Two $100M+ Operators Get Honest About Launching New Brands

Today we are talking about going from running a nine-figure brand to building a new brand from zero.

Conor 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 say, "Tell the end," you can hear what I did to get CPM's 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 seven figures range, it's going to be a lot of lessons that I think you can take away from us.”

Oh, what's up Conor, just you and me today? Just you and I, classic Conor Cody show. This one will be good because we're talking about zero figures versus nine figure brands. I don't think Conor Rollin knows what that's like, or remembers it. Yeah, yeah, they're doing like 11 figures, I think.

Is that the nine 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 say Conor Rollin, we don't even really want you to be a part of this conversation. It's been so long since Hexclad's 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 nine figures back to, we'll call it zero figures.

It's 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'll be good to dive in again. And then to compare notes on gut culture versus links 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 to things like that. Gut culture versus our first example of a net new brand.

So I'm super stoked to kind of dive in on the weeds here. I will say we basically completely shelved it for now. It's very much on the back burner. We gave it a really solid effort for six 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 a 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 roared seemed better at this moment in time. We're really focused back on the core brand. But 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 where we're currently at with gut culture. Love that love that. We kind of carved out 10, 15% of our internal teams time. So we were almost approaching like what does it look like if a fridge were to act more like a holding company or if we treated our marketing department is more of like a growth service

that could be used across different brand properties. Whereas, winks is there's no internal team. It's you. It's Matt. You guys are able to occasionally.

You got it. Occasionally Sean jumping in. Yeah, you've got to kind of build a firm square once. 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 run-ath. 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 connected to it actually drove revenue. You can plug it into your Clevio, Shopify, North Beam, 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. We use it, hexclad-use it, Jones Road uses it. It's the best AI brain for e-com brands on the planet. If you don't use it, you're going to fall behind. Go to runath.com and book a strategy session,

mention marketing operator sent you, and you'll get $1,000 in free credits. I was going to ask about that. So website, photography, stuff like that, was that all done internally? Ridge in place? Good question, because I did just say we use so much of the internal team.

What we used the internal team for largely was creative strategy media buying. So what do we do? Standing it up, we actually use, I have them written down here. We use the handful of agencies. We used bottomless to design the entire website,

basically two pages, we have a home page, it clicks to a PDP. We used unit two or three who have talked about in the past to develop the site.

And then we used, and I've never worked with them before.

Like we are friends, it 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 products. Obviously, designs, dev, email, no photography, all AI generated imagery. Pretty good, I'm impressed.

“I mean, how different is your site now compared to when you launched?”

Not very different. Okay, I'm impressed really good. Then I, for being very lean in bare bones, actually thinking it's very solid.

We do have some really talented designers.

“So we do have internal designers who took some of the AI generated renders”

in just like different products photography. And then I get to treat it a little bit further. So that's how we landed where we did. And then the internal team on a day-to-day basis, iterating on landing pages, providing creative strategies.

So we did pull in a couple of agencies. We did a lot of AI generated video for gut culture. We didn't even really see that we seeded minimal product. Like a lot of it was done via AI. And then a lot of static imagery designed.

And then the media bind. And that was kind of like the core.

I think that's the 80/20 of growth.

Because 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 obviously we've see X rolled into. So we had like an agent dedicated to answering tickets and things like that. 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 wetting bands or travel or wallet or anything like that.

So one is being 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 bind. 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 like a, I'd say day to day. It's more like every other day to every other day sort of deal.

Operator's build, Winks is the new brand that we launched myself. Matt, Patelie Curtis, he's like 20 year wellness, you know, veteran. He's like the product guy and really like the vision behind it. Most Mike, Mike Beckham is involved kind of leading finance for us. Shons involved as well, you know, operators involved as well.

So we launched it. It's been like two, three weeks. Very similar where, you know, it's pretty much been met in myself on marketing. Have not gone with agencies for websites. So like again, models are better now.

So pretty much, you know, Matt started the site and cloud code and cloud design. I kind of took it over and, and I've been getting it live and, and all that stuff.

We just hired our first, you know, employee through propel.

So overseas designer/editor. Again, we're trying to as much as we can with AI, but you need real stuff. And, you know, very similar. She'll do AI mockups within, you know, add some real imagery and design in there. Which looks a lot better.

We have a growth agency currently, you know, we're using tribe for a lot of content. Doing some, some whitelist thing as well. We're starting organic seating with Sir All who's responsible as well. But it's really, it's really like us two day-to-day. My, my assistantship to staff is like helping me who is from propel as well.

“But it's again, it's, it's, it's very lean, which is, I think we can talk about.”

Because it's, it's quite a learning to get back and, you know, very humbling to do it publicly and get all those feedback. But, yeah, it's, it's extremely lean, but we are relying on supporters. Like we're just going to start working with homestead who's going to set up our flows. I tried to do that with, with Claude and Fabel himself like that and it's just not quite there.

And I also want to spend all my time on acquisition, but it's, you know, extremely lean. We did a few photoshoots. I am looking for a photographer. Like, I do want, or it's still going to do obviously a lot of AI stuff. But I do want some real lifestyle photography, but, um, we did one or two. And I just wasn't, wasn't thrilled with them. So we are looking for a little bit more. But yeah, right now is just, it's, it's, it's offer and messaging and, and obviously creative is,

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, uh, growth agency who is doing like AI statics. They're doing some videos. Mostly AI, um, not, you know, creator stuff. We are working right now. I'm getting like, uh, which I think we, we'll definitely talk about like a scientific advisory panel,

who obviously we will want to do some whitelisting from, um, for credibility. I reached out to a bunch of, in more, I'll call them influencers who, you know, I knew we're strong performers a lot of them. We are with that 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 on organic land Instagram. And then we'll whitelist those, um, you know, that was something, you know, Jordan Manara that

instant did in the beginning and highly recommended. Um, obviously you can get a lot of really good signal and credibility in the beginning, uh, and then tribe. So, you know, tribe is, um, people call it TikTok. I, 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. Um, but you can facilitate getting

whitelisting or just content and makes it really easy and tribe automatically tracks the spend you can do a percentage of spend or a retainer or a and I can share what we're doing

doing that for their creative supply chain, um, which, you know, I highly recommend. And so what we are

“doing on tribe, uh, we're doing two things. We, we just started discord, we're starting weekly”

calls next week that I'm going to lead and we put five creators on retainer, uh, three K a month. This is what tribe team recommended. Um, instead of just going to volume and trying to like thousands of creators, really want to start with, like, from the ground up, like, really purposeful, five creators are doing two videos a day. So, 60 videos a month. Um, and, and we brief them, but mostly it's about coaching. And then we are supposed to, again, I don't know this from experience,

but from what they told us to everything we can to actually help them make us much money as possible. You don't want to be cheap and, like, just to, you know, like, cap them, like, it's all the,

it's the Hudson method, but it's all about helping them see the vision and change their life

and, and do everything you can to help them be successful. So, that's really our goal and we're putting, you know, a ton of, uh, I guess our eggs in that basket. Are you guys on tribe for a rich? We're on tribe end. We did Connor role in and I talked about it a bit. I was tweeting about it recently. I think tribes the best example of, um, the unbundling of TikTok shop. Uh, TikTok shop is like, I've mentioned this many times on the podcast. Add it's 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, um,

“whoops, 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, um, 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 and delivering some amount of assets. Yeah, exactly. It's not about the technology. I've talked to be a little bit of built their own or use Uka or refund all 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 know, have the credibility in brand and cash and all that, um, but, but speed and one of the things that I really wanted and, and know that is really important is, you know, be able to get test live

“instantly and I think we're able to do that with tribe because you don't have to go and”

brief fine creators contract them, brief them send them products. We now have people who are kind of starving for direction and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and spend an idea that we can just be like, hey, I had this idea. Can you make an ad for us today or, you know, saw this? Can you do it? Um, and I think that's incredibly helpful. Um, we're also, so, 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 designs. You can do email,

you know, she can do, uh, sorry, beginning stages. You need a jack of all trades, but she'll definitely do that and then we have runeth and I've been extremely impressed by by runeth. They're one of sponsors of show as well. Um, you know, I spent a lot of time probably too much time building like a AI static engine workflow with the, you know, clawed and codex and, like, so much back and forth, trial and error. Why did you do that? I messed it up, changed the skill, whatever. Runeth just,

like, out of the box works. Like, whatever they did to train it. It's awesome. So runeth is in our slack. And so I'll just, I'll just take an idea, you know, big, hey, I like this ad, make it for wings and whatever. And it's, it's very good. And so I have runeth doing that. I have it once I approve it. I, I save it. Um, it does the multiple formats and then runeth is also uploading ads from me. Because do I don't know about you? If you're ever like hands on media buying yourself for

gut culture, I spent like two hours uploading ads the other day. And it, 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 work. 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 LTD. Rich panel doesn't just use AI to answer tickets. They allow operators to run revenue experiments inside your support. You can test different windback 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 at a 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 got culture was access to a

and whatever else, we sort of like tap into whenever we needed. That's, I think how we would have

“described our advantage. 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 create more, you know, lifetime value and allow that to compound at a faster rate than Brian is trying to bootstrap themselves. You know, Jones Road was started because Bobby Brown gave it an advantage. What would you call, however you thought about like the advantage that links 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 a advantage in the market. And, you know, we have a lot of people that have offered to help, you know, and definitely, like I'll be honest about, get, you know, we have good rates on stuff that we wouldn't have, otherwise, you know, whether it's our sponsors who are obviously pitching in services and addition to their sponsorship or, you know, we're using the 3PL that simple modern uses and we have

very good rates of that, or we have, I don't really get to help that much, but what's a contract manufacturer, right, we're able to say, hey, we're these, you know, we, you know, here's our background and stuff, or get to intro, you know, from a nine-figure brand who who uses that to refill, 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 optics is a little bit lower, but, you know,

nothing, nothing really matters. We don't have, so I don't even stuff like that, but, you know, and it does help in some ways, like when I was doing, you know, influence or outreach, you know, a craft, and even try about reach. I crafted a really good email. It was like, hey, I'm Cody, I'm the former CEO, Jones Road, we were nine-foot figure brand, you know, together with the CEO of Red, President of, you know, CEO, some modern, like, we're coming together,

building his public, like, there are at least his credibility, they are, I can pull from, even for a new introduction, so that is definitely help, 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 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,

maybe a little bit less competitive than, like, a payroll 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 going to 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 going to 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, think about both gut culture and wings, and like, this is such an obvious thing, 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 peos from Target,

if you have some sort of relationship pre-existing there, 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 thousand loyal customers, that is just a massive advantage. So neither of us have had that, but I'm sure you're here to do it again, take another swing, doing it with distribution, creator, somebody like that, behind up 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 six figures, like, low six figures, and, like, we could take a shot at, like, building something that potentially would be really valuable. We decided, hey,

spending our time in 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. What I will say is, we talk about this with Mark Hezall the time. Mark has Brownlee,”

Chief Creative Partner at Ridge, biggest tech YouTuber, that the synergy of ridge developing and manufacturing products and having, like, best in class D to see marketing. Mark has 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 tri-factor 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, uh, Best Buy component being, like, traditional retail expansion. The only other brand

The one that I talked to most recently was tone, kisonats, deodorant brand, and I forget the,

“the founders direct background, but like, I think it's a, I think they might have been funded”

by night media and it's the exact same idea. It's like bring an experienced operators, bring in someone who can get you a media 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 tri-factor denial. 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 to, uh, to a few funds who, and

now, maybe it's just one owner who's doing them, but who have done similar things and have, you know, a team that has talent networks, you know, operate, they bring in experienced operators, you know,

stuff, stuff like that. Granted, they're probably raising five million to, you know, just to put

into the business to do that, because you, like, so it's definitely a different playbook. Maybe that's the right way to do it, but I agree. Um, but I, I mean, I feel like, the next topic I want to 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, I would strongly consider it. You know, there's, there's this one brand that Sean keeps talking about, um, son powder, um, you know, they're just, you know, small bootstrap brand, but, um,

you know, I don't, I don't want to out, anybody, if, if, you know, they're not public with who it is, but like, they did it really well. Like, 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, you know, that gives you a little

“bit of like credibility. So I think even if you have something like that, it's not a must, but, um,”

I would strongly consider it, you know, even like a wild Roman sawhel's brand, like, you know, sawhel prize 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, 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 sawhel posting for wild Roman is an example of distribution, which is great. I would say with some powder and they're like, I don't know who'd it, 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,

that's actually advantage in the auction. You're more credible, people can convert it a higher rate. You can bid higher in the auction. You can win more bids, basically. 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 I am eight. I think is an example of this. Like, I don't know if I've seen, I haven't heard about I am eight because David Beckham's constantly posting about it or

talking about it or doing interviews about it. I hear about I am eight because they spend a bunch of money on ads and it's because people convert it 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. Yeah. Yeah. You need, you need both of those things and those are the two biggest things you

really have none of it at the beginning. And, you know, you can, you can manufacture either. But you, you definitely 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”

hats. This is my opinion, because there are brands that are scaling without it, but they're,

they're going very aggressive on ads, though. People are the most important part of your business.

And finding real a player 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 specialist. They source talent from US, Latin, and beyond for top peacom 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 they easy to work with, they're quick, but they work on performance. So you only pay a one-offie. Only once you hire somebody, you don't have to pay, you know, any retainer or no-on going fees. Plus, every hire comes with a three-month guarantee. So I highly recommend them. They work really great for us. We've a really great team that they've helped us source. I had to link in the show notes

and submit the form to get 10% off your first hire. All right. So what was go to market like for you as what did you do? I know it wasn't the biggest push, but what did you do? How did you get your first 1000 customers? Yeah. So 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 it's worth the question. I

had to talk about a little bit on the pod. Sean never did a big post about it. We never said like,

"Oh, hey, we want to acquire a bunch of customers on X from our friends and family things." We avoided all of that. There's more like a Scunkworks project that was just a heavy experimentation. And again, I was going back to like, at no point where we're running the business in full force. Like, if we thought about what were the KPIs that we were shooting for,

that would pencil out over time. None of that leads to like a beautiful 3xLTV to CAC in an 18-month

period. Like, we weren't doing email campaigns. We just had flaws. 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. The stealth even, like, let's just figure out

what does CAC look like, what does retention look like, and then let's kind of stop there. I don't know if I would have done it any differently to be honest. If we had come to the conclusion 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? Oh, 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 influence. We would have

done more channel expansion. Again, I'm just discussing the rich 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 helped 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 are? I mean,

our, we've joked about it before our podcast audience or ex audience is like largely guys,

“right? Ecombros. I think for wings, we had the hypothesis. This is where we're currently at. We”

had the hypothesis, you know, largely a female brand, right? 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 signals as well as the 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 ex audience and podcast audiences

is very male leaning. Did that then take our pick because even now our meta ads are acquiring our 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 promise we have, take purple on our website and only females on our website right now. 73% of customers are male. Yeah, I mean, that was one of, 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, you know, it's not going to make the business in any way. Like, you know, if the order's on day one, yeah, it doesn't really. Yeah, if I'm wild Roman and I've got the ability for a whole 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 when, you know, when I'm posting and I'm telling,

“oh my, oh 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're 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 it'd be my, that would 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 in the CPM tax and all 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, as you want, 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 customers, because I think right now we have the signal

that's, you know, 73% men, right? All of that and all are as a woman and I think it's just such a mismatch that it's probably not doing us any, you know, helping us win any beds. 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 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've landed, yes. So we launched with, um, so yeah, we want

with like the groan style single page website. I am changing it actually in the process right now.

More of like a Mars men, you know, I guess some powder as well. So it'll be home page 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 intelligent question? Is it on site 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 an 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, um, 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, a landing page didn't win in a intelligence test, but it did, it did perform ads. 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, you know, doing that. And then

out 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, you know, 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, you know, 10 reasons why plus about just advocates. And just wanted to see if there was any traction there, wasn't. But, um, well, that's specific one. But if it's a site one,

“you know, we'll see for offers, we're going to have 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 will 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? Good 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 nine months to like do a headline test. Yeah. So, so, so I'm not going to sit around for nine months doing a headline test. What we ended up doing, we installed intelligence from day one. We did a couple different things. One, we looked at, um, I guess this wasn't with intelligence. This was with Microsoft Clarity, 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 six 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. Um, 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 in the 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 five reasons, lander, running a split test on that landing page. And we would look at things like time

on site like ad 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, 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 AB 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 like, hi, we just need a little bit a little bit more data. Before Q4 hits, the smartest e-commerce operators aren't just asking how do we spend more. They're asking how do we make every visitor more profitable. That is where after self comes in. After cell helps e-commerce brands increase revenue per visitor contribution margin and incremental profit by optimizing the highest intent moments. Cart, checkout post purchase and even the thank you page.

Brands like Hexclad, Ridge and Pilar increasing their AOV across every cohort using these zero risk upsels. We've tested and they have no negative impact on conversion. It's just more free money in your pocket. And with rocked thanks, you can offset your after cell subscription. No redesigns, no risky funnels, just better economics. Want to see how much money you can make with after cell

profit your funnel will make before BFCM starts. Were you looking at like heat heat maps? Is that how you're looking at engagement or you put like GA for events on there? We would use, uh, in the case of like looking at, there's this like modal with six reasons and people were clicking on the energy one. We used Microsoft clarity to look at that, which is just a heat map tool, free heat map tool. Um, so that was really good.

And then, and then what we would do is we'd basically just try to really stack those winds over time.

So I 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 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, male leanings. We had a male focus landing”

pages page four 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 GOP one stuff, which is a very common talking point for any sort of fiber-related brand. Groen says 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 a 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 cut through the noise a little bit. Um, we got it to work moderately well. Um, so those are kind of our three things we had those broken up, I can't paint. And that's kind of how we continued to to feed the acquisition funnel. Okay, okay, I like that. How, how did you come up with those ideas? It was a reviews post purchase survey stuff doing research or just like, good, good, a good hunch.

GOP ones for surges research. Groen'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 GOP one base. So that's how we ended up launching that one. And then the pooping one was more”

of a hypothesis. Like 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, there's the founder of Throne Science is pretty active on X. And they're like the eight sleep of, of toilets. Have you seen this? Yeah, I've seen them here. Yeah, super fun. Super fun is a, is funny way to describe that. But I just think culturally, we might be thinking about the quality of our schools in a

much higher rate. And I can't wait for Zane to clip this out. But that was, that was part of the thesis of of the fiber brand as a whole. Anyway, that's how we, that's how we identified those. So really three different ways. One was on site engagement, one was research, one was like a homegrown sort of theory. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. I know for C, I've seen that the pooping stuff has done pretty well for

them. Maybe that's who it was. Yeah. Never had a work for Jones Road as well. Unfortunately,

you know, fast forward out to three, four years, we're just early as the thing. So three, four years, everybody's going to have a poop funnel. Yeah, we got magnesium and winks. Maybe that's a good angle for us. Give it a shot. So what are you doing? Um, are using heat maps like, or do you just have a list of things that you want to be testing? Like, what is the identification of potential messaging angles look like? Yeah. So in the beginning, right, we started with three 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, obviously there's angles, you know, attached to the personas, you know, we're called a mental load. 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. Uh, you know, we have the parry menopause mom as well,

who, you know, they've got hormone changes as well. And I don't want other things that does is to just

rest your sleep. Um, we even tested the GLP one. 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 out of say you can do what to kind of whatever kind of AI research where it research you want to do. Like, that's really important, you know, anti-meltone. It's a little bit more about them funnel. But that's obviously a really big one. And, and I think a big one for us, um, because people don't like that. And, and I think

as, you know, in the beginning, you really just need one, right? Like, you don't need a scale horizontally. Like, the exact duck talks about that's that's later on. But so we're just trying to crack and test one. And now obviously, you got some reviews, you know, you look at customer feedback. You can have some surveys set up like big fan of that, um, but just trying to kind of understand and continuing to update the website as we hopefully get closer to understanding who our customers and

what they care about. And that's product market fit. And we're not there yet by any means. Yeah, 100%. Um, so I'm curious, one of the things that we would look at, because at some point, like you have, again, you have these different hypotheses. You have these different theories.

It, you're far from the point of saying, like, 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 we'll know everything about that. That was wild. It was really good. Yeah. So he, I mean, they're like heavy AI created. 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 the rate that our cacts would be profitable. And it was like that simple. They're not overthinking, you know, a PDP view to cart rate cart to, uh, you know, begin, check out rate, begin, check out to, uh, 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 the rate, then we can make

“these things work. And I think that there is a, there is 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 the rate. And men's would click the rate with men just like, excuse much lower, um, 0.3.4.

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 the rate. But if we haven't, and we have funnels like this now for ridge, and we saw them for gut culture where we would 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 nine figure men's apparel brand, the CMO, I'm over here like working my ass off at ridge. Like this is this is years ago. I'm running all the ads. We're doing all this complex stuff because yeah, I just want 50 cent clicks.

He's like, if we just get 50 cent clicks, I get works. And I'm like, dude, I wish maybe I should be just embracing this like various simplistic strategy. So anyway, that's an example of it. Same with this pocket FM guy. Or you guys, or do you have any early examples of that? Where you say, hey, it's not working at all from a cact perspective, but like this messaging funnel really seems to have

“some potency to it. For sure. I mean, that's why we can talk about, you know,”

meta ad accounts 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 has spent pretty heavily in our account. I would say sub par CPA, even relative to the rest of account, which is not good. But, you know, relative to that. So that's the ones 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 wasn't easy on 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.

“No, not at all. 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. Nine figures going to zero. You know, give you a few examples. Like, you know, I posted something in the next last week where I was looking for creators. And somebody, you know, those guys, you know, Gen Z, he, he hopped in my DMs. I'm like, friends. I mean, it's like, how you should run this in a much more like drop-shipper type way. He's like, he's like, you're totally being on, like,

he's like, don't just like manually message people, like, set up an automation, set up a farm, like, stuff like that. You know, we're 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 fun. Like, before we launched, I had all these ideas. Well, we could go, we could go 90 day, and that's

what I am, and they're doing as what Grinsam, and you see it all the time, people will be like, hey, don't look at Grins or as you want or ritual for ad in Spore, or even Ridge or Jones Road, look at the drop-shippers. 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,

chronic. 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 five years and have it turned into a nine 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's so much noise. You got platform data. You got blended data. MMM, all the acronyms, MTA experiments, all of it, all pointing in different directions. The more you're spending,

“the faster you move, the more the bad signal can cost you. That's why we use house and we've been”

using it for years. That's why the other marketing operators do as well. They're the best tool

on-plane earth for measuring what we call incrementality. We talk about a lot on a 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. Stock Exchange saw a 41% lift in IRO using house 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 house.io/operators. HAUs.io/operators and start backing your budget calls with real causal data. With that in mind, say, okay, we're going to move away from thinking about the IMA or groan's playbook to looking more like a drop shipper. 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 plan on implementing with this in mind? Yeah. So for offer, we just need volume. I think we need signal and volume. And I think I 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 worst cack or lower cack 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 is 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 much you force subscription versus not. Everyone has different opinions. 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 got to hide the, you know, not make it super clear that it's subscription. You know, obviously the lot like the dropshippers and e-commerce, like they're doing that. And it's great hat. Um, but there's a lot of white hat brands who are doing that, even, you know, I am eight. It's not super clear where it is. So, I think things like that are all needs to be tested.

Yeah, 100% that makes sense. I, uh, 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 changed a lot of these numbers. What I'm pulling up here for those just listening is like a super simple cohort, uh, analysis. 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 rebuild at the same

rate? Yeah. Yeah. So like, if you're collecting $48 at the first value, I put it in an AMERA

40%. And it's like, and I hear this across the board. I spoke with someone recently who had an AMERA of one, like basically at launch and it wasn't really at scale. Um, but like, there's a massive difference here. You hear about the, uh, hymns of the world and they're running at a point two. I am eight running at a point two. Um, and this is like dramatically changes your payback period. If you can

“collect $48 and rebuild 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 one month, 15% people turn and then 12% and then I just put 10% for the remaining nine months of the year. Really, really strong. There's what I've heard from like some of the best in class, um, supplement brands. Uh, you have an LTV to cack of $5. So it's like, obviously, if you are able to have these, you know, economics, you wouldn't be sitting around at the one X AMER. You could take this all the way down.

Let's see where you could run at probably a point five five or something and you end up at a

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 three X LTV to cack. 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 attention's probably not this good. I hate to scare you with some of these numbers, but it's like, yeah, all the sudden this stuff gets

“much worse over time. And that's even with a 50% AMER. I think it's like pretty strong for”

retention business. I talk 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 that business works there.

It's what problem do we need to solve in the 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 cugs. We have to fix ALV. Likely, it's probably a combination of all of those three 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 at new categories where we, if you look at

we have four categories. If you look at our revenue make up, if we launch a new category, we end up having to spend much more time on that category than 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. 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 it'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. This is our over investing in it now. And I think that even matters from like a”

capex 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 Wynx, we have cloud cover because we have other profitable parts of our business. Wynx 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 Groen's approach to 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 they're offers and everything changed over time. I don't, I don't, I don't totally know. You know, they're, they're 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

“rain drop videos like early early on. That's why that's why Jocca's like equity in Groen's 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 PNL at a early stage, 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, um, 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, he, he, he planned, you know, the, the end result obviously, I don't know him, but Danny for my amaze sounds like the same way, like just thinks really big, you know, Zach stuck. I think things, but really big and is willing to take, you know, risk. I am definitely not that. I'm definitely like, I was like,

Jon sort of was profitable month long. You know, like, obviously we have a huge advantage. But I'm like, you know, it's very different and new to me. Fortunately, we have, you know, 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, you know, obviously I can put and put on the offers and stuff. But yeah, I, I agree. Like, for subscription brand. I mean, a few people have, like, have bootstrap some, you know,

and are doing it super lean. So they're, they're definitely is a way to, you know, just do what

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, brain drop videos from the start, but like we do need a little bit more, uh, proof credibility. Like, the stuff that is going to help to legitimize us and,

“and drive the business and so that's what we're kind of working on, uh, getting going.”

All right. This ad is technically a job posting for neon pixel, but, but stay with me here. neon pixel is hiring performance marketers. People who actually get incrementality. They understand hold out the understand triangulation and really that's the entire pitch because when you sign with neon pixel, these are the marketers that are running your CTV strategy. We've been with neon pixel at Hexclive for three years now, and they really do work like an extension of our team.

Live on real living room TV in days, helping with creative strategy, same day end card swabs, and measurement read in our stack, not just some black box dashboard that we don't really understand

or have insights into, and that's ultimately what a managed service looks like when it's

staffed by real operators and real marketers. So whether you want to work on the sharpest CTV accounts in DTC, or you want that team running yours, go to neonpixel.co/careers to apply. 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 rebuild 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 two 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 purchase. They're not a subscriber, but one-time again. Um, no, but that was, that was of us. So we're not there yet. Um, I also think our initial, you like, most people talk about your initial cohorts being really strong because, you know, they're your golden cohorts. I actually think our is going to be pretty weak because we had a lot

“of our friends by and stuff like that. So I don't, 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 links. So I'm, I've been a terrible co-host to you. Um, but I'm one of those people whom, like, as soon as I buy, I've been a create subscriber for like three and a half years or something. And it's, I've got way too much creative home. So I just, I think some of the, the friends and family from the web are going to actually be extremely valuable cohorts for you guys. You're, you're like, lifting, you like training, like you

been here from creating. I don't know. Well, we'll, we'll see. Um, 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 say, I hope you're right. I hope so too. And if not, we'll have to remind our producer, Mike Blinken ship. He should be a subscriber, Aaron Orndor, he should be a subscriber. I don't want

to see this just canceling this subscription either. We should be, we should be able to count on $48 per month from, from our, from the podcast network at the very least. We have that. Yeah, that is your, your, your tax for listening to the podcast. We don't charge you for the podcast. We

just charge you for weeks. All right, last question I have for you. These 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 bucks, came down, you know, 150, whatever, you know, I had a long list of things that we wanted to try. Got through some of them, not all of them. We'll go one day. We're down to 35, 40 bucks. I have no idea why I don't know what you're doing. My best guess is, uh, somebody who's on x and meta rep told me to verify our business manager. I can't believe

that hadn't been done, but it was about two days after that. And so we came down 35. And so now, again, traffic quality is not good, but at least we have a fighting shot. So it probably took

“a week and a half to two weeks. You know, we'd probably spend 18 grand 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,

this is a little bit more tin foil hat. There 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 tend to discuss you higher. And the like response rate, the click the 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

relates to Winks, I know you guys are pretty heavy AI early on, that might be a factor. Like

Shons ads are very much like the claymation style. There's the, there's the Winks character like sitting in bed. That's a sort of thing like running stuff like that with gut culture, would just skew on the higher on 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're like, oh, like, you know, run, run static. Like all the normal tricks were like, all right, run statics instead of

video because you know, usually statics are 10% cheaper stuff. I was like, guys, I need like a 500% improvement like, you know, that's like 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 how do a few hypotheses? The one person I talked to maybe two of you, I talked to who had no CPM issues were going hard on organic Instagram before they launched their out of count. So we are now, we're working with, you know, content for Isaac's age and say, haven't gotten a content in yet, but we will soon. So we're going to 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 I was like the, you know, AI, native ads, doing Advertorial.

Somebody had part of my hypothesis with what this Brian can know had the hypothesis that, you know, 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 wings offers until then. I don't know if it was that or if it was just the, you know, 6% click through it on native. Again, not, not good conversion, right? Not good CPI, but, you know, learn something from it.

And maybe that helped the rest of the account a little bit. I don't know. White listing, we're getting a lot of white listing 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 creators account. And so that can also be a positive signal. So there's just 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. I mean, ours came down significantly without us doing any of that. 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 an incredible

messaging and offer that are converting people at a really high rate. 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 a $8 cost per click. So it's fixed that problem. Now we're two, 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 ones together

and get to do 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 today 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. I will. This is good. I learned a

“little bit. It was helpful, excited to share more. But I think hopefully a listeners love it,”

because we're, you know, not talking about the 99 and Connor Rollin 10 figure problems anymore for once.