted to try, got through some of them, not all of them. Woke up one day, we were down to $35, $40. I have no idea why. I don't think we changed anything. My best guess is somebody who's on X, a Meta rep, told me to verify our business manager. I can't believe that hadn't been done, but it was about 2 days after that. And so we came down to $35. And so now again, traffic quality's not good, but at least we have a fighting shot. So it probably took a week and a half to 2 weeks. You know, we probably spent $18,000 until we got there. I think we were probably spending too much per day and pulled it back a little bit. How does that compare to what your experience was?

I'm sure we verified our business ID. I would think, I don't know. What we saw was we saw really high CPMs early on and then we just saw them trend down over time. And I think a lot of it just comes down to like Meta figuring out like, Where in the auction can you compete? And it's starting on the high end. So that was our experience. The other thing that we saw, and this is a little bit more tinfoil hat theory, is like, we just consistently saw higher CPMs on our AI-generated video ads. So like any form of like AI UGC or anything like that, like tended to skew higher. And the, the, like response rate, the click-through rates, the engagement on those ads was really strong. So that could be one justification. It's just like Meta thought that we could be bidding more with this content because we were getting better engagement metrics. But just as it relates to Winx, I know you guys were pretty heavy AI early on. That might be a factor. Like Sean's ads are very much like the claymation style. There's the Winx character like sitting in bed. That's the sort of thing like running stuff like that with Gut Culture. Would just skew on the higher end for CPMs.

Okay. That's interesting. I didn't see that. Yeah. No, I mean, people were like, we got a lot of really good feedback from people and they were like, oh, like, you know, run static, like all the normal tricks were like, all right, run statics instead of video. 'Cause, you know, usually statics are 10% cheaper stuff. I was like, guys, I need like a 500% improvement. Like, you know, that's not good. But now that obviously we're in normal levels, I will look. We are still going to do it. I mean, I think my, theory hypothesis is that it's just, it's like a tax you get for being new and not having any signal and losing auctions and just Meta not trusting you really. And so had a few hypotheses. The one person I talked to, maybe 2 people I talked to who had no CPM issues were going hard on organic Instagram before they launched their ad account. So we are now, we're working with Content Forge, Isaac's agency. Haven't gotten any content in yet, but we will soon. So we're gonna take like organic social seriously just from like a, also like people, when they see your ads, they go to Instagram, especially, especially, you know, women do. So we need like more credibility there. Organic seeding. I don't know for sure. It's not the only reason we'll do it. I can't imagine people tagging your brand as a negative signal to Meta. So I'm not saying it's, you know, holy grail, but I don't think that can hurt. I did set up a native funnel and that had really low CPMs. And so that was like the, you know, AI native ads to an advertorial. Somebody had part of my hypothesis with this. Brian Cano had the hypothesis that if you have supplement claims on your landing page, you get dinged for that. And so I built a native to a quiz funnel to then a PDP offer page, and that didn't have Winks offers until then. I don't know if it was that or if it was just the 6% click-through rate on native. Again, not good conversion rate, not good CPA, but learn something from it. And Maybe that helped the rest of the account a little bit. I don't know. Whitelisting, we're getting a lot of whitelisting in right now. You know, really it's partnership ads, but when you run partnership ads, you know, Meta does use the signal from, you know, the creator's account. And so that can also be a positive signal. So there's just like a bunch of things we're still going to do and try and test that we think will be some good signal for the account.

I think all of those are fantastic strategies. We didn't do most of them for a while and our CPMs came down. So I do think there's just this component of time as well.

Absolutely agree. I mean, ours came down significantly without us doing any of that yet.

Yeah, we had the exact same thing. I don't ever remember them being $200, but it was like, yeah, off the rip, $80, $90 CPMs. And it was like, oh, this, if, if these CPMs remain here, this will quickly become cost prohibitive unless we figure out some like just incredible messaging and offer that are converting people at a really high rate. Um, but we saw those. totally normalized over time. Yeah.

Yeah. Same. No, I mean, that was the same thing. It's just like, all right, you can't afford an $8 cost per click. So let's fix that problem. Now we're, uh, 2, we can do that. We have to fix conversion rate. So it's just, it's just one problem after another. And we're just trying to fix one. And hopefully we can just stack a few of these wins together and get to a decent spot, but we'll see.

The only other thing is, I don't know whether it's time or whether it's spend. Is it like, yeah, if you just turned it on at $50 a day for 10 days, does it come down over time or do you actually need to spend $5,000, $10,000. I don't quite know. Maybe listeners will have more of a perspective on that. But yeah, anyway, glad to hear you guys are at a tolerable CPM.

Yeah, I have no idea either. Awesome. All right, well, this is good. I learned a little bit. It was helpful. Excited to share more, but I think hopefully the listeners love it because we're not talking about the 9 and Connor rolling 10-figure problems anymore for once.