Hey, Quick one today. Picture two brands. Same $60 CAC, same $80 first order. On every dashboard you normally look at, they're twins. One of them should double spend going into Q4. The other one is slowly dying, and the difference lives in a number most founders have never pulled: what a new customer is worth by day 90. If you read the scorecard email two weeks ago, this is one of the two numbers the question marks always cluster on. Brand one's customers come back. By day 90, the average new...
9 days ago • 2 min read
I have to show you an embarrassing number from my own dashboard. In June, my email list grew by exactly one subscriber. One. The whole month. And I only noticed because I was in the data for a different reason. The irony wasn't lost on me. A few weeks earlier I'd audited a skincare brand and found their ad account had stopped acquiring new customers while every dashboard glowed green. I wrote a whole newsletter about it. Meanwhile my own list was doing the same thing: totals holding steady,...
11 days ago • 5 min read
Hey, Quick one today, from the least glamorous corner of your business: the stock sheet. A denim brand came to me for an audit earlier this year. The month before, the account ran around a 3 ROAS. Then it fell apart, and by the time we spoke, the founder had turned ads off completely. They'd already tried the usual suspects: new creative, rebuilt campaigns, dark thoughts about the algorithm. Then we looked at inventory. Their two best-selling sizes had been sold out for weeks. The ads...
16 days ago • 2 min read
Hey, I work with a Scandinavian home-design brand whose product belongs to autumn and winter. Cozy season, long dark evenings. The kind of brand where the year gets decided in roughly ten weeks between October and December. Their summer used to follow the script most seasonal brands run. Demand cools in May. ROAS sags. Someone looks at the dashboard, declares that "ads have stopped working," and spend gets cut to almost nothing until September. Then Q4 arrives and the account has to restart...
18 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Short one today, and it's a follow-up. Three weeks ago I told you Q4 gets decided in the summer, and I gave you the creative math. Today's the honest check-in: did you start? Because the deadline got two weeks closer. Black Friday is about 15 weeks out. Whatever ads you'll be running that week need to be proven winners by late October, because peak season is the worst possible time to be guessing. Proving a winner takes 2 to 3 weeks of testing and iteration. Which means your real...
23 days ago • 2 min read
Two weeks ago I taught a masterclass inside Foxwell Founders, a community of about 600 of the sharpest media buyers and ecom operators in the world. These are people who run seven and eight-figure ad accounts for a living. I didn't teach them a single thing about creative, targeting, or campaign structure. They have that covered better than almost anyone alive. I taught them a decision system, built around one question every operator eventually faces with real money on the line: how hard can...
25 days ago • 4 min read
Hey, Quick one today. I was digging through the promo history of the hobby brand I mentioned on Tuesday, and one pattern jumped out. Their short flash sales, the 3 to 4 day ones, beat their week-long promos on return on ad spend. Consistently. Their best promo ROAS of the entire year came from one of the shortest sales they ran. Same brand, same audience, comparable offers. The difference was the length. Here's what a promo actually looks like when you plot it by day. Day one spikes, because...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey, Meta reported earnings last week. The coverage was all about AI spending and data centers, and buried under it was the one line that actually lands on your P&L: The average price of an ad rose 12% in a single year. That's across every advertiser in the auction, good and bad. Same audiences, and every unit of attention now costs 12% more than it did last summer. Impressions grew 14% too, which means Meta created more inventory and prices still climbed. More advertisers are bidding on the...
about 1 month ago • 4 min read
Hey, Quick one today, and it starts with homework. Open ChatGPT and ask it for the best product in your category, phrased the way your customer would. “Best standing desk setup for a home office.”“Best beginner speedcube.”"Best supplement for outdoor climbing."Whatever your version is. If your brand came up, congratulations, and now check whether it came up first. If it didn’t come up at all, that recommendation just went to a competitor, and it’ll go to them again every time someone asks....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read