The Meta Playbook That Took True Sea Moss Beyond Nine Figures

Welcome to Episode 113 of the Marketing Operators Podcast. Today we have Luca on the show. He was the media buyer at Rai's Super Foods and now he leads marketing at True Seamoss. And he has helped them scale from 20 million to 140 million in just 12 months. Today we talk about how he did it. Plus we get into his story going from agency to in-house brand operator, why he joined True Seamoss in the first place, and how he structures a meta account for hyper growth. And most importantly, he's a big fan of the marketing operator show. Special thanks to our sponsors, Motion, House, Rich Panel, and After-Sell. Luca, I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last name. Can you say it for the listeners though? Yeah, absolutely. Quite generally, really. It's going to. So does AdLuca on LinkedIn spelled exactly like it's said? Yeah, that works. That works. You're Georgian, right? Correct. I'm from Country, Georgia, Eastern Europe. And where are you at right now? I'm calling from New York City. So the first time I met Luca was a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago, and one of our vendors was nice enough to get us tickets to F1. It was the second F1 in Vegas, and Luca's a huge F1 fan. And I'm like, I like it, but I'm, you know, Luca's like, "No, it's all the drivers. He's really into it." And we get. They got us really nice tickets. So we're like sitting in this in the paddock club in Vegas, and Luca every night had his backpack with him because he was doing some, like, some sort of, like, manual bid jockeying, I think, at the time. So Luca's just like. There's all these, like, people wearing crazy stuff, like, really fancy setup in the paddock club. And Luca's just, like, laptop out, like, optimizing his ad account in the middle of the paddock club. So that was my first impression of Luca. And it was probably the best first impression I could have ever had. It was some, like, that's how I know Luca's a real one. Well, Tim, there would be a lot of F1 references today. Prepare? Yeah. I'm trying to remember one that was, too, because I think it's, like, right around black. It's, like, yeah, so it's, like, mid-November, right? So it's, like, a few weeks leading into Black Friday. So it's a pretty busy time. Yeah. It was phenomenal time at the same time over there. But yeah, can't wait for this year. Honestly, there's not a lot of things better than your brand scaling while you're doing something else that's fun. I was at an Indian wedding a couple of weeks ago. We talked about it. But, like, one of the days we just hanged by the pool, and we were having a great day. We were up, like, 60% year over year. And I'm like, dude, this is it. This is what it's all about. So the F1, the F1 evening with the laptop, sounds ideal in many ways. Oh, yeah. It was, I think it was a week before Black Friday. And me and Connor were chatting that, you know, our sales went live. It was just, we're just ripping. And it was just total bliss. And you have F1 cars, literally, driving 200 miles in a corner. So it's quite a scene. Guys want only one thing, and it's disgusting. Surf scaling budgets while at F1 races. There's your mean, there's your mean error. And Mike, yeah, Luke is like out on the railing, watching these cars zoom by. He's like, hold on, I need five minutes. I'm gonna go right back to my computer real quick. It makes some adjustments. It was, it was amazing. But, you know, that is, that's the fun thing about E-Com, right? Like the work keeps working when you're not. And it's like, I think why, I also think it's why E-Com folks are, like, embracing AI so hard and like the agentic side of AI because we're already used to like, all the work you do. And then you're sitting out there by the pool on a Saturday. And like, it's, it's working. It's ripping. You can track along. So it's, yeah, I mean, that's, at least one of the reasons I got into it. But, all right, Luca, let's, I want to jump into it. Because you have a pretty insane grow story at true CMOS. I'm like, in not, not super in. But like, I like to, I like to keep, keep aware of all like the, the trending, you know, health and wellness and food products. And I have not tried the true CMOS yet. I've heard of it. But I didn't realize it was, it was growing as much as it is until I, I saw the show notes and in preparation for this. So I'm excited to get in there. But before we do that, like, what, like, who are you? What's your background? Like, what can you kind of give us the, you know, the couple minute story on who you are and kind of what led you to your current rollout true CMOS? Yeah, absolutely. So, almost eight years in the marketing space. And of course, started, I was actually the founder. That's kind of how, that was my entry to this world. And I can, after my third company brand that I started, it was kind of the drop shipping thing. Which successfully, I sold/got rid of to work with the bigger brands. And got very excited and see what was under the hood with those, you know, who were the founders, what was the team looking like, all of that. And of course, started freelancing, bunch of, a bunch of agencies. And my goal was to just like work with the bigger brands, to be close to that group and to understand how they think and all that. So got very, very lucky to work with Rise, of course, Rise superfoods and joined in 2022. And of course, seen a lot of growth. And it was a lot, it was just total bliss, of course, to see how the team was getting bigger and seeing all the growth. And after taking, you know, short pause, after Rise, I thought, okay, what's next? Then kind of weighing my options and kind of ended up at true CMOS with a bigger title. But at the same time was super stoked to kind of take over the huge team. It was, company was growing, it had that trajectory to surpass last year's growth. But of course, nothing that we ever imagined had happened. And now it's roughly 33, I think 33, 34 people team right now in a marketing team. Entire company is roughly 100 people. Of course, we sell CMOS products online and retail. D to C driven, of course, which is the part of this pod that we're going to dive into. And yeah, that's pretty much it. So what? So I have a note here that you were a lawyer before getting into Ecom. Is that true? Yes, that's very much true. I'm, again, I'm from Georgia, Eastern Europe. And I finished, I had my law degree and practice law for a couple of years. Definitely wasn't my thing, I quickly realized that and thought, okay, I really need to think other ways I can make sense of this thing called life and kind of dabbled into other things that kind of experimented. And luckily, I was living with the roommate back then who was an engineer. And then my, I guess like my IP address picked up and recommended me a lot of YouTube videos about, you know, what the Ecom world was all about. And in a couple of days, I'm asking him, like, what's this thing called Shopify? And that's literally was the question. And then he kind of told me, hey, here's the thing called SEO. I never opened an admin panel ever back then. So I was just like fascinated by the fact that you could do this. So I could already imagine that those companies were this. Like every, every online business was like this huge company. But actually now you can, you can, you can make something work. And I just saw an opportunity. And then of course, learned a ton. And of course, start listening to podcasts, all of that. And then kind of slowly but surely moved away from that world, which was very happy about what were your, what were your early resources for? I want to ask two questions. A, like what were some of the early resources? If you can remember that like presumably you were figuring out how to set up a Shopify store. Maybe how to run some Facebook ads. Like what were those early resources? And then what was your, what was your most successful drop-shipping company? What was the, what was the product and like how, how big did you get it? Yeah, so nothing is exciting. Nothing that will sound as exciting as Tracey Moss. But the early resources were, for the most part, it was just YouTube videos, just like hearing. But of course, it was very hard to understand kind of what was right, what was wrong. So I just had to buy some courses or pirate some courses. But of course, at the same time, there were a few podcasts. One of them I remember that I still occasionally plug in and listen to is perpetual traffic. I think Molly Pittman was over there as well. Who, yeah, still, I think she was an e-commerce roundtable recently, also presented there. So still very relevant. And then from there, like of course, Nick Shackleford and many others kind of, came to the surface and of course, there's, okay, there's Twitter over there and then, and then slowly but surely kind of, that was my, that was my world. In terms of business, so very first one was, you know, print on demand, of course, made just one sale. But the fact that it actually happened was a super stoked. Still remember that feeling, one of the best feelings ever. And after that, got into drop-shipping and a high-ticket drop-shipping, kind of selling foosball tables, near hockey tables and all of that stuff. So you kind of were, you were going to manufacture, kind of signing the deal and then kind of, you were sitting on a very tight margin, running some ads on Google or Meta. And it was mostly just search terms. And that helped to get an understanding how the business works. Because you're running the whole thing. And did you actually develop a brand for that? Like, no, so where were you? So no brand, but you're selling foosball tables. Like, what's the, trying to like picture the web experience or like the digital experience? if there's like, oh, I mean, this is probably what's 2020 or 20, this is the 20 teens, I imagine, right? This is like, this is 2015, what year is this? This is 2017, 2018, I think, yeah, I think it's about that time. It was, so essentially you have this online retail store that you sell a bunch of brands. I think like a electronic store, but like four game tables. And the brand was called GameDribble.com. It no longer exists. And you just had like a bunch of those brands over there. And yeah, you were kind of bidding on their not branded, but like their category keywords. And then maybe driving some traffic through meta. And from there, because I was introduced to some groups, some people would ask me, I would just be in a group chatting and then they would ask me, hey, can you do this for me? And then all of a sudden started freelancing for out of nowhere. Of course, I was doing it for free. But at the same time, they're like, hey, I can pay for this. It's like, you want to pay for this? Really? And I was like, yeah. And so like, okay. And then, and I was doing that on a side. So, um, but slowly but surely kind of when agencies got introduced, a whole world changed. Um, because the brands became bigger and I was more exciting. So I had to make, I had to make that decision to let that company go for a small amount. But nothing, nothing flashy, but the fact that I landed that claim is their rewarding feeling. Motion just dropped their 2026 creative benchmarks report and it's been getting shared everywhere. Slack channels, LinkedIn, Twitter, sharing it in our private group chats. And it's great because everybody's been asking the same four questions forever. What is normal? How many ads should we actually be shipping? What is a healthy hit rate and which formats really win? The report analyzes over 575,000 creatives from 6,000 advertisers and over a billion dollars in ad spend to answer these exact questions. And the report has some really interesting findings like the fact that only four to eight percent of ads actually become liners and over half of ads actually lose. And for motion customers, this report is especially helpful. You can upload it into your motion dashboard with a run of AI chat and compare it directly against your vertical benchmarks. Hit the link in the show notes. I promise you won't regret it. And as always, go to motionnap.com until the marketing operator sent you. I have a question about the move from rise to true moss now. Because I think it's like what we've got a lot of marketers who listen to the show. And I think a lot of people would be interested in the path that you went down. You're a paid media, manager, director at rise, extremely big, very successful brand. You go to a much smaller brand, take a much higher position, as you mentioned, and that brand scale 7x. So you guys are now doing my favorite. Now you're the CMO at a nine-figure brand. It's like, okay, perfect. And it only took like 18 months. That whole transition is like really impressive. So I'm curious when making the move out of rise, what were the attributes you were looking for in your next role? And like, what was it about true moss? How certain or like what was your thought process on? Hey, true moss has all the makings of a brand that I think I can help scale further. Yes, that's a very good one. Because I got to, I was away my options. And I was kind of trying to understand, okay, I have plethora of options. But then again, like I really want to work with a brand that has led a bit of, you know, future, but let's let's say next five to 10 years, right? And what I can, what my impact will be, what's my job there? And so what I was doing is like, I was requesting a lot of interviews from companies like, I wanted to audit like, what is your gross margin? What's the LTV looking like? Because I was, what I knew was like working with subscription brands. So like, okay, let's repeat that instead of going to the peril or anything like that where I have to relearn everything. Why don't you deploy what I know? All the mechanics and everything. So, so I was auditing a lot of the stuff. So true sea moss right away struck me as like, hey, if this brand is vertically integrated, big plus. Right? So great margins. It's made in U.S. Second, it's a brand that has a presence in retail. It's in sprouts, okay? And there's a lot, there's a lot more demand to get into other retail stores. Okay, great. And true sea moss was born Amazon. So Amazon team was already, you know, best seller badge for years. Okay, there's a lot of presence over there. And then the, the, the D2C side, the website side was, was good, but like, there was a lot of potential over there. So I thought, okay, this has a very good chance. I can't have a very good chance of like creating and generating a lot more demand. That will then trickle down to all other demand capture channels. Whether that can be other online sales channels or retail. And that's exactly what happened. And that's, and of course, the team and the founder, who is the founder, from agency days, what I've learned is the biggest constraint of company's growth, hands down as the founder. It's like their limitation of like, what can be done, the risk tolerance. And are they willing to take bets? Because this like, back then, the decision that we had to make was in a range of like, you know, 50 to $100,000. Now it's multiple millions of dollars. And then you kind of, you operate from a very different mental space when you do that. And you have to grow as a person. And then I saw the founders and saw the, the partners and there, there were that team that had no egos. There were very clear direction. It was very result driven and felt really, it felt absolutely the right choice to do that. That's fantastic. Okay, so, and I love that little list here. So founder one, unit economics, another, I think that's a good one, getting it on gross margin, things like that. I like the distribution point a lot. I don't think that's always a requirement of like, identifying a potential high growth brand. But I do think it's like surprisingly common. I just spoke with someone I met them at an event last week. They do $6 million a year in cookie sales. Oh, wholesale. They're in three thousand dollars. And they're like, I forget what it is. But they're expensive cookies. They do something that's cool and people are excited about, right? And he was like, yeah, we're thinking about like building out the marketing team. And I was like, I was like, dude, you have to build out the marketing team. I'm like, you have everything that you need. Not only do I think this could be a really strong D to C business, because I think you could drive $60, $70 order values on these really unique cookies. But I also think that once you're growing brand awareness, the three thousand doors are just all of a sudden, you're going to double sell through rate everywhere. And I just, yeah, I think that's a really interesting one. The hex cards a little bit like that. Like way back in the day, you had this big Costco business. Like you had this foundational sort of distribution. And then as soon as they got good performance direct response marketing, there was like, there was just more sort of kindling and wood for the fire to burn on. Totally. No, it was honestly like when you were saying that, Luca, you were like every single thing you hit on were things that I was considering at when I was deciding to join hex card. Like we had, because a lot of brands don't, a lot of brands are in the reverse, right? Or it's like, hey, we're going to prove this out with dot com. And then we're going to use that data point to go to sprouts and say, hey, sprouts look like we have something that people want. And like this customer is not in sprouts yet. Like we can bring that customer to sprouts, but which is not a bad approach, but your bucket is leakier when you're doing it that way. So I think I like that you guys had that like distribution. Like you had that that bucket was pretty tight. So then when you come in, it's like, all right, like this is all just going to halo really nicely and all these other distribution channels, which I think makes a ton of sense. And I'm curious, the I want to add, like let's get into the growth here. But before like right before then, like the founding story here, I want to like dig in here because like true CMOS is having a moment obviously where like how did the founder end up producing this product and like where do you guys stack rank in the market? Like were you guys first movers? Were you into the game a little bit later than some of the first movers? Like where does true CMOS fit into the into the market broadly? The story started in late 2019, so right before COVID. And the story goes like this. So essentially the founders wife is an nutritionist and would always look for new natural ways, natural superfoods. And so she flagged like, hey, this is something that I would like to buy by. It looks very difficult to get. And there's a lot of sugar and a lot of products. So what can we do? Can we buy some raw CMOS from somewhere? And it was for internally you suddenly they actually started taking it and they saw a lot of benefits from it. And of course, founders very entrepreneurial and kind of saw an opportunity on the market, saw that there was, you know, there was not a lot of competition on Amazon. And of course that, you know, it's shortly after it started its life. And yeah, the founder is a product guy at the same time. So I started with the raw CMOS and then of course there was a demand for CMOS gel. This product jar that you see in a very interesting format. We can talk about that as well. And it literally first, I think roughly around like a thousand gel jars. He was mixing himself in the kitchen. I have some pictures that I can send to you guys as well. We can show a flash on the screen as well. But it was truly inspiring how much passion there was to make this thing going. And when CMOS gel started, it got introduced to Amazon. It shortly after became, you know, best selling product because it was arguably just better tasting product. It was made more, much more naturally, no sugar, no bad additives. And after that, of course, he started in type production who took a lot of risk throughout the process. Everything is made in L.A., he is from L.A., and yeah, that was kind of the backstory of it all. In the box, I was like that Hexclad really checked when I was deciding to join. Like Danny has two decades in cookware. I'm like, this guy knows this market in and out. Like he's in a like produce really high quality products that I feel I can go and sell online. And it seems like the same thing here. Like founder's wife, nutritionist, like sounds like she was just making a product that she would want to take. And then her husband kind of turned it into more like a consumer facing product, right? And then there's also another big, big part of what I miss actually. The CMOS itself, you asked about this, we were not first, hands down, right? And from Rise Days, I've also learned you don't have to be first to be the best, right? So, and then he is a product guy at the same time. Of course, wearing a lot of hats, including marketing, but he's constantly perfecting the product. Customers don't necessarily see it, the constantly, you know, perfecting the flavor. And then we're of course, we're tracking retention because of that. But that was his world of like, how can I make the best product that is out there? Because as I was kind of auditing everything as I was moving in, okay, what is this thing, right? This CMOS. So is it like a new thing that kind of got introduced in the market for the past 10 years? But actually, no, CMOS itself has been around for many probably a century. Even more, I don't know, of course, how far it goes back. But in different cultures, in Asian culture or Europe or Africa, people are taking it. The Ross CMOS blending it and making a puree or making a smoothie or something like that for the benefits that it had. So there was already an audience for that product. And then the benefits of those products are not made up. They're already confirmed by the history. So how can I now take that and amplify that to wider market? All right. And that's what I want to get into. Like, I'm looking at Google search trends here. It looks like, it looks like 2020, it really started to pop off. Actually, it had its highest moment in April of 2020, which is interesting. So like, right as, right as COVID was hitting and it's really like, it was almost non-existent in Google search trends prior to 2020 and now it's really, you know, a lot of up and downs. But cool. Let's dig into the growth here because the growth, the growth story is pretty insane. You came on when the brand was low eight figures, scaled to a nice nine figure size now in about a year, which is pretty wild. So I want to dig into that growth story. Like, what, what has unlocked growth? Like, if you could hit on maybe like the two or three biggest levers that have really unlocked this exponential growth for your CMOS. Absolutely. Just to quickly address that 2020, there was a other company that went on Shark Tank and I just exploded everything. Yeah. So. So they rose the tide and, and okay, yeah, you could say, and then they were doing of course, demand generation a little bit, but I don't think that's that scale. But now for true CMOS, I wish I could tell you very comprehensive, hey, we did like this five six things, but what I realized walking in is that, hey, clearly we need a demand generation engine. And you don't need to look far to know what that thing is and that's meta. And it was already there. It was doing well. But okay, how can we amplify this by a, how can we increase the span and implement the measurement? So we hold team accountable for the numbers. And then how can we increase the creative input? Right. Just coming from experience that is, of course, one of the biggest levers. And but true CMOS was on a bunch of other sales channels. There was, and then there were like two big demand generation machines. Of course, TikTok shop and meta, but of course, meta was taking the lion share of that multiple 90% of that demand generation now. And so there was, of course, I very much like, hey, let's focus on this one thing and it's working. And then of course month over month, it was kind of starting to grow and grow. And so okay, then the question is like, how can we keep this ship going as much as we can? And then as we were in the different sales channels, now the measurement became a very big thing. Of course, understanding the data, having it more accurately, having an accurate data, and then measuring the impact of that dollar that you spend on demand generation to how it halos everywhere, at least get a directional. You will never get like accurate results over here, right? I think Connor, you mentioned that as long as you can have the direction on their standing, that's more than enough to you to drive meaningful assessment of that. So any of whether that placement is incremental or not. Can you just speak to that, like at true CMOS's level of growth from a low eight figure branch and now a nine figure brand, like how are you making sure the data you're relying on is accurate to make big decisions and not have any questions in the back of your head? Like, oh, is this data right? Or is it not? Oh yeah, I've been asking that question for first few months, like not getting anywhere. So which was a natural growth working with Sarah's. This is not my first time working with Sarah's at the same time. So it was super stoked to kind of join working with them. But yeah, walking in, like I was asking for some of the reports and I was trying to pull reports as well. It was just a mess. Like wherever I looked, like there was like hundreds of skews for a practically for like 10 products. And it was like, why do those exist? You look at the cohort because it's a subscription business. It's just complete mess, like somebody would read, somebody we would go and win back. They would not get assigned to that original order and it would start as news and new subscriptions. Like why is that happening? And then like just just the share of headache that we had to go through before we started looking for a partner was just, yeah, just I was imagining like just as to your corner just going in, okay, I'm just going to get super metrics and just like going to map it out. And then, okay, I'm going to pull this report. So maybe a sign someone was like, nope, that's not how it doesn't didn't work. So so first it was the accuracy problem, big problem to kind of deal with when you're growing really, really fast and need to make decisions like drastic decisions week over week. And the spend is high, and the second is of course, okay, how can we now deploy a wider measurement across this? So like, and then of course when the AI kind came to the conversation, Sarah's definitely took a lead of like, hey, now you can apply, like you can use so many prompts to actually pull that data a lot more easily. And it was like that just music to my ears because wow, now the game has changed for us from here on. And so when you are especially into multiple sales channels and we're not plugging in only just website data, right, just that's, yes, that's the very important, you're plugging in Amazon data, plugging the retail data. And then the big factor here is that how you can capture that demand is your pricing. For example, other than the at spend, so you change different pricing that your demand capture changes, how much you capture in one channel, second shows. So that you're working with them to hypothesize with, you know, all those scenarios. And it worked really, really well. Of course, we went through a little bit of crisis as well earlier this year with a recall, we can talk about that as well. But that was also a very interesting point where Sarah's came up from and say like, hey, let's let's imagine, let's hypothesize on scenarios that we can, what's the plan from here? Because it was just panical over the place throughout the team. And so what is the game plan from here? If scenario A happens, B happens, but also then we had 10 scenarios. And then having that just gave us so much peace. And only way we could achieve that is just to have data in order. So do you chat talks a lot about like gold standard for a subscription brand is 3X lifetime value to CAC ratio and they basically optimize their business off of that. And they have enough cohort data where they know like, all right, if CAC's here today, like this is going to back into this lifetime value, not revenue, but like actual, I think he looks at it as like a 3X, like actual lifetime contribution margin to CAC ratio. So not even not revenue even. So how are you thinking about your business, Luca, like, what's your, like if you had to choose two KPIs to make decisions off of for true CMOS, like what are those KPIs? It's chat, yes, I mean, there's the LTV to CAC is the holy grail for the most part. It can be deceiving certain cases, but like for the most part, like that's kind of the golden ratio is that. And also every, the most important chart other than just like daily growth spec sheet or, you know, Sarah's dashboard. is the LTV to cohort report. So the cohort report is say we have like 50,000 new customers this month from DTC, just DTC website. What are we doing with, how much we have spent, how much we had paid for the product fulfillment, what is our contribution number three, which is after product fulfillment, you strip out some of the charge bags, refunds, merchant fees, all the variable costs, and then the ad spent, of course, and that's your contribution. So you're negative for the most part, subsurgements, folks, businesses are negative. And then where do we break even? What is that point? And then after 12 months and after two years, where are we going to be either? What's the point? Is that a good scenario? It's a good, what's bad? And that's just DTC website. You overlay some Amazon on top of it into a different tab, you overlay some of the retail and all of a sudden, what you see is that your break even point through for the whole business for that acquisition is actually goes even lower, right? You gotta be careful there, of course, just to not get super excited because all of a sudden you just like went from four month break even to like a one month break even, but you want to hold the website accountable for its own metrics so that you can survive without those channels, although there's a leakage over there, right? We go to Costco, we go to Kroger, Walmart, that AMER will deteriorate, but now the conversation more leads into, okay, how can we assist the business here and better? But the cohort report is, of course, the Holy Grail, LTV2CAC, AMER, of course, business AMER, CAC, AOV, first returning, all of that good stuff. Of course, it's a tailor holiday school of hierarchy of metrics in the end of the day. So, and listening to the marketing ops. But of course, we had like very big to demand generation channels such as Amazon and retail, which was kind of fueling back the meta. And of course, we were holding our website to its very, like it has to survive on its own. If none of this existed, it has to survive. So like what is that break even point, where we can keep this ship going as much as we can and we can capture all of that contribution margin from other channels. And then we can readjust how we can move forward from here. So, I think that's kind of the, if I could point out one thing, that's the one. But of course, I walked into an already set up team. There was already, and we were hiring really, really fast because company was growing, hiring out of desperation because we needed to fill in a lot of roles. And I was very, very challenging and we made fair share of mistakes over there. But of course, learning, still learning. We talk about incrementality a lot. But how do you actually operationalize it to make your business better? That is one thing that I've been really leaning in with my team recently, and House has played a tremendous role. We use it for all of our experiments, all of our geo-lift testing, but we now use it for our MMM as well. I've been a design partner. I've been one of the early design partners on House's CMMM, C stands for causal. So it's one of the only MMM's. If not the only MMM that I've seen, that's actually using your causal experiments to build the model. And so that allows me to just trust the data so much more. So it's not a block box, but actually informs our roadmap. It has been so crucial for allowing us to operationalize around incrementality. The House team is world class. I can't speak highly enough about them. They've also built a really amazing community with some of the best D to C growth operators out there. If a few exciting events coming up soon that they call the House Growth Lab, one is an LA in May 19th, and the other is in New York on May 21st. I'll highly recommend checking it out if you're in the area. If you want to check it out, learn a little bit more about CMMM. Go to house.io/operators to start making better data-driven decisions today. - So on the scale test, just quickly, I'm curious what that looked like in practice. You come on board, you're like, hey, this is the big opportunity. We need to scale this. And a while we scale this, we need to understand what is the impact across other channels. Is that just an observation? Did you say, hey, I'm going to double budgets, and then we're going to look at cell through across Sprouts and on Amazon and on D to C and sort of triangulate the impact there? Was it more scientific than that? I'd love just a few more details on the House. - Someone listening might be able to action what you did. - Yeah, so the first thing, like A, we were seeing it already halo. So for AMP, just Camp Company Group seven times, right? They went from $20 million to $140 million. And then it's saying that Amazon in meantime, also group a lot, also five, six times. No category grows that fast in terms of search volume in the demand on that query. Whereas that fast, unless there's external traffic coming to that channel. So we were already seeing that halo effect. - So you're just mapping it out. You're saying, hey, we're spending up three X period over period in meta right now. And we're also seeing our Amazon sales in search queries and traffic grow three X. So you're kind of just setting up like a, all right, I'm going to pull this lever over here. And then I'm just, you knew which data points you were looking at, like you went into that saying, hey, I think this is going to halo in this way. And here are the data points indicative of that. You didn't need any, you won't give me a wrong. We love our measurement tools here, but I think this is like a great case in point. Like you don't need too much fancy measurement tools for all things. Is that correct how you were thinking about that? - Correct, there's, I did some back then, there was not that much, there was no cloud, I would say, to do the same type of regression analysis. But I was trying to basically map it out together. So I was taking several data points, of course, spend being the number one. But of course, as Cody mentioned, this number of times as well, like reaching new people is a very big challenge over time. So I was taking that new reach and rolling reach and applying that on top of it. So I can then guesstimate, okay, if I'm reaching X amount of people more and I'm spending this much more, how much I'm actually will be able to capture more on those channels. And that's just Amazon, right? We have retail, bigger, like there's 450 stores, we were adding few, now we're in Whole Foods as well, and then soon to be in many others. Now, that being said, okay, that channel's also generating a lot more demand over there. So, and then we have TikTok also doing its own thing in and of itself for a different type of audience. I think it's still a separate corner of the internet that is over there. But so then that's kind of what was like, basically trying to put that in a, back in the napkin, okay, 'cause we needed to move fast, but really fast. Like every week we had to have answers of like, what is our next target? What, if we move faster and lower our, increase our catch threshold, what will change? And let's look at, let's test those out, right? And what does account looks like from AEMER perspective, from AEMER perspective, total revenue to total ad spend and all of that? Because in certain cases, we were thinking like D2C was not necessarily doing good, but actually like business was doing good. So then the question is like, okay, why don't we hold it there? And then we'll see the fruits of that labor and other sales channels. But then let's hold back and then what else we need to do to, in terms of like setting targets, to make this business grow faster. - So phase one here is just like, a new lens of analytical rigor. Like what does good look like? What are we making decisions off of? Which is amazing. Like you can't scale as aggressively and as fast as you have and as grooms have, unless you have a, like a well informed yet simple decision making framework. And like, it sounds like that was one of the first kind of like foundational things you lay down. But what about from a marketing perspective? Like you said, meta in TikTok, where existing demand generation engine that already existed within the business before you got there. But you also at the same time were thinking, hey, yes, these exist, but they can be better. They can generate more demand. We can put more fuel into these demand generation engines. So from a marketing standpoint, so step one, like dial in how you're measuring, then step two, you presumably really scaled meta. What did that look like? Like the actual tactical notes on how you scaled meta? - Yeah. So there was walking in, just looking at the account a like my, I'm a Facebook guy at heart. So I'm still meta at account is my number first, the first tab that is pinned on my Chrome, right? So looking at the account, of course, okay, what we can change here and what we can, how can we set it up the account so that it actually grows naturally? And then, because like, okay, let's not introduce any new channels, let's say YouTube, which came around a little bit later or any other channels for now, which is like focusing on meta, but then that's account, but then you need the fuel to that fire, right? So that's your creative. And walking in, what I had noticed is that, although account was growing, but it was growing on the back of the strategy that was not necessarily dialed in towards a kind of, it was not as strategic to kind of create a UGC or static. It was there, but we got lucky a few times with few ads. I was like, okay, this is very, very risky. Right now, if we can only rely on those like 45 ads and hire 30 people because of this, no, no, don't, let's not do that, right? Let's have put a strategy behind it. So looking at the creative strategy piece, I looked at it, okay, volume is definitely low, right? Which aid was something that we need ASAP and diversity for sure, but like account was every new concept we were introducing to the market, it was net new to the account, so it was like rewarding us. It's like, okay, so how about we take SMS, as many shots on goal and see kind of what sticks essentially. So let's reduce our expectation in terms of quality, let's get lucky more times, let's increase the odds of this. So within a quarter, our creative input, I think like four or five X, and of course what we did is like A, I believe in an in-house, love agencies, I've worked with agencies a lot, but I definitely believe that people in-house do take a better care of the business. So what we did is that, okay, let's take, build our in-house team, but also continue working with agencies when it comes to creative, right? So that A, we create a little bit of competition, but also create that, take those some of the leading creative agencies and input those creative into our account as well. So all of that was working all together to create more winners for us, and that luckily kind of worked out. But at the same time, building internal team is a whole different beast after you surpass that, getting lucky face, all right? So once you kind of hit your number of winners by just pure random, that and messaging that or X messaging or Y messaging, now you kind of have to build a methodical system of like how we can create a more predictable measurement on like what we're doing, what variables we're testing, which we're re-ad right now, and now we're actually of dialing back on the volume and putting more pressure on like the pieces that we're testing and the kind of what exactly we're, what are the exact answer, questions that we're trying to answer here when we're talking about growth for the business. How many ads are you launching, like on a weekly or monthly basis? Every day, I think, I look at the daily basis every day, I think six ads go live at a minimum right now. Okay. Yeah. So that makes sense. Call it 30 ads a week, 40 ads a week. Yeah. Yeah. Have you guys seen this being discussed on Twitter? If you like, I feel like people are absolutely split. You've got these people. Alex Hermosi said this week in an interview, I think he's doing 15. He might have said 1500 a week. It was some obscene amount of ads, just extremely high volume. And then you've got this growing sort of faction on the other side whose like volume is a myth doesn't help what you need is like finally crafted ads and like it's actually the people not producing all that many that are winning. Yeah. It's just the phases thing. It just like depends on the phase of your business. It's kind of crazy Luca here and you talk about your first few levers you pulled because I like those that was actually like maybe the same exact playbook in my first year at Hexclad. Not like in 2022 is like step one, how what is good look like like why are we making any decisions we're making and like there is no framework for that. So it was like what are blended merge targets like how do we measure ad channels using like a multi touch attribution tool like that was phase one and then phase two was shots on that like cool. Well, this is a this is like a 20 like a 30 40 million dollar brand, but like and the ads are okay, but they're not launching that many. So like I think in 2023 when Hexclad or 2022 when Hexclad like became a nine figure brand, like it was the same playbook. It was like we need to be producing more ads like Connor talks about this a lot of like unlocking new like peaks that you can that you can kind of maximize and it was the same exact playbook. It was like we need to produce a lot of creative and get more ads in the ad account. Now over time we've realized that it's like no, now it's like the new unique stuff that really unlocks those new peaks like it's this new influencer ad that we spent a month scripting and another month producing and editing and then we finally launched it with like 10 versions and now we've spent a million and a half dollars on it and we paid this creator $200,000 or something like it's it's just transitioned over time, right? Like where it was analytical rigor volume and then creative intentionality and like not that in now it's a balance between volume and being intentional and taking big swings. I can I want to ask you about some of the specifics in your creative testing. So like you were throwing a ton of creative in the ad account. Do you remember like any of that really took off or like holy crap like like we just launched this new creator ad and we it just immediately overnight is getting like insane engagement insane CPAs you're like are we can we can triple spend I think we've all had that experience as ad buyers at least me at the agency and probably you at the agency where like you encounter I mean you have that agency background too where you like toss a new ad in the account and like you look at it in a few days and the CPA is half of what it is and you're like you kind of get that like those goosebumps like all right we're going to be able to like triple spend in this account in the next month or two like do you do you remember any of the ads that unlocked the account first true CMOS when you're playing this volume game? Yes and my appetite is very high when it comes to like coming from rise like there's I mean you can go to rises at library there's thousands of ads over there so I had that luxury of course seeing those come in often so when team would get excited like he getting those winners like once a month let's say I was like no I need like six of those I'm on that's kind of how it's how it needs to go but yes we just had the one for our CMOS electrolytes three days ago and I'm just buzzing how fast it is it's going a cat dropped AMER improved you know spend is up 25% last three days versus previous and week over week is like massive jump of course in month over month and that being said like okay yeah like how can we generate more of those and I do think that volume hands down if you playing the volume game is a great proposition right I don't think that is wrong but I don't agree with the fact that you just have to detach from the reality of like what meta wants right we have this huge update if it's going to think that 80% of your 1500 what Hermosi says meta meta thinks is the same ad guess what's going to happen it's not going to reach new people because it's going to think it's the same ad and it's going to start looping in your funnel but funnel not not talking about the funnel people of people who visit your website there's a whole nother funnel of people right we're talking about who are not have never even clicked on your ad right so so it's going to it's going to circle around there it's never going to reach new people so what you actually need to do is like be more strategic it's just a game has as always it has evolved again so now just focusing on a volume is just not good enough what I'm what I'm saying and I think you know quantum you mentioned something that you a lot of episodes back that how you guys change that strategy rich panel CEO just predicted his own SaaS products will lose 90% of its revenue and he's the one building what will kill it they are betting that AI agents will replace traditional support tools entirely no dashboards no seats no workflows so what did they ship an autonomous AI agent that handles customer support from end to end reading order data issuing refunds updating shipments without a human ever touching it it means you can run a faster leaner support team at a fraction of the cost while resolving tickets instantly 24/7 rich panel is cannibalizing their own business to build the future of cx and support for brands because if they don't someone else will go check out what they're building at richpanel.com and learn how you can automate your entire support operation today well one thing that I think is interesting right now is metrics and analytics of the creative supply chain and I was sent to deck a while back by another brand and one of the things that I loved that they did was they were mapping like amount of ads delivered versus ad spend and so we started doing that and what we found is that we can we can spend more on ads for the categories that we've been selling longer and that's because to to Connor Rowling's point we were like further down the maturation curve because we're able to say hey we kind of know what winners look like we can be more methodical in our approach here for some like a new category for something like travel when I was looking at this last year we've got to overproduce content to spend fewer ads because we're in a more exploratory phase and we need to identify what are the what are the value problems and what are the angles and what are the concepts that are going to be winning angles here so that we can move into a more methodical approach and ultimately get more ad spend per ad created so I think that's what we're hitting here but one question I have for you look at is Chad Janice was on my first million and Grooons has just done a fantastic job of building out these like independent funnels like in an insane way like just on Grooons.co they have all these clear funnels whether it's fiber or holistic health or you know people moms or whatever it is all these different funnels they've gone to the point where the new brands they've launched are their own websites right they're probably like the most segmented brand we've seen but I don't want to talk to segmentation of brands I know that that's not applicable to true CMOS I'm curious how your guys' approaches developed around building concepts for different value props and funnels I imagine people are buying CMOS for all sorts of different reasons how do you support that on a creative and and media buying end yes so the we talked about meta kind of what Drought like we're when we're talking about meta, it's like 80/20. We haven't even touched that, which is the way we're about to talk about, right? Like, landing page testing. C-I-R-O. That has been going on, which was never done before to an extent that we're doing right now. So building those landing pages that are specific to the audience, like whether that's gut or supporting your GOP1 journey or helping with your stress, whatever that is, supporting you in all sorts of ways. That is a whole different part of the business that marketing team is taking care of, right? So that is going on, for sure. But when we're talking about scaling the demand, yes, the meta is going to do the heavy lifting over there. But there's what we look at is, I'm going to quickly jump to the back to the meta conversation. What we look at is, in the account, let's say, for set product, right? What are the all the ads that we have? Then, of course, naming commissions is a very big deal, as always. So what are the messages? If we take like $100,000 yesterday, right? So how much percent we spent on this messaging, versus that messaging? What was the hook rate on that? What was the whole rate on that on a weekly basis so that we can then assess, okay, from that funnel that is going on right now, impressions that we're generating? Who's taking the lion's share of those impressions? And what are the messages that we're leading with? Who is getting us new people into our funnel? How are we supporting that with the landing pages, like educating them throughout the journey? Because what on earth is CMOS? Like, not a lot of people. Yes, it's great to reach people who've been taking CMOS a lot. When they're a kid, when their parents have been giving them a natural remedy or whatever. But at the same time, if I'm going to build this thing from $142,500,000 to $1 billion, for sure, I need to reach out to people and take some wallet share, share of wallet from other nutritional brands that they're spending their money on. But if you're taking your green powder, if you're taking your colostrums, like, well, I'm reaching for that dollar as well. So I need to do that education piece for sure. It's because it's going to be very polarizing to a lot of people because what is this thing? Imagine this. Right now, we're very native to what is a green powder? 15 years ago, what on earth is green powder? And then you look at AG1's first website, they had to go through a journey as well. But now, if you go to Whole Foods or any type of store, green powder has its own shelf. Right? So our goal right now is how can we make CMOS products, and especially through CMOS, and next mainstream health and wellness product? And what it would take us to do that? A lot of education, a lot of demand generation, and then reaching the right audience with that. So I love the approach to optimizing destinations, because basically what you're saying is you build your funnels and your ads really around outcome. Hey, I want to improve my gut health, hey, I'm on GLP ones, and I need nutritional support. So you're reaching different consumers by the outcome that your product can provide. I mean, like Zack Stock talks a lot about this with Hollow, right? He sells alpaca fiber socks, and there's like six or seven different kind of use cases that people would use that for, and like, that's how he scales those funnels. So you guys take the same approach, but you're saying, hey, we see that gut health took up 30% of our budget in the last, in the last 30 days, and like, that's the biggest percent of spend by outcome. Let's go start there, because if we can optimize that destination with like a lander and improve the conversion rate by 10, 15, 20% like that has the most upside compared to like GLP one that only had maybe 10% of total spend. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, and then there's also the other layer, you can layer in some incrementality testing behind it as well. And I would speak with Nick from house and think of like some of the successful tests that he has done. And I was like, okay, there's some very good case studies over here. And then so, okay, so if this angle messaging is taking 30, 40% and that's kind of our leading message. And we see the near visitor percentage also on that messaging is very high. Okay, I do think that the acquisition cost or the return that we're seeing inside our NTAs, uh, introduced tools. Um, it's giving us like ex output. But I do believe is whatever it's telling me over there is actually not that, not actually true. It's actually a far more incremental than what we think what it feeds to the account. So because like this winner that we're just seeing right now on with CMOS electrolytes, great, it's, it's, we're seeing great performance on it, right? But there are other ads are not as good in terms of numbers. But there, we much rather spend money on those, take a maybe 10% hit on their return inside NTA, what it's giving us. But it's going to bring a lot better people to an entire account and it will, uh, rise entire, uh, increase the account of velocity in the end. So then now we're layering in, of course, some incremental testing within, you know, inside meta so that we can under better understand what is the message that we should be leading with. So it's not only, so we come from like, you know, throwing a lot of creatives and then just like scaling whatever in whatever ways, now being very methodical of because now, of course, reaching new people is becoming more challenging and data and measurement, of course, which is hold another conversation, um, becomes more and more challenging as well. Okay, so that's, that's really interesting, like, very actionable, tactical, honestly, you said you didn't really have like a, I did this first, this second, this third, but when you are actually saying it, it kind of did come across that way. I think that actually some really good actionable stuff on how you like thought about improving the meta account from the ad level and then moving down funnel and saying, all right, great, we've got some, a bunch of winning ads now. How can we optimize the post click experience? Marketing operators, I want to challenge how you think about post purchase. If you zoom out, post purchase isn't a tactic, it's a system. It's your cart, your checkout logic, your one-click upsells, how you increase AOV, revenue procession, profit procession, it's your confirmation pages, all of that system together. The entire flow determines how much incremental revenue that you can make for order. That's why rocked aftersell isn't just an upsell tool. It's a design system for the full post purchase experience. Rocked aftersell gives you one unified system. A smart cart and checkout offers one-click post purchase upsells and thank you page monetization with rock banks. And here's where it becomes very strategic. Beyond the 30% revenue per visitor lift, rocked aftersell opens a monetization layer that most operators haven't fully priced into their unit economics with rock network products. Run the math on your own volume at 50k orders a month. That's 15 to 25k in pure profit with rock banks. At 100k, that's 30 to 50k. I'm not great at math, but I love those numbers. Straight to the bottom line as well. Every month, from a page, your customers already landing on won't affect conversion rate. It's just free money you can pocket at the end of the month. No inventory, no operational lift, no contracts to lock you in. And this is not just for Shopify native brands anymore. Whatever platform you're on, rocked aftersell supports it. Operators, listeners can activate rock banks and get the full aftersell suite for a year or grab an extended 60 day trial to test post purchase performance. Go to aftersell.com/operators, build the system once and let it compound. I think if I remember correctly, Chad, Chad's just saying is that that like 3x lifetime value to cack, like that's a lifetime, like a true lifetime, like that's not even 12 months. That's like average lifetime of every cohort is trying to hit that 3x. Do you have a good finance team at true CMOS that like is so that way you know like their contribution margins are super buttoned up. Like you're really able to dial in very specifically like true cost of goods, true cost of fulfillment. And then obviously you have cack dialed in so you feel really confident because I think that's at least in my experience sometimes where you you run into like figuring out where do the KPIs need? If you don't have that like finance function that like a solid finance function in house, it's like where does cack need to be? It's like well, we don't really know because our data is messy and like we don't really have our cost of goods and our cost of fulfillment buttoned up and like we don't have a like a per order calculator built out that allows us to see those things. So what does that function look like at true CMOS? Like have you spent a lot of time with that team? Oh yeah, I met with CFO every week and just so that we can ideate on the priorities. But yes, from the beginning, right, I just showcased like hey, this is the cohort chart. If I have those metrics, I can assign the success metrics. What's good? What's bad? And this is kind of the scenario number A. If I don't have those numbers, I cannot set my payback period target cannot set my cack targets all of that. So it's just explaining like, hey, why did matters? And the CFO didn't come from the DTC background. I was like, again, okay, this is kind of why it's important. And we quickly became a important point that we need to work really, really close together. And they're phenomenal just to give you guys a background a little bit more about true CMOS. It's a bootstrapped brand. And it's making its own product. And we were out of stock last year, two times, I think, for a couple days. Just the fact that that team has managed that somehow, of course, I'm not as much one in the weeds of what's happening in the production and procurement side, but NSCO only joined a phenomenal CEO, joined three months ago at this point. But that team pulled off just insane. amount of work just to keep the ship going, and then, of course, the CFO understanding kind of how things are, and what is the metrics that we need to look at, other than just like P&L statement and the cash flow statement, right, and looking through the marketing lens. So, I provided whatever is feasible, and then we then adjust like, okay, we can actually go harder, you can actually spend extra 100 grand on just experimenting with whatever you want. Okay, I can take that, experiment with YouTube, I can buy this software, and then that deal that I'm negotiating over there, I can do that with them. So, it becomes a very collaborative work with finance team. The three pillars of an e-commerce brand, finance product, and you are the third infinity stone with growth. Yeah. Yeah, the interesting thing is that True Seamoss was for the very long time like a product to let company, founder is a product guy, of course, wearing a lot of hats, but production was, our manufacturing was making all sorts of products, and it was kind of, in a way, it was kind of thrown at the marketing team, hey, just go figure out, right, so there was no go to market strategy, there was no marketing calendar and nothing, right, there was, nobody was using Slack, by the way, just at the scene, there was a Trello and Telegram groups, and that was it. And there was no notion, no click up, nothing, last year when I walked in, so company went through just throughout insane transformation throughout this journey, and super proud of the team, of course, but yeah, making, shifting from product led company to a little bit of marketing led company, it was a massive shift, of course, there was some, you know, conversation we had to had like what's realistic, what's not realistic, but we don't want to lose that leverage of making products on demand pretty much, because Seamoss electrolytes will launch it last four to July. Four months ago, it was just an idea over the kitchen counter. And then all of a sudden we have the product, and then now we can, it's a $50 to $20 million business all of a sudden, as of this point. So you want to keep that while overlaying some of the expectations and visibility, what you can do with the market and what's worth doing, what's not worth doing, and there's a product lunches. And like when you say the shift from product, like being a product led company to a, to a marketing led company, like, I think you already hit on this kind of throughout some of the other questions, right, it's like, hey, we have a product that has some demand, like let's just throw a few ads into meta and see what happens versus what's actually be intentional about the angles and the personas we're going at for, let's build a process around how we launch ads, how we measure ads, let's actually like have a flywheel for optimizing landing pages and like conversion rate, is that what you're referring to when you say the shift from product led in a marketing led or anything else you would add when you, when you're saying that? Yes, the, the bare bones we're talking about just a basic infrastructure, let's just align on like when we're doing sales, right, and then what we're doing, what are those gift with purchase, what are discounts, how we're structuring those, let's, let's not figure out what we're doing for 4th of July, on 3rd of July, right, basics. And after that, okay, let's align on not launching 12 different products because we had CMOS green powder, we had CMOS soaps, we had tons of CMOS tablets, drops, whatever, and it's okay, is the cannibalization a thing here, right, is it worth continuing doing and spreading ourselves way too thin or just let's focus on the one thing, right, because the, we were growing so fast that we got very, we got a shiny object syndrome of like doing everything because that we thought which is gods of like growth. And so going way too horizontal because the questions came right, okay, let's go to Germany, let's go to UK, let's do all of those things, but then, yeah, that's great. But then I'm the one who's like asking those, you could say those questions like, so we're going to UK, but why we're going to UK, what is this problem that we're solving, it's like, oh, we're going to miss some more product, but do we lack demand, is that the demand is the problem or is like why are we going there, right, so let's not this product, so like we're doing this product, but like what's the intent, what's the positioning, why, it is probably, unless it's like a $20 million opportunity, right, now we shouldn't get into it essentially, right, so we're getting distracted. And I was a big proponent of like eliminating noise, just like, let's zero in like, what's working and there's like, grow that, but doesn't mean that we should discount all the opportunities that come our way and using that leverage that we have with production, making products very fast, iterating on flavors, product, benefits and all of that stuff. I love the discipline, by the way, it's just so easy to like do too much at too too much too early and you came in and you're like, no, meta's gotten us here, but it's clearly unoptimized. Like, I'm going to like focus on maximizing meta and like pointing all of your guns at meta as opposed to having like, just your two spread thin and I just, I love the discipline, we talk a lot about like the one in the line behind expanding channels and I think this is like a great episode for folks to listen to because you were just like, so disciplined on like, no, I know we can get more out of meta and clearly you have, right? Like clearly it's taking you to from a, whatever, $20 million brand to a nine figure brand and beyond. And I know you've expanded channels now, but I would guess that your focus on optimizing meta has allowed you to, you know, now vertically scale it and get you to where you are. So I just love the discipline and I think it's like a really good point for listeners to take home is there's often more to get out of the channels that you found product market fit within the first place.