Ben

update: it 100% has. the low quality writing + recycled ideas has 10x’ed since this episode. i am such a proponent of AI but fkn nervous for the people who are not consciously trying to combat their brain rotting away entirely while they use it

It’s at the point now where I’d say 1 out of every 3 messages I receive that are more substantiative than just a slack response are fully written by AI. Emails, docs, briefs, etc. It’s always so obvious (and usually shit quality) but even worse is that most people make no effort to mask the AI and will often try to proposition the thoughts as they’re own when they’re so clearly not.

I was one of them. Went from going into Claude strictly to accomplish some higher effort thing to starting every action in Claude. Comfortability/outputs/what I was able to accomplish went through roof

we’re all masochists man I feel u

You have a "winning" offer on a landing page. Over time, you've realized that offer isn't the best offer for the business, but it's still a good one. You've tested multiple new offers/pages, but none take over spend meaningfully from the control. WDYD?

Do I know anyone living in Tampa or St. Pete? Will be there next week would love to say what’s up to some people.

1. relentless focus 2. master the skills of the levers that moved our needle 3. profit first/pay ourselves first mentality there's a bunch of tactical stuff in there that I'll get around to sharing when I have the time to put it in some type of constructive format, but i want to paint a picture of where we were at, and why those are my answers. end of 2023, we hit our first $1M year on december 23rd if i remember correctly. 10 days before that, our highest sales day ever had been $6k. on the 23rd it was $25k. we were convinced we'd be billionaires in a year. then we looked at the forecast and realized we'd run out of inventory in about 2 weeks if we didn't slow down. we cut spend by 80% that day and didn't recover for 4-5 months. in 2024 we burned around $200k over a 6ish month period. overcapitalized on inventory, down bad on meta (probably around the time we met you @ashvinmelwani ), and paying multiple agencies to scale meta, google, email/sms, and amazon, all while having zero real clue how any of them worked under the hood. initially we tried to spend our way out of it. we didn't have a great understanding of cash flow at the time, and figured if we could just move a bunch of units with bad spend, we'd have enough cash come in. FKN WRONG. that caught up to us. we took our first Wayflyer MCA in october. told ourselves it'd be the only one and we'd really buckle down. 2025 starts and we seem to be on the right path. we'd taken meta back in-house, but hadn't really changed anything else. we started ripping again in march (first $25k day since 12/23), then an error got our ad account taken down for a week and it took us until october to turn it back around. around july we were getting $100 CACs on a $40 AOV, paying about $10k/month in agency fees to run platforms we had no idea how to use or gauge incremental performance on, and we hadn't paid ourselves in 5 months. that's when focus, mastery, and paying ourselves became the priority. FOCUS: every weekly call from that point until early this year, i started by saying to my co-founder: "the only things that matter right now are turning a profit/having enough cash to make it another month, mastering meta ads, and paying ourselves enough to not question whether this is worth it." MASTERY: we cut 3 agencies, set-up google ads and amazon to run on autopilot (spending way too much on brand protection but idgaf), and joined @andrewfoxwell community where we were relentless in learning from people like @MaxorrLloyd , @zachmstuck , @MikeLukashewich , and many more to understand our primary advertising channel - media buying, creative research, scripting, etc. my co-founder @Niehoff_11 made over 500 ads in a couple month period. we tracked every single thing about our creative that we could. meta didn't turn around quickly. it took months of small budgets and jamming shit into the platform before something clicked, but we refused to stop trying. there was no chance we were going to be the brand who couldn't make the best advertising platform in the world work for us. PROFIT FIRST/PAY OURSELVES: i'm all about the starving artist thing when you're building something like this. the first year it was fun to have no money and work the long hours. but kevin had a kid on the way, i was getting married, and there was no world in which i could look my wife or kevin's wife in the face and justify working on a company that was unprofitable, swinging that wildly, and not paying us enough to contribute equally to the household. we started smaller - $40k, no matter what. a few months after - $70k, no matter what. a few month after that - $100k, no matter what. now, we're paying ourselves a salary that is livable + some that keeps us excited to work on the business, but still not enough to make us feel comfortable. november '25 we did $350k with $40k profit. FY '25 we did $50k in total profit FY '26, we'll do ~ $7.5M in sales with ~ $500k in profit. so if anyone actually read this, which I guess in looking at it myself feels a little crazy that anyone would, the point is this: this game is already fucking hard on it's own. when you try to do too much, in too quick of a time, you will get caught with your pants down, or at least we did. during all of the bad times, I was desperate to find answers, and looked in all of the right (and wrong) places to get them. but it wasn't a tactic that turned this around. no landing page, CBO/ABO structure, or tik tok shop hack got us through that. the only thing that got us through it was relentless focus, mastering the skills/levers needed to run the business, and focusing on profitability/paying ourselves. there are probably thousands of ways to spin that for any one unique situation.

We just hit our first $500k month. We've been profitable for 10 months straight. TBH, it took longer than it should have, in my opinion I've mostly lurked that whole time (and sent some insanely cringeworthy DMs). I've read a ton and posted almost nothing. Maybe the right answer was to share more the whole time, but IMO I don't think so, because one of the biggest challenges of spending so much time on here was sifting through the bullshit. A bunch of people on here helped me through some really bad stretches. A lot became legit friends. I just took, and told myself I'd retrun the favor once I had something worth saying. Realistically, I had to get my house in order by any means necessary. So I guess this is me trying to do that. I'm going to try to spend most of time on here talking about the actual mechanics of what we've done -during the good and bad times - to get to where we are today. We've overcome a bunch of shit that I'm really proud of, and I think where we're going is really exciting. If you're in that part right now, tlel me where you're stuck, and I'll do the best to answer waht I can.

follow-up to this is that in the AI era, this is even more important. don't give people a reason to try and vibe code a solution just for themselves just because they're sick of interacting with your shitty AI chat bot. if you become sticky by having humans interact with your customers and help them maximize your platform, the case to build on your own gets mega reduced.

I think it's really fkn sweet what @aftersell is doing on here. Should be the playbook for more. The vendors who make it easiest to interact with them, take feedback, and get on the phone to workshop how to use their products better are the ones we stick with the longest. @retentionx @IrisFinanceCo also in this category

For the people moving to Omnisend, is it actually worth it? Are people waiting for Postscript Email? Klaviyo pricing is getting out of control.

This shouldn’t be unexpected. That’s the problem. We have every prerequisite necessary to eliminate all the problems we have, most of which are self inflicted, but continue to do the same thing. It’s the definition of insanity.

Recently started using @ToriiRowe strategy of testing. The goal for us was getting significant volume into the account to identify new winners, but also to ensure we had a ton of different touch points happening. ABO, $10 budgets. Auto rules for budget increase/decrease. The campaign is seeing great efficiency, but what's been best is that it allows ads that may not win at scale to continue getting 1-2 highly profitable conversions a day in a dedicated environment. The auto-rules have been both a time saver and made sure I'm not missing anything when doing reviews/hands on management. Killing ad sets that do not hit KPI's within $100-$150 in spend. Scaling ads that get 2-3 conversions at or below KPI to see if they win at scale, but still letting them run in ABO to get those low cost 1-2 conversions a day. A few ad sets have 3x initial budget automatically, still performing. 3 ads have scaled and become top spenders in account.