DTC Midas retweeted
I got an eCom friend who got all his cash frozen on @Wise right before Q4.
Can anyone help?
Need to speak to a real human that can act with a sense of urgency
Creative is higher leverage than offer.
Zach's right here.
A good offer will only get you so far, it won't get you to real scale without great ads. The other way around, it will.
Imagine 2 scenarios:
1. A very good offer, but you only run headline call-out and basic BOF offer statics.
Meta will find the low-hanging fruit that converts easily with your offer. But then your funnel dries out as you try to scale budgets, because you won't be able to reach new people and fill your top of funnel with your shitty ads.
2. A mediocre offer, but you only produce killer 3, 4, 5, 6+ minute VSLs.
Great ads will improve cvr, improve rps, and can make a worse offer work.
Every day of the week I'd rather be in the second scenario than the first.
Most people who call themselves creative strategists are indeed swipers.
I'd say 80%+ of them.
There's such a big demand for this role that a lot of new people are getting jobs and quite good pay easily.
Without experience, any real DR education or any idea how to write scripts from scratch.
Also watch out for candidates with 9 figure brands in their portfolio.
If they were really that good, they'd be making a shit ton of money there and not be applying to work for you.
If you’re looking for top CS talent, pay attention to swipers who call themselves creative strategists.
Swipers usually stalk all the most popular ad libraries
- Ryze
- Resilia
- Rosabella
- Koriderm
- Smooche
etc.
and they usually have impressive portfolios with good-looking ads but irl they have no clue what they are doing.
I recently interviewed a swiper who looked good on paper, with a strong portfolio
but when I asked him “How do you learn direct-response marketing, do you read any books and how do you study human behaviour”
he simply said
“I don’t read anything, I just learn by doing”
I wasn’t sure what to think about this because from my experience, in order to become a really good DR copywriter/creative strategist, you need to have studied DR copywriters, principles, frameworks, and what influences people to buy something.
So I gave him a trial and tbh this was the most terrible trial task I’ve seen.
The guy had no idea how to sell the product,
no clue how to influence the buying decision of the person he was targeting,
and had no idea what the core desire was that he needed to sell to.
He simply presented scripts that were 1:1 re-creation of the inspo ads he'd seen on the Ads Library.
Finding a good creative strategist is super hard and you need to make sure you have a proper hiring process before investing time & money into someone who will never succeed.
aov-minning on acquisition is the meta
.@stevenborrelli on the pricing experiment that flipped their unit economics:
"Our AOV dipped to $140. But then our CAC dipped from like $120 to $55."
"To get the same revenue, we did have to acquire more customers. But the new customer count—in August of this year, we acquired half of the total '25 cohort in one month."
"It's almost like a weird thing where the customer getting more value is what lowered the CAC."
The problem is you can’t change one number and assume everything else stays the same.
Smaller discount > higher price > higher cac, which can eat into the extra margin.
Ofc it doesn’t always happen, but you can’t assume you’ll decrease your discount and keep acquiring customers at the same cost.
It works the other way around too.
A bigger discount/lower price can lower your margin per order, but also lower your cac and expand the pool of people you can sell to. That can let you scale further and make more total profit, even with less margin per order.
That’s why you need to test these changes and make sure you’re tracking your numbers accurately day by day.
This is the single most useful thing I can teach a DTC founder:
Running a business is mostly just doing math. All of your growth levers are interchangeable.
Say COGS goes up 5%. You're down about 2 percentage points of contribution margin and roughly down –$500k of net profit. This might make you freak the hell out.
But wait! Now reduce your blanket discount strategy by 2%. Ta-da! You just clawed the whole thing back into the previous profitability levels.
Sometimes, instead of panicking, you have to move one number alongside another.
When you understand the impact, you get your power back.
I created a calculator for this. Who wants it?
I never understood people who come on here just to complain about how bad their performance is.
The moment you start blaming things you can’t control, like the algorithm, competitors or the market being “too saturated,” you’ve already lost.
Just put your head down and launch more and better ads.
If your customers are 40+ and you run a lot of facebook placements, one of the easiest ways to increase cvr is to add fb comments as proof on your pdp and pre-sell pages.
This is how to do it at scale, without manually finding and screenshotting every comment:
Connect claude or codex to meta ads mcp and apify mcp - meta finds your ad url’s, apify scrapes the comments.
Give it your ad account and landing page url, then tell it which product or angle to focus on.
Have it shortlist the strongest social proof: people sharing results, overcoming objections, or explaining why they bought again.
Pick the ones you want and ask it to build a comment section using 1-on-1 fb ui - give it a screenshot for reference.
Add it to your pages and see cvr go up 📈
How to build an ecom business that actually pays you along the way:
1. Get really good at direct response
Understand your customer and learn to make ads, offers and landing pages that sell. If you suck at acquiring customers, you’re ngmi
2. Have good margins and know your numbers
Preferably 75%+ after COGS and 60%+ after fulfillment.
Track your unit economics daily.
Know what you can afford to pay for a customer and what’s left after all costs.
3. Stay lean
Learn how to implement and use AI across your whole business (creative, ops, supply chain, customer service, email, etc) before throwing more people and expensive agencies at problems.
You can get a shitload done with a small team.
Keep overhead low, both people and software.
4. Have a plan for getting people to buy again
Could be subscriptions, promos, limited editions or new product drops.
Give customers a reason to come back.
And ofc, a product worth buying again and a good experience. No retention flow can replace those.
5. Negotiate every major line item
COGS, shipping, fulfillment, software.
Both prices AND payment terms.
As volume grows, stop accepting the deal you got when you were tiny.
Lower costs and better payment terms free up more cash to take out or reinvest into growth.
This is why most don’t share their brand.
You post your store + how much rev you’re doing.
Within minutes, dropship demons are on telegram buying spy access into your ad account to figure out your winning ads and funnels.
Within hours, they’re running copies.
Within days, your roas starts dropping and you’re back on here complaining about copycats.
It’s net negative.
Doomscrolling should be part of your job.
Once you know which angles work for your product, there’s a huge upside in being first to bring a new format into your market.
There are only so many angles for your product, but new formats are emerging every day.
I’ve brought new formats into our market many times and saw huge growth during those periods.
The easiest way to do this is to either
Intentionally doomscroll content your audience watches organically.
Or take a format from another niche or market and bring it into yours before everyone else starts doing it.
Here’s how to approach it:
1. Look outside your own market
If you only look at competitors, you’re mostly finding things your audience has already seen.
Look at what brands in other categories are doing too.
A format that’s been used a lot somewhere else can still be new to your market.
2. Consume content your customers actually watch
On YouTube, search for the problems, interests and routines around your product and find creators making content for your audience
On TikTok, search the phrases your customers use when talking about their problem.
Open relevant vids, read the comments and click through to the creators and scroll through the vids.
Same for IG.
3. Build a swipe file
When building one you also need to be able to answer which of your winning angles could work with this format (there needs to be angle <> format fit)
4. Be the first one to test
Don’t wait until all your competitors are running it before trying it yourself.
Ofc, being first doesn’t mean the ad will work. You still need to execute it well.
I just updated my full workflow for turning winning competitor ads into ads for your own product.
8 pages, all new prompts and the full 11-step process.
The guy in this screenshot is still making winning ads with last year’s version.
Here is the new one👇
docs.google.com/document/d/1…
Happy q4 scaling! 😃
This is how to legally rip any winning ad that's printing money right now.
It's my exact internal process for finding + reverse-engineering winning competitor ads and adapting them for your product.
Takes about 30 minutes and gives you a battle-tested script ready to scale.
Full workflow + all prompts below 👇
This is how you can use Muse if you're in Europe, the UK or anywhere else where it’s not available.
And not only in your browser, but also in the mobile app👇
First you need to make a muse account.
To do this turn on a US vpn, go to muse.ai and sign up.
Now you can already start using it in your browser if you want.
Just make sure to turn off your vpn before you start using it, otherwise your account gets flagged and you'll be locked out.
Next up, the mobile app.
This is how it works on iPhone:
First you need to switch your app store country to the U.S.
1. Go to your iPhone setting
2. Go to media & purchases
3. Tap country/region and select the United States
4. Fill in a random US address and phone number (they won't send a 2fa, just make sure it's a real number tho)
5. Accept and you're in the US app store.
Now just go to the App Store and you’ll be able to download the muse app.
Don't open the app right away after downloading.
Enable your US vpn again and only then open muse and log in (I wasn't able to log in without the vpn)
Once you're logged in, don't start using muse right away.
Go back and disable your vpn first.
Now you can go back to Muse and start using it.
No idea how it works on Android btw (and I never will)
There are even more benefits for lowering aov:
- Lower cac
- More & quicker feedback
- Bigger tam
- Quicker sales cycle
A lot of the AOV-maxi talk forgets that when you try to juice your AOV you more than likely get a corresponding decrease in eCVR, so you reap no benefit
(Bid x eCVR) + User Value = Total Value
You can also "outbid" your competitors by having a great estimated action rate and not having to play the AOV game or even mega long LTV equations
My product costs $24.99 and my competitor's costs $49.99. At real scale, who do you think is really going to win the customer base?
A great estimated action rate comes from a great offer (CVR), excellent ads and good/fair prices i.e. the same prices you would find it for in nationwide retail
There are not many users on FB who will pay $79.99 for a greens gummy on a subcription that they've never tried before, which is why the whole idea that you need to maximize AOV to maximize scale is dumb
Going the lower AOV route is still underrated, i think it's a lot easier to build a great eCVR than it is to build a business that can afford a 2-3x higher CAC than the closest competitor
The point is to try to find which item in the equation is your biggest lever with the most room to move, dial on it, and then try to find the spot where increasing it does exponentially more good than harm to the other items in the equation
I highly recommend everyone to start doing this now.
I forced the team to do it, and within a week everyone had made at least one major breakthrough and was getting way more done across the whole board, creative, ops, supply chain, cro.
It can take longer at first because you have to figure things out and rethink how you approach tasks, instead of falling back on how you’ve always done them.
But it’s 100% worth it!
If you actually want to master AI, here’s the playbook:
1. You’re only using Claude code or codex now. You’re not allowed to open any other apps. No cowork or chat nonsense either.
2. Every task needs to go through AI. No email, no browser, no figma, NOTHING
3. If AI can’t connect or do a task for you, you’re only allowed to give up after 20 attempts. Yep, 20. You need to learn how to figure shit out with AI.
If you do all your work this way for a month, you’ll be a master of AI.
Here’s the alpha: being good at AI means knowing how to figure shit out with AI. You need to train that muscle.
Here are 13 Black Friday ad formats I’m swiping this year 👇
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Yes, they’re simple, but that’s the point.
During Black Friday, you want the offer, urgency and scarcity to be immediately obvious.
Make it clear what people get and why they should buy NOW.
It’s also not the time to reinvent the wheel.
Stick to what worked for you throughout the year, swipe ideas from others and add a Black Friday theme.
Even as simple as putting an offer banner over your winning video ads works really well.
You’ve spent 11 months building demand, now is the time to cash in on it.
