Founder of SAWMILL - we make great ads. The future is bright. Focused on the intersection of AI implementation and creative strategy in marketing.
Austin, TX
Joined January 2009
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Across a dozen brands I worked with as a fractional CMO, the biggest lever kept turning out to be the same thing.
Ad creative.
As fCMO at Clean Juice, Snap Fitness, Tarry's Apparel and more, performance ad creative for Meta, YouTube and TikTok became the most requested part of my work.
So this week I'm launching SAWMILL ⚙️.
One focus: making great ads.
Plenty of agencies offer ad creative. Few do only that.
And hundreds of AI tools now make ads cheap to produce. The results are a different story.
Great performance ads come from great creative strategy:
WHY your audience buys from you.
WHO they are, in real detail.
WHAT you make, from UGC to long-form animation to statics that pop.
HOW it all becomes one plan that tests, learns and doubles down on winners.
That's the gap SAWMILL fills.
Experienced designers, editors and strategists, using the best AI tools.
it’s happening whether people like it or not 🥴
WEEK 3
// building my new agency: SAWMILL
- Focusing on client #1 (clients always come first baby) 🤠
- working on signing client #2 🙂
- outbound cold emails and LinkedIn DMs at 20 per week (1 lukewarm response 😕)
- finishing up SAWMAP, our ad creative mapping tool, to use as a lead magnet and help us plan client creative 🤓
- developing a content strategy through an interview with Atlas, my Grok bot for content. Our calls have dropped 3 times now “you’re right to be frustrated, that’s on me” 😑
- reviewing applications for a video editor 😎
CEO: CPAs are up again, Johnson.
Head of Growth: Yep.
CEO: How much?
Head of Growth: Enough that I had to change the investor deck to "blended CPA" again.
CEO: And AOV?
Head of Growth: Ad traffic AOV is lower than our site average.
CEO: So we’re paying more for customers who are bargain hunters and are probably going to make a return.
Head of Growth: Well, yes but the data isn't....
CEO: What about the AI?? Claude and the AI tools?? We made 200 ads last month! AI man!!
Head of Growth: We did. They're what the kids call "slop." And the Meta algo is not liking them...
CEO: Why am I paying for SLOP? We are not a sloppy brand!! Get Cher on this ASAP.
Head of Growth: Cher designs our packaging and updates the brand guidelines kit no one uses. Last week I asked her to add captions to a video & she quietly updated her LinkedIn status.
CEO: So, hire a video editor?
Head of Growth: An editor can cut footage. They can’t tell us what to say. That’s how we got 25 ads that look like rave flyers.
CEO: So what’s the solution Johnson? I'm losing patience.
Head of Growth: We have no creative strategy. And my name's not Johnson.
CEO: Isn’t that YOUR job?
Head of Growth: Me?? I’m running $240K/mo of spend across Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, AppLovin and Megasaurus. Rebuilding attribution after iOS broke it again. Trading options on Robinhood. Fixing a dozen landing pages so ChatGPT recommends us. Vibecoding an app that gets me more matches on Hinge. Finalizing the holiday launch. If I have time for creative strategy, it will have to be in the shower.
CEO: Johnson, please. What do we do?
Head of Growth: Hire a small team that only does ad creative.
CEO: The last agency charged $25K/mo and their best ad was a 30% static.
Head of Growth: I found a good one called SAWMILL. Run by a creative strategist who helped a supplements brand scale to $10M in revenue with ads he made himself.
They map every ICP, why each one buys, then build the angles & formats for each. AI does the resizes. Humans do the creative strategy and make the ads.
CEO: Cost?
Head of Growth: $7K/mo.
CEO: Do it.
Head of Growth: Already did. Figured you’d say yes after the slop discovery.
--
If you're tired of AI ads and want a real team focused on making ads that sell, let's talk. 3 people. 2 creative strategists, including me. 1 suspiciously talented video editor. Using the best AI tools
SAWMILL ⚙️
Swells retweeted
So many people act like attending to their kids is such a big sacrifice and loss of freedom because they conditioned their mind to chase productivity, money, and status, and they can no longer see that being able to spend time with their kids and watch them grow is one of the highest blessings, privileges, and forms of wealth that they will ever get to experience.
my daughter (1 y/o) eats grapes and blueberries like sunflower seeds…
she chews em up and spits out the skins 😂
When I used to work in Dubai we got handed an envelope with a fat stack of cash in it every two weeks. 💵💶💴
Highly tangible.
I have learned a massive arbitrage when it comes to compensation:
There are a lot of different ways that you can pay someone. The most obvious method is salary and bonuses. In our modern world, our salary gets processed digitally and deposited directly into our bank account. Although it is helpful to the employee, it is intangible. They will never physically see the money, and it is hard for them to tie that money to a specific future purchase.
Basically, this make salary and bonuses table steaks for compensation. We need to be looking for other concrete ways to financially compensate employees. Some examples include:
Buying their lunch
A gift card to their favorite store
Providing a laptop that can be used for work & personal
A budget for decorating their office
I've found that these forms of compensation deliver MUCH higher happiness per dollar spent. If I pay $10 for an employee's lunch, that is much more concrete than their digital bank deposit being $7 higher after taxes.
Compensating people in ways other than salary requires creativity and thinking outside the box, but it is worth the effort. And the ultimate skill is learning to compensate people in ways that don't cost money. Some examples:
+Publicly recognizing a team member for excellence.
+Writing thank you notes.
+Investing time in the personal development of people who you manage/lead.
+Creating an environment where employees are empowered to make decisions.
+Cultivating a culture that people will enjoy being immersed in for 40 hours a week.
You should strive to pay your employees well, but a paycheck is the most basic form of compensation. Business gets much easier when you master the many other ways of rewarding your employees.
Future job predictions by Grok:
1. AI dream editor
2. Digital afterlife estate planner
3. Robot empathy trainer
4. Asteroid claim adjuster
5. Neural privacy firewall installer
6. Synthetic organ matchmaker
7. Metaverse identity thief hunter
8. Gravity gym coach for Mars
9. Emotion-as-a-service broker
10. Exoplanet tourism concierge
Hey @grok, name 10 future jobs that could pay $200K+ a year by 2040 but sound completely absurd today.
Interesting strategy. My concern would be the new cohort having a much lower retention rate and LTV than the previous cohort which had a higher AOV.
.@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."
GrokBot is the best. Muse is the worst from all these, imo.
🚩 Important note for anyone seriously paying attention to posts like these: you need to build a memory system outside of the agent, regardless of which one you’re using.
📁A folder system of MD files to store all your notes, insights, data and project info you generate with your agent.
I use Obsidian, but you can use other tools.
🧠 The point is to build your own “AI brain” that is independent of any agent harness, so if you need to switch, you can easily port over and get up and running in a new agent system within hours.
Otherwise you risk a) losing information over time due to every agent’s memory limits, or b) being forced to stick with one agent since that’s all you’ve ever used, and paying more when they inevitably raise prices
I read Meta's Q3 earnings call so you don't have to, and made you an infographic because you're a visual learner.
Five things marketers need to know, one slide each.
4) Muse is the big swing.
Meta says 10M+ people in the US and Canada set it up in 40 days.
30% of people still use Muse after 7 days, compared to 19% for other AI apps. It will be interesting to see how Claude Duet compares since it just launched yesterday
Meta says Shopping is the top use for Muse, at $200+ per purchase (travel included).
Zuck also said Meta plans to take a fee on transactions it helps facilitate.
However….
