Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | CMO of JAQ Group

The rules of DTC growth changed in 2025. In 2026, they're set to change again.

The playbook that got you to £10-30M - broad Meta campaigns, a handful of hero SKUs, one creative style across every touchpoint, is now actively working against you. 

Algorithms reward creative diversity. Attention spans demand psychological precision. 
And TikTok Shop has emerged as a genuine high-volume demand creation channel, not just another place to run ads.

The brands winning today are producing high volumes of distinctly different assets across every awareness stage (problem, solution, product), each built on messaging frameworks that actually drive people to buy. 

Not more creative. Better creative, deployed smarter.

I've spent 7 years in this problem space. My agencies have generated £600M+ in revenue across 250+ DTC brands. 

More importantly, we've built systems that compound, so you're not starting from scratch every creative cycle. Data from 70+ brands and over 4,000+ ads per month. 

A few recent wins we've delivered for our clients:
→ Ekster: 40% increase in profit, 75% YoY growth
→ Spacegoods: New customer orders up 86%, NCPA down 33%
→ AKT London: Tripled new customers and cut CPA by 59% in 6 months
→ Nutrition Geeks: 2,200% growth in 12 months

What makes us different: we build context databases that capture your brand DNA, winning angles, and performance learnings across every campaign. 

When the algorithm shifts or a creative fatigues, we're already three steps ahead, not scrambling to figure out what worked.

If you're a CMO or founder at an 8-figure brand feeling the scaling friction, happy to talk through what's working right now. Connect here or email olly@soarwithus.co

Olly Hudson

I'm giving away our most in-demand strategic resource, the same frameworks behind £600m+ in revenue generated for the DTC brands we work with.

(This will be the last chance to download for free).

The year is 2026, and every consumer now lives inside a personal algorithmic bubble.

Every feed, every search result, every shopping journey is uniquely shaped by micro-behaviours, emotional signals, and past engagement.

Meta, Google and TikTok aren’t matching ads to audiences anymore. They’re orchestrating hyper-personalised experiences at the individual level.

At the same time, consumers are craving something algorithms can’t manufacture: real connection.

For brands, this changes everything. Winning in 2026 won’t come from targeting hacks.

It will come from:
– Creative built around individual triggers
 – AI-powered signal analysis and rapid iteration
 – Systems that compound incrementality
 – And content that still feels deeply human

This playbook breaks down the exact structures we use across Meta, TikTok, AI and Creative to drive compounding growth in this new era.

Like this post and comment "2026" and I'll send it over.

The Creative-Led Paid Acquisition Partner Behind £600M+ in DTC Revenue | Meta & TikTok for 8-9 Figure Brands.

We've broken down the funnel of a brand doing £20M a year in DTC revenue, and we're giving it away.

Ancient + Brave went from £1M annual revenue to £1M a month almost overnight in late 2022.

By 2023 they'd hit £10M. 2024 they doubled to £20M. They're forecasting £40M+ this year.

90% of that revenue comes from DTC. No aggressive VC pressure. Profitable throughout.

But the numbers aren't the interesting part.

Ancient + Brave built their growth on a framework most supplement brands can't replicate; transitioning health-conscious consumers from "supplements as pills" to a permanent lifestyle of Bio-Optimal Rituals.

That means their entire creative system, their media strategy, their retention model, all of it is built around identity shift, not product features.

They sell through authority, aesthetic ritual, and scientific credibility. B-Corp certified. Clinical trials in-feed. Persona-segmented Meta ads that speak to high-performance professionals and graceful agers in completely different languages.

And we've broken down the funnel to show what that actually looks like in practice when a premium D2C wellness brand commits fully to persona-led growth and creative scale.

Inside this breakdown, we unpack:

- How creative volume and diversity feed Meta's Andromeda system with high-density signals
- Why scaling a luxury wellness product requires a fundamentally different creative strategy than a commodity supplement
- How to maintain premium brand perception while producing the creative variation Meta's algorithm demands
- The role of UGC, high-production, and partnership ads in a sustained performance ecosystem that never compromises on quality
- Why persona-led creative is the only sustainable way to grow a high-ticket D2C product without racing to the bottom on price
- What this approach teaches us about scaling a luxury supplement brand in an increasingly saturated wellness market

If you're responsible for growth, creative, or paid media, this breakdown shows how the winning brands are already operating. 

Want it? 
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Comment “2026” and I’ll send it over

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BFCM Guide

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If you’d like 126 more pages of ecom gold, join 500+ brands and check this out: https://bit.ly/3RlTHZ4


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12/03

5 more critical errors to fix: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/olly-hudson_use-data-to-fix-your-brands-creatives-and-activity-7168154221719056384-Yn5A?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

13/03

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We mapped the full persona-led creative system we run for 8 and 9-figure DTC brands and it's yours.

Persona-led creative strategy has been the single biggest topic of conversation in our world over the last 6 months - across our client work, our podcast, our Meta partnership, and the broader DTC community we're part of.

The problem is that the conversation has been scattered.

So we built this.

Everything on this board reflects what we are actively doing right now for the 8 and 9-figure DTC brands we work with - from the AI research stack we use to build personas, to the brief structure, to the testing tiers and optimisation rules we run in accounts every day.

It's informed by our own data, our official Meta partnership research, and the conversations we've had with people like Maxime - Meta's Creative Strategist for Disruptor brands - who gave us a rare look at how Andromeda actually works from the inside.

A single, chronological walk-through of the full persona-led engine - so you can see not just what to do, but why each step feeds the next.

Want it? Like this post and comment "persona" and I'll send it over!

🚨 We're giving away our free UGC 2.0 playbook, built with Insense | TikTok & Meta Partner. Everything we know about scaling creative across Meta and TikTok in 2026, in one free resource.

Meta's Andromeda doesn't care about your targeting settings. It cares about creative signals. And if you're still producing 3-5 assets a month hoping one becomes a hero ad, you're not giving the algorithm enough to work with.

CPA doesn't spike randomly. It spikes because Meta has found everyone it can reach with the signals you've already given it, and your production system can't keep up.

The playbook covers:

- The reason the hero ad is dead and what the algorithm actually needs from you now
- How to mine your own funnel data to identify micro-personas before you brief a single creator
- Full-funnel architecture across UGC, high-production, static, and partnership ads
- Hook, body, and CTA structures working right now
- The feedback loop habits that separate brands compounding at 8-figures from everyone else

You can download our free playbook here: https://lnkd.in/esPS2rns

We've pulled everything we know about incremental reach into one guide. Here's how to diagnose it, measure it, and fix it.

Your CPA doesn't spike randomly. It spikes because your account ran out of new people to show ads to. 

Incremental reach is the one Meta metric that predicts problems before they show up in your CPA. Most brands aren't tracking it. They find out they have a saturation problem when costs have already risen and scaling has already stalled.

It covers how Meta's AI (Andromeda, GEM, and Lattice) creates saturation at scale without you realising, the three ways to actually measure your incremental reach today, and the six levers we use with 8 and 9-figure brands to grow it - in the right order.

If your CPAs are creeping up, your new creative is fatiguing faster than it used to, or scaling spend just isn't moving the needle - this is where to start.

Want it? 
Like this post
Comment “incremental reach” and I’ll send it over

Seven years ago, we walked out of a meeting with our first real e-comm client.

Ten minutes later, sat in the car, reality hit: we'd just agreed to do three months for free.

That drive back to Tadcaster was chaos in my head.

Half of me was buzzing. We'd actually done it. Walked into a room, pitched our vision for how we could scale their football shirt brand on Meta, and they'd said yes.

The other half was terrified.

Because talking about what you can do and actually having to deliver it are two completely different things.

No safety net. No second chances. Just me and Joe and a brand that had zero reason to trust two lads in their early twenties with no track record.

That night, I called my family.
"We got our first proper client today."
"That's brilliant! What are they paying?"
"...Well, nothing. Yet. But if we hit their numbers, they'll introduce us to other brands."

Silence.

Then: "Right. So... when does the money start coming in?"

I could hear it in their voice. The same concern I'd been hearing from them for months. This agency thing... is it actually going to work?

And honestly? I didn't know.

But I knew this was the moment. Either we'd become another "I told you so" story, or we'd prove we could actually do this.

Week one was brutal. Just manual bidding, a Google Sheet where we'd split out every single audience by hand, and me refreshing the ads manager every hour like my life depended on it.

Week two: 2.9x ROAS on cold traffic.

I remember seeing those numbers and thinking: Holy shit. This might actually work.

By week three, I'd stopped checking the dashboard compulsively. Not because I was relaxed, I was still bricking it, but because something had shifted.

The doubt was still there. But underneath it, there was something new.

Belief.

Not the “fake it till you make it kind”. The real kind. The kind you can only get by actually doing the thing you said you'd do.

That football shirt brand never became our biggest client. The case study didn't change our business overnight. And looking back, the ROAS wasn't even that impressive.

But none of that mattered. Because proving it once, to yourself, to the people who love you but quietly wonder if you've lost the plot, that's the moment everything changes.

The next pitch we took, I wasn't trying to convince myself anymore. I just knew. That free trial gave us something more valuable than revenue. It gave us conviction.

And seven years later, that conviction is what's carried us through every campaign, every scale, every moment of doubt since.

You can't fake that. You have to earn it.

P.S. For the founders reading this, what was your moment? The one where doubt started turning into belief?

Meta just changed how click attribution works. Here's what it actually means for your campaigns.

Click-through attribution will now only count link clicks, not likes, shares, comments, or saves.

Those non-link interactions are moving into a renamed bucket: "engage-through attribution" (formerly engaged-view). Worth noting, unlike engaged-view which only applied to video, engage-through now applies to all ad formats.

Two other changes:
The engaged-view threshold for video drops from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Meta's own data shows 46% of Reels purchase conversions happen within the first 2 seconds, that window was already overdue.

Northbeam and Triple Whale are being brought into the fold to incorporate both clicks and views into their attribution models.

For most accounts, the practical impact is minimal short-term. Your click-through numbers will drop slightly and engage-through will absorb the difference. If you want to see exactly where conversions are moving, you can break it out using the Compare Attribution Settings feature or the Breakdown by Attribution Setting in Ads Manager.

This closes the gap between Ads Manager and third-party tools like GA4. That discrepancy has been used to dismiss Meta's numbers for years. Less ammunition for sceptics, more confidence in the data.

The accounts that should pay attention are those who manually switched off engaged-view attribution. You may see a drop in reported totals. Worth reviewing your settings before this rolls out fully.

Attribution is still imperfect. But this is a cleaner signal than we had yesterday.

Meta invited me to tell their product and marketing team how we approach Facebook differently.

The answer surprised even the agencies 10x our size.

Agencies running massive brand budgets. And there we were, a bootstrapped DTC agency from Yorkshire, obsessed with conversion, testing 100+ creatives a month, and ignoring most of the conventional playbook.

That's exactly why they wanted us there.

The gap between how large brand advertisers think about Meta and how DTC operators use it is significant. Not better or worse, genuinely different orientations.

Most large advertisers still think in terms of:
→ Brand campaigns
→ Funnel splits
→ Top-of-funnel reach
→ Media planning cycles

The 250+ DTC brands we work with think like this:
→ Creative as infrastructure
→ Conversion as the north star
→ Testing velocity as competitive advantage
→ Profitability over vanity ROAS

A few things came out of the discussion that stuck with me:

Creative is the new targeting. As Broad and ASC become the default, the question has shifted from "what audience do we buy?" to "what creative system do we build?" Testing 50 to 100+ assets a month isn't excessive at our scale, it's the mechanism.

Profitability is replacing vanity ROAS. The founders we work with are pushing back on surface metrics. The real conversations are about contribution margin, blended CAC, and whether growth is actually incremental.

Meta has earned its way up the funnel. Reels, broad delivery, and AI-driven placement are doing legitimate brand-building work now, whether brands planned for it or not.

Meta creates demand. Google captures it. They're complementary, not competing.

AI-enabled creative infrastructure is becoming the moat. Agencies and brands building proprietary systems for creative intelligence will compound an advantage that spend alone can't close.

Grateful to be part of the discussion and to see how seriously Meta is thinking about creative, measurement and signal quality. Thanks to the panel Amelia Ensell, Lucia Magadan, Caroline Reynolds

Partner, Digital at OMD UK | Media Week 30 Under 30 2022

Entertainment, Media and Tech Marketing - Strategy, Leadership, Execution, and Commercial

Partner | Global Chief Performance Officer

We’re moving into a persona-driven era of paid growth, and I don’t think enough teams have internalised what that actually means.

As Meta’s delivery has improved, the constraint inside ad accounts has shifted. The question is no longer, “How do we find the right audience?” but “How many distinct, meaningful personas can we give the algorithm to work with?”

We built a Creative OS around: persona → micro-persona 

At the time, it felt like a strong creative framework. Now it feels like the operating system for scale. As delivery has become more probabilistic and creative-led, we’ve been able to unlock more personas per brand, but only when the research and messaging are strong enough.

What started as macro personas (e.g. “menopause”) is fragmenting into increasingly nuanced segments, moving toward a “soulmate theory” end state where each user sees the version that feels built for them.

You can see this in the strongest accounts. The best brands are mapping the full chain:

Persona → Creative angle → Landing page → Offer framing

They’re not just launching ads. They’re asking, “are we systematically covering the opportunity landscape?”. Which raises a bigger question. Should we start reporting by persona? Spend per persona. CAC per persona. New customer volume per persona. Contribution margin per persona.

If persona is the real growth lever, it arguably needs to become a reporting dimension, not just a creative one.

Most accounts still report by campaign type or funnel stage. But if creative is the new targeting mechanism and persona is the core creative variable, then persona becomes a performance variable. And that changes prioritisation.

Not every persona is equal. They differ in TAM, competitive density, ease of conviction, LTV potential and creative scalability. Some are “easy money.” Others are strategically important but structurally harder.

The real skill becomes answering,“which personas deserve scale capital?”

There’s also an account structure implication. We’ve seen persona-mapped campaign structures work at scale. The question is whether fragmentation intensifies as budgets increase.

Does one macro persona split into three, then seven, then fifteen micro-cohorts? If so, creative strategy, campaign structure, reporting and landing page architecture all need to reflect that.

The upside is that this makes scaling more deliberate. Instead of random angle testing, you’re building structured coverage across defined intent clusters.

But it requires growth teams to move beyond concept testing and think in terms of:
- Persona coverage audits
- Persona saturation
- Persona-level incrementality
- Persona lifecycle value

Which likely means persona should show up in reporting, not just in the brief.

If you're spending serious money on Meta and want to pressure-test how your persona coverage maps to your account structure, that's exactly the kind of work we do at Soar With Us https://lnkd.in/e8Tkwe4q

We built an AI UGC ad and we're giving away the prompt that made it possible.

Most people waste time trying to engineer the perfect video generation prompt from scratch. Getting the cinematography right, the character description, the dialogue format, the camera motion. Sora 2 is incredibly specific about what it needs to produce consistent, hyper-realistic output. Get the prompt wrong and the footage looks off.

This template removes that entirely.

The Claude prompt takes that basic information and structures it into the exact format Sora 2 needs: character description, cinematography, camera motion, lighting, dialogue, audio, authenticity keywords. Everything.

It sits at step one of our AI UGC workflow. And it matters because everything downstream depends on it.

Get this right and your Sora 2 output is hyper-realistic UGC style footage with good camera shake and audio that sounds like it was actually shot on an iPhone. From there you take that output into ElevenLabs to clone the voice. Then into ChatGPT to create a JSON prompt for subject consistency. Then Nano Banana to place your subject into new scenes. Then Kling to bring those scenes to life as B-roll.

The whole workflow starts here.

We gave this away on this week's D2C Diaries episode. Dropping it here too.

Like this post and comment PROMPT below and we'll send it across.

Excited to share that on March 9th I’ll be speaking at The eCommerce Acquiror Conference 2026. 

📍1 Liberty Street, NYC.

The event is the leading global event for investors and acquirors focused on eCommerce-led consumer brands.

It’s a unique opportunity to gain insights from top dealmakers, founders, and strategics driving M&A in the lower middle market.

The event is completely free to join for acquirors in the space. Don’t miss out on connecting with industry peers and uncovering new opportunities.

Reserve your spot today: https://lnkd.in/eqUzy_VH

Looking forward to an incredible lineup of sessions and discussions. See you there!

We’ve put together a playbook of proven Meta strategies that are working right now for 8 and 9 figure DTC brands.

Meta advertising has changed more in the last two years than in the five before it. The algorithm is smarter, the competition is heavier, and the old playbook (stack your targeting, run your best creative, scale what works) doesn’t cut it anymore.

The brands pulling away from the pack aren't spending more. They're thinking differently.

They've shifted from audience-first to persona-first, from volume to variety, from optimising individual ads to building creative systems. They're feeding the algorithm better signals and getting better results in return.

This is a comprehensive guide of what those brands are actually doing right now - the strategies, structures, and thinking that are moving the needle on Meta right now. 

Here’s what you can expect:
1️⃣ Understand how Meta actually works in 2026 - learn how Andromeda's individual-level ad matching has changed the rules of creative strategy, and what it means for how you build, structure, and scale your account.
2️⃣ Build a persona framework that drives real incremental reach - go beyond demographics into the psychological fears, desires, and cognitive biases that tell Meta exactly who to find, and stop wasting spend reaching the same people repeatedly.
3️⃣ Create ads that stop the scroll - discover the creative principles, narrative structures, and emotional frameworks behind the highest-performing Meta ads right now, with real case studies and measurable results.
4️⃣ Scale without starting from scratch - learn the systems, hierarchies, and portfolio thinking that the fastest-growing DTC brands use to keep creative output fresh, efficient, and compounding over time.

Get a full-funnel playbook you can apply immediately - from account structure and partnership ads to AI tools, organic strategy, and multi-channel thinking, every chapter is built around what's working right now.

Want it? 
Like this post
Comment "meta guide" and I'll send it over

Loukas just dropped one of our most requested masterminds.

A full mastermind on micro personas, a live demo of a persona build, how it maps into scripting, and why most brands are leaving incremental reach on the table without even knowing it.

This is the internal Hambi Media framework. What we use across our 7 and 8 figure brands. Awareness levels, cognitive biases, valence zones, soulmate theory in practice, all of it. With a live walkthrough of how it feeds directly into creative concepts and scripts.

If you're spending seriously on Meta and your reach has plateaued, this is the session to watch https://lnkd.in/epyhGaXA

Inside every macro persona are 3 completely different buyers. Most creative speaks to all of them at once. Here's how to map them.

(Busy Dad is not a persona. It's three completely different buyers wearing the same label).

Macro personas tell you who to reach. Micro personas tell you why they actually buy. Most brands never make it to the second step.

Allocating spend at the persona level is powerful, but the real advantage comes from signal precision within each persona. If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the efficiency lever.

Most teams are allocating spend by WHO. Modern delivery systems optimise around WHY. That gap is where performance gets diluted.

Macro personas are still necessary, they're how you structure spend buckets and organise coverage. But inside every macro persona are multiple psychological tensions, and those tensions behave very differently in-feed. 

That's where the real leverage sits.

Take "The Busy Dad." Time-poor. Career driven. Wants energy. Wants to be present with his kids.

But inside that single persona are very different psychological tensions:
- The Control Seeker: wants predictability and measurable safety 
- The Skeptical Analyst: wants proof and transparency 
- The Quiet Normaliser: wants dignity and normalcy

Same life-stage, same product, but completely different emotional drivers. And those drivers behave differently in-feed.

When you speak to "Busy Dads," you blend those signals. When you isolate the dominant tension, you create clarity.

Cleaner tension → clearer engagement pattern → stronger delivery → more stable scale.

If persona is the growth lever, micro persona is the precision instrument and that's where the real optimisation happens.

Most brands stop at WHO. But modern delivery systems respond to WHY.

We do this for DTC brands every day. Get in touch and we'll show you how we'd map your brand https://lnkd.in/eqqDp-xu

Meta just said it publicly. Insight diversification over creative diversification.

We've been running this exact framework for the past year, and now we have the data to prove it works.

Working directly with Meta, we tested what actually happens when you build creative around persona-driven insights rather than production volume, 
25 variants vs 5 variants, same spend: 
171 more purchases 
59,000 fewer people reached 
15% lower cost per conversion

Partnership Ads vs BAU only: 
800 incremental conversions vs 520 
Cost per incremental conversion: $25.63 vs $39.34

The mechanism isn't surprising once you understand Andromeda. The algorithm isn't rewarding volume. It's rewarding signal diversity. Different insights unlock different audience clusters. Different motivators reach people BAU creative never touches.

What most brands are doing wrong: producing more ads anchored to the same insight. Louder, not different.

What the top 1% are doing: building a systematic process to surface new insights first, then activating creative from those.

We wrote up the full methodology and results with Campaign UK   https://lnkd.in/gyFcQ-Fs

Forget creative diversification. Think insight diversification.

The industry has been obsessed with volume.
More ads. More variants. More creative.
The logic: more creative = more chances to win.

But if 1,000 ads are built on the same insight, you're not diversifying.
You're just saying the same thing a thousand times.

Here's the shift that actually matters:
Creative diversification asks: how many ads can we make?
Insight diversification asks: how many insights can we test?

One is a production problem. The other is a strategy problem.

The best operators are flipping the ratio. 
80% finding the right insight. 20% activating it. 
Insight is becoming the job.

The algorithm handles volume now.
Dynamic creative. AI. Automated variants.
Execution is becoming automated.

The insight isn't.
The pain points. The motivators. The barriers.
The exact words people use to describe their wants, needs, problems.

The brands winning aren't the ones with the most ads.
They're the ones with the most angles.

The gap between what people post about Meta and what actually works inside the accounts is massive. D2C Diaries exists to close it.

When Loukas and I started the podcast, the pitch was simple: two agency founders talking about what's actually working in accounts.

4,000 subs and 18 months later, we're sitting across from Maxime. A creative strategist at Meta whose job is to work with the most disruptive brands on the platform. The top 1%.

That conversation wouldn't have happened without the platform D2C Diaries has become.

Here are the four biggest lessons from that episode:

1️⃣ Meta is no longer about interrupting attention. It's about earning it.
Maxime's framing: Meta has moved from disturbing attention to curating a feed people actually want to be in.
His analogy for Andromeda: "Think of it as a super intelligent librarian. The old system judged ads by the cover. Andromeda goes inside the book."
The algorithm isn't reacting to formats or surface-level edits. It's interpreting sentiment, narrative, context. That's why small iterative tweaks stop working. If the story hasn't changed, the system hasn't learned anything new.

2️⃣ Creative diversity is how the system learns.
If all your ads tell the same story, from the same perspective, in the same structure, you're starving the algorithm of information.
Diversity isn't volume. It's giving the system new meaning to work with. Different angles, different voices, different framings all expand Meta's ability to match creative to individuals.
One winning ad no longer scales the way it used to.

3️⃣ Partnership ads work because they change how the algorithm understands the creative. Not because the creator has a big audience or because it feels more native. Because identity and perspective shift the meaning of the creative.
Where brands go wrong: same script, same message, different face. To Andromeda, that's not new information. It's the same book, reprinted.

4️⃣ AI isn't the advantage, creative judgment still is.
Maxime's warning: AI becomes a problem when brands use it as a replacement for thinking. If everyone uses the same tools in the same way, everything starts to look the same. And when everything looks the same, the algorithm has nothing new to learn from.
The brands winning with AI aren't asking "how do we automate creative?" They're asking "how do we use AI to amplify strong creative judgment?"
That distinction matters more than most brands realise.

Everything Maxime described requires a strategy layer most brands don't have.

We built the Creative Intelligence Report to build it for you.

A full audit of your creative performance, persona and messaging frameworks built from research, and a ROI-ranked roadmap of exactly what to fix and in what order. 

4 weeks.  One-time fee. No retainer commitment.

Get in touch to find out more: https://lnkd.in/eHGwf6e8

CEO of Hambi Media | Co-Founder of For You Advertising | CCO of Soar Hold Co | your DTC brand’s one stop destination for Performance Creative

Creative Strategist @ Meta | Ex-TikTok | Brand & Creative Strategy Director

We're going through a full brand and positioning project at Soar Group and looking for the right agency or freelancer to bring it to life.

We've put together an RFP so if you're a branding agency or freelancer who fancies taking a look, drop me a message with your portfolio and I'll send it over.

Or if you know someone who'd be perfect for this, give them a tag below - would really appreciate it.

Rory Sutherland said something at MAD//FEST that most D2C founders in the room probably glossed over.

Guinness, he argued, has crossed a threshold almost no brand ever reaches.

It no longer needs to explain itself. The herd has decided. The social norm is set. And once you're there, individual persuasion becomes largely irrelevant. The culture does the selling for you.

That should reframe how you think about growth.

We spend our time obsessing over ROAS, conversion rates, perfect targeting. Those things matter. But they're not what separates the brands that break through from the ones that plateau.

The brands that genuinely win aren't just outperforming on performance metrics. They've made buying them feel socially normal. Safe. Obvious.

Because people don't buy on logic. They buy on social reinforcement. We aren't loyal to products, we're loyal to our networks. And underneath almost every purchase decision, however rational it feels, is one quiet question: how does this make me look?

That's why community isn't a nice-to-have for D2C brands. It's structural.

UGC isn't just content. It's proof that the herd has already decided. Influencer and partnership ads don't work because of reach. They work because of perceived similarity and trust.

The brands that win the next five years won't just have the best product. They'll be the ones that engineer the conditions for collective momentum, and make choosing them feel like the most obvious thing in the world.

Cheers, Rory. 🍺

Vice Chairman at Ogilvy UK | TED Global speaker | Author of Alchemy: The Surprising Power Of Ideas That Don't Make Sense

MAD//FEST

Here’s how we helped Nuovva scale from zero to five figures in monthly spend within a few months.

We onboarded Nuovva in August 2025. Zero paid advertising history. No pixel data, no audience insights, no creative learnings. They had a strong Amazon presence, but their DTC arm was starting from scratch.

Here's what we did.

Foundations
- Before a single ad went live, we built the data infrastructure: conversion tracking configured between Shopify and Google Ads, Triple Whale onboarded for clean cross-channel attribution, and Meta Pixel, CAPI, and catalogues all set up and verified to ensure reliable data flow from day one.

Meta
- Launched a structured Creative Testing campaign that isolated individual creative variants and copy combinations simultaneously, generating signal fast rather than testing sequentially and wasting early spend.
- Top performers were identified within weeks and pushed into a dedicated scaling campaign, giving us proven assets to put budget behind rather than running broad from the start.
- Remarketing opened two weeks later, targeting mid and bottom-funnel audiences with messaging tailored to where they sat in the consideration journey.

Google
- We began with an optimised product feed to maximise match rates and search visibility before layering in campaign types.
- Launched Brand Search to capture the awareness being generated by paid social activity, alongside a Performance Max campaign structured around Nuovva's core product collections.
- Dedicated Standard Shopping campaigns for Knives, Utensils, and Storage pushed into additional revenue streams, with a DSA campaign running in parallel to mine keyword data and inform longer-term search strategy.

Creative
- Starting from zero meant assumptions weren't an option. Our AI-assisted research process guided the first round of creatives, building personas and identifying pain points and purchase motivations before briefing a single asset.
- Early output leaned towards upper-funnel content to build a strong signal base, before scaling into high-production, UGC, and static formats.
- Three angles proved consistent performance drivers across the funnel: savings and value framing, aspirational aesthetic messaging, and the versatility proposition of replacing your entire kitchen setup with one pan.

Results
- DTC revenue 10x in 180 days, growing from almost nothing to consistent 6-figure months.
- On Google, purchases grew by 111%, revenue by 171.5%, and profit by 666% comparing the first two months to the following two, with ROAS improving 32.6% as the account matured and spend scaled.
- On Meta, ROAS improved every single month from launch, growing over 100% from September to January, with remarketing delivering a 2.5x ROAS uplift over top-of-funnel activity alone.

Nuovva is now targeting a further doubling of monthly revenue. If you want us to do the same for your brand, get in touch here: https://lnkd.in/eRcbUZ8q

We tripled new customer orders for AKT London in under 6 months. CPA dropped 59%.

Not through bid optimisation. Not through budget reallocation. Through creative volume and signal diversity.

The full breakdown is inside the new "How to Move the Needle in 2026" playbook, put together by Customers Who Click alongside some of the best operators in ecommerce right now.

Our contribution walks through the exact creative-first growth architecture we built for AKT: AI-driven customer research, high-velocity testing across UGC, high-production and graphic-led formats, geo-split account structures, and full-funnel diversification onto Google Demand Gen.

The result was a 74% increase in Meta spend with a 3.5% CTR and 40% overall ROAS uplift.

If you want to see how creative diversity actually moves the numbers at scale, this is worth reading. Great insights from some brilliant partners including:

OctaneAI, PostPilot, Littledata, Rebuy Engine, Flare - Scheduled Delivery, Videowise, Growthub, Zigpoll, Intelligems, KnoCommerce, Soar With Us, Sweet Analytics, Leaf Signal, Nosto, Order Editing

🚨 Copy of the playbook here: https://lnkd.in/eDYPXzEp

Joe Marston 🚀

Co-Founder

Building DTC brands to 8 and 9 figures | Founder of Soar With Us & For You Advertising | Triple Whale's "Agency of The Year" Winner

3x Agency Founder.

We scale brands to 7 and 8 figures with creative, paid traffic, retention and funnel optimisation.

In 2024, having a great product is one thing…

But scaling a brand to £10M is a another.

You need a simple roadmap for profitably attracting and converting customers, at scale.

Because when you get that right…

- You stand out from competitors in the market
- You build a community around your brand
- You acquire customers at will (profitably)
- You turn customers into raving fans 

Giving you complete control over your growth.

We help our clients do exactly that with our proven system that guarantees growth.

1. Initial diagnostic to identify bottlenecks in your business
2. Developing a bespoke growth strategy for your brand
3. Creative ideation and production 
4. Unique UGC collaborations
5. Targeted advertising (Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat)
6. Email marketing 

And having generated over £100M+ in sales across 200+ brands, we’ve know the ecommerce game inside out.

🚀 Mystery Shirt In A Box grew from £5K to £2.6M in just one year with our help
🚀 The Essence Vault is hitting 7 figure months in its second year since launch
🚀 Vintage Threads tripled their revenue working with us with a 6x ROAS
🚀 AIRfreshh went from 0% to 52% of revenue from email in 2 months!
🚀 Bene Culture saw their revenue grow 6x in 6 months with our help
🚀 The Oodie generated £2M on TikTok alone in their first year
🚀 UN:IK’s first quarter of 2023 was up 88% on 2022
🚀Grew Liam and Co. 500% year on year

Don’t put up with unpredictable, unsustainable or underwhelming growth any more.

If you want to see how we could help scale your brand, send me a DM saying ‘SOAR’

If you're not ready yet, I post daily educational content to give you all the secrets.

Founder

E-commerce growth agency offering bespoke services to online businesses looking to increase their sales and scale their brand.

The 2026 D2C Playbook has been the most requested resource in my DMs. This is the last chance to grab it.

Here's the reality: every consumer now lives in their own algorithmic bubble.

Meta, Google, TikTok → all delivering hyper-personalised experiences based on micro-behaviours, emotional signals, and past engagement.

AI enables individual targeting at scale. But people are craving connection more than ever.

2026 belongs to brands that blend machine precision with human emotion.

That's what this playbook is built around. Specifically for 8 & 9-figure e-commerce brands looking to break through growth ceilings.

Inside:

→ Meta: Andromeda, GEM, account structures that actually work now

→ TikTok: Shop strategies, affiliate frameworks, what's driving 8-12% conversion rates

→ AI: Workflows we use internally to move faster without losing quality

→ Creative: Formats driving incremental growth (not just ROAS)

Want it?

Like this post + comment "2026" and I'll send it over.

Thanks for the like! You can get the 4-step process for creating highly profitable UGC here:

https://www.notion.so/4-Step-Process-to-Create-High-Converting-UGC-87fc4bbb1ceb4802ae8da8efa3d24b87

Are you currently using UGC as part of your marketing strategy?



for-you-advertising

soar-with-us

launch-with-us

We've broken down the entire Meta funnel of a supplement brand that went from £1M/year to £1M/month. It's yours for free.

Ancient + Brave | B Corp hit £1M/month in late 2022. By 2023 they'd crossed £10M. 2024 they doubled to £20M. No VC. No Amazon dependency. 90% DTC. Profitable throughout.

But the numbers aren't the interesting part.

Most supplement brands compete on ingredients. Ancient + Brave compete on identity. Their entire creative system is built around one question: who is this person trying to become?

That means persona-segmented ads that speak to high-performance professionals and graceful agers in completely different languages. Clinical trials running in-feed. UGC, high-production, and partnership ads working together without ever compromising the premium aesthetic.

And it means feeding Meta's algorithm with the creative density and signal diversity it needs to scale, without racing to the bottom on price.

In the breakdown we cover:
How their persona-led creative system works at the ad level 
How they maintain brand premium while producing the volume Andromeda demands 
The role each creative format plays across the funnel 
Why this is the only sustainable way to scale a high-ticket wellness product on Meta

Like this post and comment "BRAVE" and I'll send it over.

Ancient + Brave | B Corp

JERMS is a gut health brand I've been watching closely. They're raising a £600k EIS round and the numbers are ridiculous:

→ 66% DTC repeat purchase rate
→ Average subscriber orders 7.7 times
→ 75% subscription revenue
→ 4.8/5 rating across thousands of customers

That's a product people genuinely love and keep buying.

They're already in Holland & Barrett, Selfridges, Wholefoods Wholesale, Planet Organic and Fenwick. National rollout across one of the UK's biggest retailers landing April 2026.

Plus partnerships with Soho House & Co, The Hoxton and Free People.

World's first probiotic+ energy blend you can add to hot drinks. Actually useful innovation.

JERMS is now opening a £600,000 EIS round, with £100,000 already closed.

With full national retail distribution, accelerating DTC and Amazon growth, and an upcoming SKU unlocking new distribution channels, 2026 is shaping up to be a breakout year.

If you’re an investor looking at high-growth, retail-ready wellness brands with exceptional retention and brand equity, this is one to watch.

Happy to connect interested investors directly with founder Louise Macnab and share the deck. DM me for more info.

We're giving away a free playbook we built with Insense on scaling creative in 2026. 🚨 Download here: https://lnkd.in/egHbttus

In the UGC 1.0 era, you were a content creator. In the UGC 2.0 era, you are a signal engineer.

To scale in 2026 across Meta and TikTok, you need a system that delivers three things:
- Strategic Volume: Enough creative to deliver to a range of micro-personas.
- Variation: A diverse range of researched personas to unlock new audience pockets.
- Velocity: The ability to turn funnel insights into fresh creative in days, not weeks.

Most brands have one of the three. Very few have all three running as a system.

We’re going to show you exactly how to move away from creator-led content and toward persona-led performance creative. We’ll break down the frameworks used to audit funnels, identify creative signals, and build a modular production engine that makes scaling inevitable.

Welcome to the era of UGC 2.0 - brought to you by Soar With Us and Insense | TikTok & Meta Partner.

Most brands think persona strategy means knowing their customer.

It doesn't. It means knowing which version of their customer they're speaking to, at which point in their journey, with which emotional driver.

We think about it in three layers.

Layer 1 is the macro persona. The broad type of person or state you're speaking to. The Stressed Mum, 30-45. This sits above everything and contains multiple distinct people beneath it.

Layer 2 is the micro persona. This is where creative strategy actually lives. Two people under the same macro can have completely different micro-drivers.

Under The Stressed Mum:

Persona 1.1 is Keeping Up Appearances. Trigger awareness. She doesn't know stress management is the solution yet. She thinks she just needs to try harder. Core fear: being seen as a bad mum who can't keep it together. The creative that converts her is peer-led social proof. A clinical ad does nothing.

Persona 1.2 is Irritable and Guilty. Exploration awareness. She knows she needs help but is overwhelmed by options. Core fear: her irritability is permanently damaging her relationship with her children. The creative that converts her is emotionally resonant and identity-led. Authority doesn't move her.

Persona 1.3 is Frazzled but Sceptical. Evaluation awareness. Actively researching, open only to evidence-based approaches. Core fear: complete burnout. The social proof ad that converts 1.1 makes her roll her eyes.

Same product. Same macro persona. Completely different brief.

Layer 3 is the creative vehicle. The format, creator type, tone, and visual execution that delivers each micro-persona's message as a distinct signal. Same insight, multiple vehicles, multiple net-new audiences for Andromeda to find.

This is the structure we use before we brief a single ad. At higher spends, ASC campaigns structured by persona give Andromeda the signal clarity to find genuinely incremental audiences without collapsing spend to a single winner.

Most accounts are running Layer 1 creative and wondering why incremental reach is declining.

The ceiling isn't Meta's. It's the persona layer.

Loukas Hambi maps this all out in this article: https://lnkd.in/eNEX4t6U

Our most requested masterclass yet…

Loukas has been building this micro persona system at Soar Group for the best part of a year. I've watched it change how our brands approach creative from the inside.

He's just put the whole thing on D2C Diaries. End to end. Live persona build, straight through to scripting.

The thing that doesn't get said enough in this space… most brands with a reach problem don't have a volume problem. They have a psychological diversity problem. Those aren't the same thing and the fix is completely different.

Worth an hour of any founder's time who's spending seriously on Meta https://lnkd.in/e5ZRujiW

$32k extra monthly profit. 50% lower ad spend. 28% higher conversion rates.

A few of the results inside the new "How to Move the Needle in 2026" playbook from Customers Who Click.

We partnered with them and a group of leading ecommerce operators to contribute to this one. 

Real brands, real numbers.

Inside you'll find examples of how operators are:

- Increasing revenue per visitor by 21% without driving more traffic
- Generating $32k+ extra monthly profit from a single shipping test
- Lifting abandoned flow revenue by 40% without touching email templates
- Improving conversion rate by 28% after fixing product discovery
- Cutting ad spend by 50% while maintaining growth

Solid work from the partners involved: Octane AI, PostPilot, Littledata, Rebuy Engine, Flare - Scheduled Delivery, Videowise, Growthub, Zigpoll, Intelligems, KnoCommerce, Soar With Us, Sweet Analytics, Leaf Signal, Nosto, Order Editing

Like this post and comment PLAYBOOK below and I'll send it over.

We ran a controlled test with Meta in Q4 which found Partnership Ads drove 54% more incremental conversions than BAU creative alone.

So we doubled down.

The mechanism is signal diversity. When you run from a creator's handle, you're not just getting their face in the ad. You're feeding Meta a completely different signal set; their community, their content context, the emotional associations their audience brings to every piece of content they consume.

That's a new creative entity. New audiences. Incremental reach you cannot generate from your own brand handle alone.

We tested creative volume in the same period too. 25 variants vs 5 variants. The higher volume cell drove 171 more purchases despite reaching 59,000 fewer people. 15% cheaper cost per conversion.

Both findings point to the same thing: Andromeda rewards signal diversity above almost everything else.

Most accounts we audit are sitting sub-10% partnership ad spend. Top disruptor brands are allocating 30-50%.

That gap is the opportunity.

If you're sitting sub-10% partnership ad spend and want to understand what closing that gap looks like for your account specifically, get in touch here: https://lnkd.in/eZmWY_gH

I don't know another M&A advisory firm as niche, as experienced, or as plugged into the e-commerce space as the The Fortia Group.

If you're building a DTC brand with an exit in mind at any point in the next few years, this is the episode to watch.

I met Paul Hanley and the team at their annual New York conference in 2024. 

Since then we've hosted events together in Dubai and collaborated on a lot of things,  all centred around helping DTC brands and agencies build toward an exit the right way.

I've been invited to speak at their annual NYC conference today, the biggest e-commerce acquirer event globally. Ahead of that we got Paul on the podcast to share what he knows with the audience here.

Full episode live now: https://lnkd.in/eymQzGr9

We’re sharing the full persona-led creative system we run across our client portfolio. For free.

Most DTC brands aren't losing on creative quality. They're losing on creative logic.

They're producing content without a system underneath it. No persona architecture. No brief structure tied to funnel position. No way to know which signals are actually working.

That's the gap we've spent the last six months closing, for ourselves and every brand we work with.

We've taken everything we know about persona-led creative, our own account data, our Meta partnership research, conversations with Maxime (Meta's Creative Strategist for Disruptor brands, who walked us through how Andromeda actually processes creative signals) and built it into one place.

The AI research stack we use to build personas from scratch. How we structure briefs. How we tier tests. How we read results and feed them back into the system.

The full engine, in the order you'd actually run it. Each step explains why it feeds the next.

If something resonates, every section links to the deeper resource behind it.

Like this post and comment PERSONA and we'll send it over.

We've spent the last few weeks building a process for AI UGC, here's how we did it..

The bottleneck right now is that every tool does something different well. So if you want a layered ad, you have to use multiple products. It's a lengthy list, but it works.

Here's the workflow we're using:
Claude writes the prompt. Feed it basic information, who the subject is, where they are, what they're saying, what device it should look like. It structures that into the exact format Sora 2 needs.

Sora 2 generates the hook. Up to 15 seconds of hyper-realistic UGC style footage. Good camera shake. Audio that sounds like it was actually shot on an iPhone.

ElevenLabs clones the voice from a 10 second clip. You then use that voice to record the rest of the script as a voiceover.

ChatGPT creates a JSON prompt to keep your subject consistent across scenes.

Nano Banana takes that JSON and recreates your subject in a new scene.

Kling brings the static image to life and turns it into B-roll.

The output: 10 hook variations of a concept that already exists. Different emotional states, different persona call outs, different messaging angles. For $1.

We're still early. But the direction is clear.

Full breakdown on the newest D2C Diaries episode. Comment PROMPT on the video and we'll send you the Claude template we use to build the Sora 2 prompts https://lnkd.in/erx3vVRp

These are strong references for building visually disruptive creative.

Instead of relying on copy to explain the problem, they externalise the emotion, the frustration, the tension, the lived experience behind it.

That’s what stops the scroll.

A visual that makes you feel the problem before you’ve read a single word.

In a feed where attention is earned in milliseconds, showing the emotion will always outperform describing it.

Definitely worth pulling inspiration from these.

We helped Nuovva scale their revenue 10x over the course of 180 days. Here's how..

We onboarded a cookware brand in August 2025. They had solid foundations on Amazon, but were starting from almost nothing on their DTC arm. That kind of blank canvas can be tricky, but luckily we had a strong brand and great product line to work with.

Six months later: 10x DTC revenue. Meta ROAS up 103% from September to January. Remarketing driving a 2.5x ROAS uplift over top-of-funnel activity alone. Google purchases up 110%.

Before a single ad went live, we built the data infrastructure. Conversion tracking configured between Shopify and Google Ads. Triple Whale onboarded for clean cross-channel attribution. Meta's Pixel, CAPI, and catalogues set up and verified. Reliable data flow from day one.

Creative was the primary performance lever. We leaned on our AI-assisted market research tool to gather insights on key pain points and purchase motivations, then built personas we knew would drive impact from the get-go. Affordability without compromise became the creative anchor. We built our messaging frameworks around that tension.

Early creative output leaned toward upper funnel to build a strong signal base. Then we scaled high-production, UGC, and static formats. Three angles proved to be consistent performance drivers across the funnel: savings and value framing, aspirational aesthetic messaging, and the versatility proposition of replacing your entire kitchen setup with a single pan.

On Meta, we launched a structured Creative Testing campaign that isolated individual creative variants and copy combinations to generate signal fast. Top performers were identified and pushed into a dedicated Scaling campaign within weeks. Two weeks after that, we opened remarketing.

We've taken them from 0 to 5 figures in spend in just a few months.

This data led foundation meant we could start using performance to guide every subsequent decision instead of assumptions.

If you want the same results for your brand, get in touch with the team at Soar Group https://lnkd.in/emtYbdgC

We audited 200 ads for an 8-figure brand last month. There were only 5 genuine entity IDs.

All that production budget. All that creative volume. Andromeda was reading it as 5 ads and serving them against the same audience pool on a loop.

Here's the mechanism: Meta's algorithm doesn't sort by content ID. It groups by entity ID, based on talent, environment, filming angle, and framing. 

Different creators, same location and message structure? Same entity. Same audience. Same ceiling.

Volume without structural diversity isn't creative testing. It's expensive repetition.

When we showed them this, the first question was "how do we fix it?" The answer isn't more ads. It's a different brief. One that specifies entity DNA, not just angle or hook.

The constraint at scale almost never lives in production rate. It lives in brief architecture.

We built our Creative Intelligence Report around this process.

In 4 weeks, we'll identify exactly where your creative is leaking money and hand you a roadmap on how to fix it using a persona-driven strategy that reduces CAC, beats creative fatigue, and scales spend profitably.

This isn't a production package. We're not delivering a folder of assets. It's the strategic layer that makes everything you produce work harder, whether that's in-house or through your existing agency.

If your CAC is rising despite producing more creative, if your ads are burning out faster than they used to, or if you suspect you're only reaching a fraction of your addressable market, that's exactly the gap this was built to close.

4 week sprint. 3 hours of your time. No retainer commitment.

Get in touch to find out more: https://lnkd.in/eFVdFvs4

We're giving away our Incremental Reach Guide, built for brands spending £10k–£150k/month on Meta who want to scale without recycling the same audience into the ground.

Here's the problem it solves:

Meta's AI is optimising your account into a saturation trap.

Andromeda. GEM. Lattice. Three systems working together to get better and better at finding people likely to convert.

Until "likely to convert" just means people who've already seen your ads 5+ times.

The algorithm isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it's designed to do.

But without tracking incremental reach, you won't see it coming until your CPA is already up and your ROAS is already down.

Inside the guide:
↳ What incremental reach is and why FTI predicts CPA spikes 2–4 weeks out
↳ How Andromeda, GEM, and Lattice create saturation at scale 
↳ The warning signs your account has a reach problem right now 
↳ The 6-lever prioritisation framework to fix it 
↳ A weekly tracking dashboard to stay ahead of the curve

Want it?
Like this post
Drop "REACH" in the comments 
Make sure you're following and I'll send it straight over

Do this before you brief another ad concept.

Ask: who specifically is this for?

Not "busy professionals." 

The Busy Professional. Career-driven, time-poor, 32. 

What does she actually need to see to stop scrolling? What scenarios does she recognise? What format matches how she consumes content on a Tuesday evening?

That specificity is what soulmate theory is about. 

There is a perfect creative for every single user. The ad that converts her won't convert the sceptic two personas over. 

Same product. Completely different execution.

The brands winning on Meta right now aren't making more ads. They're making more intentional ones. Coverage across personas, angles, and vehicles, so the algorithm has something to actually match with.

Stop measuring output. Start measuring coverage.

Every week, we get asked the same question about creatives on Meta: 

"We've got five UGC videos. Same creator. Same location. Different scripts. Is that enough?"

It comes up so often I almost have a scripted answer.

But last week we asked it to Maxime Menant from Meta's Disruptors team. Someone who has seen this play out across the top brands on platform.

His answer: in most cases, no.

Script variation alone isn't generating entity differentiation. Visual context, creator identity, setting, persona. All of those factor into how Meta groups assets. A different script in the same scene with the same creator is largely the same creative in Meta's eyes.

The clients asking this question are usually the ones who've made a significant investment in creator content and are starting to wonder why it isn't moving the needle the way they expected.

The answer is almost never the creator. It's the lack of differentiation at a deeper level than most people realise is required.

If this sounds familiar, it's worth having a conversation about your creative infrastructure. Get in touch: https://lnkd.in/eQSriGWC

We're giving away the exact prompt we used to make this AI UGC video.

Getting Sora 2 to output hyper-realistic, consistent footage isn't just about the tool. The prompt has to be structured in a very specific way… character description, cinematography, camera motion, lighting, dialogue, audio, authenticity keywords. Get it wrong and the footage looks off. 

Get it right and everything downstream becomes easier.

We’re sharing the exact Claude template we use as step one of our AI UGC workflow. It takes a basic brief (who the subject is, where they are, what they're saying, what device it should look like, their accent) and structures all of that into the exact format Sora 2 needs automatically.

No prompt engineering. Just inputs.

It sits at the start of a full workflow that runs through Sora 2 for the hook, ElevenLabs for voice cloning, ChatGPT for subject consistency, Nano Banana for B-roll generation and Kling for animation. The whole thing is broken down in the latest D2C Diaries episode https://lnkd.in/erx3vVRp

But this prompt is the foundation. Without it, the rest of the workflow is harder than it needs to be.

If you're building in this space or testing AI UGC for your brand, this is worth having.

Like this post and comment "PROMPT" and I’ll send it over.

I saw this Rian Doris piece this week on position rotation. The premise: sitting isn't synonymous with working.

Your brain treats a static environment like a desert. It goes into conservation mode. Reduces focus. Caps your stamina. The moment you change position or place, it reads novelty as an oasis. Dopamine. Reset. Back into flow.

The protocol is simple. Stand 50% of the time. Walk 25%. Sit 25%. And rotate between three fixed work environments throughout the day. Not every ten minutes. Two or three times. Enough to reset perceived effort without destroying momentum.

I've been building my apartment here in Dubai with this in mind. Dedicated space, controlled environment, set up to actually support output. Not just aesthetically. Structurally.

It's not just about protecting time. It's about designing the physical conditions for your best work.

Most founders I know are optimising their calendars. Almost none are optimising the body doing the work.

Worth thinking about.

A patient walks in feeling tired. The doctor prescribes caffeine.

That's not medicine. That's a reflex.

This analogy came up in a training session with our growth strategists last week and I wanted to share it.

Good doctors diagnose before they prescribe. They don't reach for the nearest tool. They find the root cause first, then treat it.

Most performance marketing works like the bad doctor.

CPAs rising. Prescribe more creative. Growth plateauing. Increase budget. ROAS softening. Test new audiences. All action, no diagnosis. The assumption is always that the problem lives inside the ad account.

It usually doesn't.

In our experience across 250+ DTC brands, the constraint that's actually limiting growth is upstream of the ads more often than people expect. A landing page converting at half the rate it should be. An offer that only works for one type of customer. A product mix where the highest AOV SKU keeps selling out, pulling spend toward something that can't fulfill demand.

None of those are solved by creative iteration. Prescribing volume into a broken funnel is caffeine for fatigue. It keeps you moving. It doesn't fix anything.

The diagnostic has to come first. What is the single biggest factor limiting growth right now? What is that constraint worth in revenue if it's solved? Only then does the prescription make sense.

Effort without diagnosis is just expensive noise.

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