Hey, Quick one today. I audited a home & furniture brand last week. Average order around £500. Their Performance Max campaigns reported a 6x ROAS, and everyone involved was understandably pleased. It’s the kind of number nobody questions. Then we removed one thing from the report: conversions from searches containing the brand’s own name. The 6x became a 2 to 3x. Nobody had touched the account. We’d only changed what the report was allowed to count. Nothing was technically fake. PMax had...
5 days ago • 2 min read
Hey, Last month I wrote that creative volume is the number one constraint for most brands between $1M and $5M, and that your quality bar might be the bottleneck. The reply I got more than once: “Fine, I’m convinced. But HOW does anyone actually produce that much without the quality collapsing?” Fair question. It’s the single most common thing I get asked on audits, and the honest answer surprised me too the first time I watched it up close. So today I’ll show you the machine. A brand I work...
7 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Quick one today. A niche hobby brand I work with hit a wall last month. A new customer costs them about $11. For the unit economics to work, that number needs to be under $10. We tried the usual levers first. Sharper creative, cleaner account structure, better landing pages. Each helped a little. None of it reliably pushed CAC below the line, because in their category, at their price point, that’s roughly what a stranger costs right now. They’re in good company. Industry data suggests...
13 days ago • 2 min read
Hey, I audited a premium skincare brand a few days ago. Every dashboard was green and numbers looked great. Platform ROAS looked strong.Site conversion rate sat well above the category average.Retention was genuinely excellent, with customers reordering month after month. But revenue had been flat for the better part of a year. Even declining in most markets. Growth meetings kept producing theories, and none of the theories survived a week of testing. The founder suspected the usual suspects....
15 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Open your Meta Ads Manager. Look at your prospecting campaigns and your retargeting campaigns side by side. If you're running the same creative in both, you're probably wasting your retargeting budget. Here's why. Your prospecting ads have one job: make someone aware of your brand and get them curious enough to click. They're top-of-funnel. They introduce the problem, position the product, and create initial interest. Your retargeting audience has already done all of that. They clicked,...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Every founder between $2M and $5M reaches the same inflection point. The business is growing, but the founder is oftentimes still the bottleneck. They're managing content, answering support tickets, managing fulfillment, developing product, negotiating with suppliers, and somehow trying to "focus on growth" in between everything else. The obvious next step is to hire. The question is what role. Many founders at this stage hire a marketing manager. Someone to "own marketing" and free up the...
26 days ago • 3 min read
Hey, Personal note this week. Seven years ago I was selling frying pans to strangers at a trade show. Today I turn 28. In between those two sentences there's a wife, a team of nine, and brands that now trust us with more in a month than I ever imagined. Most days I still can't quite believe either end of that. First, I was planning to give you 28 tips. But I'm not going to do that. Most listicles are filler, and your inbox has enough of those already. Instead I want to walk you through the...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Every time I review a creative brief or audit a landing page, the first thing I ask the founder is: "What are the most common objections people have before buying?" Usually I get some version of: "I think price is the biggest one" or "Probably shipping time" or "I'm not sure, honestly." They're guessing. They've been running their business for years and they're guessing why people don't buy from them. There's a tool that answers this question definitively, and it takes about 10 minutes to set...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
I get on calls every week with founders who tell me the same thing: "We tried to scale from $50k to $100k in monthly ad spend and our ROAS dropped from 5x to 3.5x. Something must be broken." Nothing is broken. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. When you scale ad spend, you're reaching colder audiences, broader segments, and people who are further from being ready to buy. Of course they convert at a lower rate. You've already captured the warmest, most in-market buyers at your current...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read