The Ad Creative Strategy That Takes Brands to $100M in Record Time
Ultra's creative and growth lead explains how a nicotine-free pouch hit a $100M run rate in under a year: customer-language angles, a three-part replacement formula, creators as strategists, and constant new footage.
Posted
today
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
772
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Winning paid ads come from amplifying what real customers already say a product does for them, framed as a better replacement in a specific situation, and then feeding Meta a constant supply of fresh angles and footage.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
A DTC or CPG founder spending on Meta ads who keeps relaunching small tweaks of one winning ad and watching it fatigue.
A performance marketer or creative strategist who needs a repeatable way to generate new ad angles from customer reviews.
A brand team running UGC creators or TikTok Shop affiliates who wants to turn that volume into a source of testable ideas.
Someone about to launch a consumer product who is deciding between organic-first and paid-from-day-one.
SKIP IF…
You sell B2B software or services; every example here is a physical consumer product sold through paid social.
You want account structure, bidding, or campaign setup tactics; the conversation stays almost entirely on creative and messaging.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Ultra reached a $100M run rate in just under a year by treating ads as a way to say what customers already believe about the product. The core tool is a three-part formula: name the thing people currently use, name the situation, and show why the product replaces it there (nicotine in the gym sucks, Ultra is better in the gym). Creators and TikTok Shop affiliates act as creative strategists, surfacing hooks the team then reshoots. Each winning angle gets its own landing page and post-purchase flow. Because Meta now punishes recycled footage, the real job is producing more new visuals for the same or less money, and testing angles organically before scaling paid.
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Cold-open teaser and introduction: Ultra's sub-one-year path to a $100M run rate and Levi's background at Freshly and Tube Science.
00:50 – 02:48
02 · $100M in under a year
Ultra ran Meta ads from launch; Levi joined two months in. His path from psychology and film into Tube Science, the high-spend performance video agency.
02:48 – 04:51
03 · Sell what customers say
Tube Science's framing: learn what people want the product to do, then amplify a real customer's reason. Laundry Sauce rebuilt its mission around people who now love doing laundry.
04:51 – 06:16
04 · The Core Three formula
What are you using now, in which situation, and why this product replaces it there. Nicotine in the gym sucks, Ultra is better in the gym. Applied to a host's creatine launch.
06:16 – 11:07
05 · Avatars and fake podcast ads
Avatars should not distract from the message; scale winning angles across avatars later. Credibility is about truthfulness, and podcast-format ads hold attention long enough to stack selling points.
11:07 – 15:27
06 · Static vs. video ads
Ultra runs about 50-50 static and video. The angle picks the format; a tennis angle found on Reddit (Adderall, not nicotine) needs a talking-head video. Includes a sponsor read.
15:27 – 21:47
07 · Creators as creative strategists
TikTok Shop creators test many messages and surface hooks and nicknames; the team reviews two-plus hours of creator content daily. 50+ creators on Meta via Tribe, plus format-specific agencies.
21:47 – 29:05
08 · Creative ROI and funnels
Benchmark the return on a single produced concept, cut agencies below it, grow spend incrementally, and keep winning angles alive across formats and placements. Angle-specific landing pages and post-purchase flows. Includes a sponsor read.
29:05 – 32:11
09 · Organic first: make them want it
Ultra ran paid from day one and hit profitability in Q3. For a bootstrapped launch, testing angles organically is valid, but ads should make people want the product so badly the landing page doesn't matter.
32:11 – 36:00
10 · The 5 reasons ad format
The host's maple-syrup creatine pitch is already a classic list-of-reasons ad. Use burner accounts, delay the product reveal, or lead with the product when it is a visual hook as Ultra's pouch is.
36:00 – 37:45
11 · Meta punishes reused footage
Freshly reused one steak shot for three years; today Meta wants new visuals. The real hack is more ads for the same or less money, which forces the team to keep listening to customers.
37:45 – 42:00
12 · Go paid before you raise
Test organically, then put working angles into paid quickly so investors see real CAC, LTV, and payback. Around $100K is a solid starting budget. Close with Ultra's product line.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Ultra hit a $100 million run rate in just under one year, with Meta ads running from day one and profitability reached in Q3.
The best ad angle is often a reason one customer gave in a review that nobody else is talking about yet.
Saying a product is better than a competitor works worse than saying it is better than the competitor in one specific situation.
Laundry Sauce reframed its whole brand mission around one review theme: people who used to hate doing laundry now love it.
Ad avatars should not distract from the message; a college student reading a script meant for 45 to 55 year old women just feels fake.
Find the winning angle first with a neutral avatar, then multiply it across different avatars to see who it resonates with most.
Podcast-style ads hold attention because viewers mentally commit to a long clip, which lets you stack multiple selling points.
You can start with a low-cost fake podcast ad and, once it scales, upgrade the same format to real podcasts with a more credible voice.
Ultra's paid mix runs about 50-50 static and video, and the specific angle decides which format it gets.
Reading Reddit threads about what pro tennis players abuse revealed an angle: tennis doesn't have a nicotine problem, it has an Adderall problem.
TikTok Shop turned creators into hustlers who test many messages without protecting a persona, which makes them ideal creative strategists.
Ultra's team reviews creator videos for at least two hours a day and hands the best ideas to the co-founder to reshoot.
Set your creative budget by first measuring the return on a single produced concept, then cut every agency that falls below that benchmark.
Ultra once sent around 70% of paid traffic to angle-specific landing pages rather than the product page.
A post-purchase flow that only reinforces the original use case hurts retention; adding secondary use cases keeps buyers when the first one fades.
Freshly reused the same gravy-on-steak shot for about three years, and today's Meta delivery actively punishes that kind of reuse.
A list-of-reasons ad works even when viewers disagree with one point, because the disagreement keeps them watching to the end.
Packing an ad with so many reasons that viewers will hunt the product down on eBay removes your dependence on the landing page.
Takeaway
Ad angles come from customers, scale comes from volume
WHAT TO LEARN
The fastest-scaling ads say out loud what a real customer already believes, framed as a replacement in a concrete situation, and they stay alive only if new footage keeps arriving.
03Sell what customers say
Read reviews for a reason one customer gives that nobody else mentions; that lone reason is often an untapped angle worth a whole ad.
When a review theme repeats, reframe the brand mission around it, as Laundry Sauce did with customers who now love doing laundry.
04The Core Three formula
Write angles as a swap in a situation: the thing people use now, the moment they use it, and why your product wins there.
Run one competitor across several situations to turn a single comparison into an array of distinct ads.
05Avatars and fake podcast ads
Pick on-camera people who fit the core buyer closely enough not to distract, then test a proven angle across other avatars.
Podcast-style ads earn longer watch time, letting you stack more selling points; test cheaply first and add credible voices once it scales.
06Static vs. video ads
Let the angle choose the format: cheap statics for simple claims, talking-head video when the situation needs nuance to land.
Hunt for new angles where your audience talks candidly, like Reddit threads, and look for the thing your product could replace.
07Creators as creative strategists
Treat creators who post many variations as idea scouts, review their output daily, and reshoot the strongest hooks in-house.
Keep separate creator workflows if creators prefer them, and avoid depending on a single creator source.
08Creative ROI and funnels
Measure return per produced concept, set that as the benchmark, and cut creative sources that fall below it.
Scale spend incrementally and keep winners alive by porting them to new formats, people, and placements rather than tiny tweaks.
Give each winning angle its own educational landing page and post-purchase flow, but add secondary uses so customers stay.
09Organic first: make them want it
Pack ads with so many strong reasons that the landing page barely matters; viewers who want it badly enough will find it.
Testing angles organically first is valid when bootstrapping, using engagement and shares as a proxy for paid performance.
10The 5 reasons ad format
A five-reasons ad keeps viewers to the end even when they disagree with a point, and for paid it can carry almost too many reasons.
Delay the product reveal to sell the benefit first, unless the product itself is an unusual visual hook worth showing in frame one.
11Meta punishes reused footage
Meta now rewards fresh visuals, so the real lever is producing more ads for the same or less money.
12Go paid before you raise
Move working angles into paid before raising so investors see real acquisition cost, lifetime value, and payback data.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Run rate
Annualized revenue based on a recent period's sales, such as one month multiplied by twelve. A $100M run rate means the business is selling at a pace of $100M per year.
DTC / D2C
Direct to consumer. A brand that sells straight to customers through its own website and ads instead of through retailers.
CPG
Consumer packaged goods. Everyday physical products such as food, drinks, supplements, and household items that are used up and repurchased.
Angle
The specific reason or framing an ad uses to sell a product, such as a pre-workout replacement. One product can run many angles at once.
Avatar
The type of person shown on camera or targeted by an ad, defined by traits like age, lifestyle, and situation.
UGC
User-generated content. Videos made by everyday creators, often paid, that look like real customer posts rather than polished brand ads.
TikTok Shop affiliate
A creator who sells products directly inside TikTok and earns a commission on each sale their videos drive.
Static ad
A single image ad with no video, often used as a cheap first test of whether a message works.
MER
Marketing efficiency ratio. Total revenue divided by total marketing spend, a blended view of how efficiently ad money turns into sales.
CAC
Customer acquisition cost. The average amount spent on marketing to win one new paying customer.
LTV
Lifetime value. The total revenue a customer brings in across all their purchases, used to judge how much you can afford to pay to acquire them.
Landing page (LP)
A page built for one ad angle that educates the visitor before showing a buy button, as opposed to sending traffic straight to the product page.
Burner account
A separate social profile used to test sales-heavy content without affecting the main brand account's look and audience.
Creative fatigue
The drop in ad performance that happens when the same audience sees the same visuals too many times.
“Make them want to try it so bad that it doesn't matter what hoops they have to go through to actually purchase. If it's sold out and it's on eBay, you're going to buy it.”
the episode's thesis in one breath, no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
05:17
“Just saying Ultra is better than nicotine does not work as well as saying, nicotine in the gym sucks, Ultra's better in the gym.”
a complete framework in one example→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
03:25
“If one customer says this helped me do this, but nobody else is saying that, my job now is to just amplify that almost on their behalf.”
clear, contrarian research tip→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
13:06
“Tennis doesn't have a Zyn problem, tennis has an Adderall problem.”
punchy, surprising angle with a story behind it→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
36:25
“We used the same fricking steak shot of gravy pouring on steak from literally our first shoot for maybe three years. And that is actually punished in today's Meta delivery.”
vivid before-and-after on how ad platforms changed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
36:55
“The hack is how do I get more visuals, more ads, for the same or less money.”
one-line reframe of creative fatigue→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
33:35
“If I don't agree with one of the couple points, it might rage bait me a little bit and I'm still going to watch through the end.”
counterintuitive reason list ads work→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
16:20
“We work with a lot of creators that I think of as our creative strategists.”
reframes UGC creators in one line→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 02:48steadyUltra's growth and Tube Science background
02:48 – 06:16denseCustomer-language angles and the Core Three formula
28:49 – 36:00steadyOrganic vs. paid for a bootstrapped launch
36:00 – 37:45denseCreative diversity and Meta delivery
37:45 – 42:00steadyLaunch budget and fundraising
The Script
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metaphorstory
Make them want to try it so bad that it doesn't matter what hoops they have to go through to actually purchase. If it's sold out and it's on eBay, you're going to buy it. That's how bad you want it.
How long did it take you guys to reach a $100 million run rate? $100 million run rate, just under one year. the marketing brain behind Ultra, the nicotine -free pouch that sold a million cans in its first six months.
Before that, he scaled Freshly, the meal brand Meslay bought for $950 million. Today, he's breaking down the simple ad formulas and creator playbooks he's using to scale brands fast. We have a lot of creators that I think of as our creative strategists.
They're coming up for us, new nicknames for the product, new opener hook ideas, a core three formula. I've seen work at Ultra, I've seen it work at Laundry Sauce, I've seen it work back in Tube Science days, is...
Levi, welcome to the pod, man. Thank you, man. What an incredible year it's been for Ultra.
So one of the most breakout success stories in D2C history, arguably. How long did it take you guys to reach a $100 million run rate? $100 million run rate, just under one year.
Yeah, so under a year to reach a $100 million run rate, that doesn't happen often. And I think a lot of it is due to you guys just having an excellent entire marketing funnel, but obviously the paid ad side of the business. Yeah, that's where it all started, really.
I came on about a month and a half, two months into them starting to launch ads. And from conception, Eric, the founder, and then his brother, Neek, had a keen understanding that this is where we start was meta ads. And they got the ball rolling.
And then I knew how to add more balls. to juggle more and help them snowball and one thing we like to do on sweat equity is juggle ball juggle balls juggling balls a lot of balls in the air but uh so your background guys you were at tube science right which is a kind of famous uh paid creative agency i'll let you tell the story yeah no tube science is it's the og paper performance uh video advertising agency um mainly focused on meta i mean they i'm not sure what their minimum is now but uh just a couple years ago the minimum to work with them was spending at least a million on meta a month and yet they're still focused on like really high growth d2c brands and that was where it's where i earned my chops i went to la because i wanted to go the film director route but i had studied psychology in college and taking the psychology route into academia there just wasn't as much money or opportunity in doing that but taking a short form content but taking exactly all the opportunity in the world psychology and film directing is a deadly combo exactly yeah so they like the idea that your creative could be your a b behavioral uh tests um your behavioral variance um it was incredible and tube science really taught me about like
the framing for advertising as not that you have a message that you want other people to understand but to learn what people want your product to do for them right and then it like backtracking the message um on what like largely what you're hearing from real people talking about what the product does or could do yeah and you're like that is something real but it doesn't exist yet i'm going to put it in an ad and make it real So you're kind of saying that, you know, one of the secret sauces tube science taught you is reverse engineering, sort of the dream outcome that someone wants from a product and then figuring out how to articulate that from, I guess, a real voice.
A thousand percent. Yeah. It's almost like you could think of it as if one customer says this helped me do this, but nobody else is saying that.
My job now is to just amplify that almost on their behalf of. That's a very real reason to use this product. Nobody else is using it for that reason.
That's a whole new unlock for me. Feeling like the voice in your head a little bit of, if I have this problem and I'm always like, when I'm doing this thing, I'm always complaining about this other thing. If I can scale that into a way where it feels like I'm always consuming, it's exactly what I say and it's getting solved by this product.
That's like, that's the unlock. A thousand percent. I think like the first example of that that comes to mind is at Laundry Sauce.
where I was before Ultra, something that I started working with Laundry Sauce in a consulting capacity that I noticed as a consistent theme in customer reviews that was not being leveraged anywhere else in their messaging was so many people talking about how they used to hate doing laundry, now they love doing laundry. And so we really built and reframed the brand mission around what does it look like to love doing laundry.
and then instilled that into messaging as well. Like a core three formula of like three characteristics that I've seen work at Ultra, I've seen it work at Laundry Sauce, I've seen it work back in tube science days is what are you, what replaceable thing are you using right now in this situation? And why is this product a better replacement in that situation?
Like just saying Ultra is better than nicotine. does not work as well as saying, nicotine in the gym sucks, ultra's better in the gym. So adding that third situation, it creates a much more real use case for the product.
And running that formula of, okay, competitor product in these six different situations, I'm going to go hit an array of ads that's replacing this product with our product in those six situations. So I'll give... see if this is right.
I'm launching a CPG brand that's right now like a competitor to Symbiotica, if you're familiar with them. The first product is going to be a creatine that's, again, very much like in the sachet space, but ready to go take gel, right? So based off what you're saying is, it's called Onda.
Onda is better than having a shaker cup in the morning when you're trying to walk out the door and you're in a hurry, right? yeah exactly in that relatable scenario yeah put in the relatable scenario how do you how do you view because there's two other components i would say that probably play a role there which are obviously problem problem solution as like one component and then also avatar right like alex just made a really good point there's a situation where ultra is better than nicotine in the gym ultra is better for alex who is power cleaning in the gym than brian who walks in there and hits an incline walk and does three curls right and it's like are you subbing in avatars and problem solutions and stuff like that so designing creative specific to an avatar is valid but i've i generally don't prioritize it um and again this goes back to tube science days where if you want to create an ad that is mass applicable then the more specific you are with the archetype on camera the more it can kind of like
narrow it you want the focus to be on the product and the situation and like why and how it's useful and then the avatar just has to like not be distracting too much from that now granted this is a very like paper performance way of doing it and part of what you want to do in that very paper performance method is once you get a once you get a a concept ripping then you're scaling to a bunch of different avatars to see which ones it continues to resonate with.
Right. To maybe like deepen it. So find the winning angle first and then multiply it across avatars.
Yeah. In my mind, the avatar thing, let's say you're unlocking a new concept or a new like messaging angle for an ad. The avatar just has to not distract from it.
For example, like if you're, let's take Laundry Sauce, for example. If you have, If most of your customer base or you know who the people who crave your product the most are suburban women ages 45 to 55, but then you're featuring a college student in your ads who is running the same script.
But if you featured someone in there like a woman in their 30s or 40s who's running the same script, the slightly older demos is probably going to resonate better. Not because... it feels more true well it probably does feel more true but the college would just be a distraction like it feels fake um if they're running the same script yeah yeah okay avatars are one thing but also there's key opinion leaders right and there's kind of like basically you know i i'm guilty of this like we at nibble we would literally throw a lab coat on a creator and be like I'm a oncologist and like, this is why this mushroom gummy is going to make you chill out.
Kind of insane. Let's see some crazy black hat ads on that account. Be like, Brian, is this you?
Yeah. I got accusations for years, but there would be like a new viral crazy ad. They'd be like, dude, what's going on?
But like, you know, I think credibility, right? Like credibility stacking on top of some of the things you're talking about. Like, do you, do you view.
credibility is important within the angle is that like where does that fit in your stack the credibility is the the truthfulness of the message like first and foremost and so we are very risk tolerant and and and have also seen that we don't lose credibility um by let's say for example running a fake podcast ad um knowing that that format is just it's the format that people are familiar to be able to listen longer and to One of the components of why a podcast style ad works is because you're able to communicate multiple selling points within a 30 to 60 or even longer video when most people, you know, if it's a different format, they wouldn't listen to that many different reasons.
I think that goes back to what you were mentioning about the psychology part where if I see... the beginning of a podcast clip i'm naturally like committing mentally to say if this is interesting within this first five seconds i'm committing to 45 seconds a minute 15 no matter how long the the the a thousand percent so i would say like uh uh a performance focused brand starting in a place of let's test this relatively a fast low cost and in a way that like the message is still true of what we're saying it works okay great clearly podcast is is scaling let's go advertise on real podcasts let's go let's go shoot um you know a podcast ad still but with a more credible voice so like you can you can kind of scale into credibility um and yeah yeah you can scale into credibility yeah yeah that's awesome what uh Do you have, I mean, if you can't share, what are like the top formats that are doing well in your ad account?
Is there podcast, static, like testimonial? We're like 50 -50 static and video. You know, I think of them, they serve different purposes.
So the ad determines and decides whether or not it should be a static or a video. Like if it's, I'll give you a quick example. We haven't made this ad yet, so I don't know if it will perform, but I'll kind of walk you through it.
So we've been curious about getting ultra into and popular with tennis players and racquet players. There's something about the cognitive side of an individual sport that is accurate and relevant to what this product does. But there's not an easy in because it's not just a Zen replacement situation.
There's not a lot of tennis players that are Zenning. especially pro tennis players. Whereas there are pro NFL players, there are pro MLB, like there are all of these pro athletes that are actually using nicotine pouches, but that they don't want to, and they're buying ultra.
So that doesn't exist for tennis yet. I need a way in. A lot of golfers do.
A lot of golfers do. A lot of golfers. Big on golf, yeah.
I needed a way into tennis, and probably like once a month, I will Google tennis players in. just to see if anything has popped up to start to get some traction there. And of course, I've already ran static ads that are like quotes or statements about ultra and tennis that never really took off.
And I ended up down a Reddit forum thread about what do pro tennis players use before a game? Like what are they most commonly doping with? Like what do pro tennis players abuse?
Adderall came up. And I was like, that's a way in. That's a something that we can replace with Ultra in a given situation.
And so that to me is a concept that because of a little bit of a nuance to the situation, it'd be kind of difficult for me to run it as a static ad and test it out first. I feel really confident if we do a talking head. of a tennis player creator on a court talking about, you know, tennis doesn't have a Zinn problem, tennis has an Adderall problem.
That is just more likely for the message to work the first time than testing it in a static. So, yeah, the mix of video and static, it's roughly 50 -50. And in a perfect world, we test things on statics first, and then we have a workflow of formats that work from there.
It can include podcasts. It can include our founder standing in the kitchen and doing a talking head video. It can include outsourcing to creators to do a little bit more polished of a skit style video or a talking head video.
I mean, it really varies. Each time we unlock a messaging angle, we then look at, okay, what should this scale to? based off of what we think it's going to perform real quick because social snowball is a partner of the show and this is something i actually think about a lot most brands doing creator marketing have an infrastructure problem your customer referrals live in one tool influencer gifting moves in another tick tock shop soft doing its own thing and performance gets tracked through discount codes screenshots and a spreadsheet that someone's scared to touch so the program grows the admin grows with it and nobody can tell you what's actually driving revenue social snowball puts all of this in one place referrals affiliates influencers tick tock shop You can recruit them, gift them, pay them, and see exactly what every creator drove in sales.
It's what Groons, IMA, True Classic, and Dr. Squatch, these top tier D2C brands, are running their creator program on, along with 3 ,500 other Shopify brands. In the last year alone, creators on Snowball drove over $265 million in revenue for brands.
So if creators are a real channel for you, they probably deserve real infrastructure. I'd highly recommend checking out our friends at Social Snowball. They've been in the game for years.
Make sure you go to their page. We'll link it in the description. sweat equity get 20 off your social snowball again we'll link that description in the show notes all right back to the show yeah how do you uh view creator partnerships because obviously you guys have athletes taking the products you have probably middle tier influencers doing it then you're active on tick tock shop like what is your creator strategy okay so creators serve two crucial purposes and i'm very i love tick tock shop because it's completely revolutionized how creators think about their job Their job is not to protect their followers and then you're entered in and they're careful about.
It's about like really open amplification to brand new eyeballs with almost every post. And that enables creators and TikTok shop has enabled creators to think, oh, I could make a ton of money if I pump out a lot of videos that are saying different things to see what works. And I'm not concerned.
in this profile about my follower account or my my persona my public profile that i'm building it's truly it's it's a hustle um and tick tock shop has unlocked that in creators so that's one purpose is we work with a lot of creators that i think of as our creative strategists because we're giving them product we're giving them an array of things to talk about and they're coming up for us with like how to talk about it, new nicknames for the product, new opener hook ideas.
I mean, we have, we sit and we do at least two hours, if not more, of reviews of these creator pieces every single day. And we're taking the ones that like, this is, we start to know that's going to work. And then we can pull that out even before we're launching it and say, hey, Neek, you know, our co -founder that shoots every week, go do this one.
This was a great idea. You should do this too. That's an interesting way to think about it.
I haven't heard somebody mention it like that where your top creators are the creative strategists and you're basically extracting the data and scaling it across. Probably all other channels, all other characters. Hudson from Comfort obviously does that a lot where basically his top creators are like, not only are they his creative strategists, but they're his product feedback people.
So they guide his next, like he asks his creators first, not his team. He's like, what do you guys want to make next?
You know, like what, like that's where he got the idea for the airplane hoodie. That's like, it's a really fascinating leverage point you can have when you have great relationships with these people. Totally.
And having enough of them too, like you, you can kind of cover your bases. How many, how many of you guys work with? We have over 50 creators live in our meta account and then a lot more on that on TikTok.
But we actually, I'm sure you guys have heard of Tribe. Yeah, of course. So we just onboarded a Tribe.
I mean, really they they lucas at tribe built what i wanted for a long time every performance marketer stream yes a thousand percent and so tribe has been like it's really delivered um and i tribe is our main source there are a couple people outside of the tribe ecosystem that are more on retainer for us because they serve both a brand accretive service you know there's someone like a marathon runner that is serving where we want to represent the brand more so than just performance yeah um but uh but yeah our two biggest buckets right now are tribe ugc and then um and then tiktok shop affiliates but we We want more.
Like we want to diversify continuously. Speaking of podcast ads, you just ripped a great one for Try. Yeah.
I was about to prompt him again. I mean, I'm an investor in Tribe. So anytime we get good pub, I was going to be like, will you describe how you've seen success with Tribe?
What do you mean? It's a growth marketer's dream. Just a full testimonial.
Yeah. I was trying to kind of like clobber together a version of Tribe before I found Tribe. And then I actually was a little bit late to the game on onboarding to Tribe because we had built a certain like uploading flow for our creatives that I didn't want to create a separate workflow.
And now I'm kicking myself. I should have done it three months ago. For sure.
Do you manage your TikTok shop creators and your meta creators on Tribe at the same time? Separate, yeah. So you silo those two?
Yeah. Nice. It's one of those situations where like I don't mind complexity.
It's where the creators... prefer like if you have enough creators who prefer this method then stand that method up and keep it running i think deprecating it for the sake of simplicity for our internal operations is just that's not worth it like if we're still seeing the roi there then then yeah staff it manage it separately and then unlock something new um the one thing i never want is heavy reliance on only one source so uh you know like Tribe will always, hopefully will always remain a core part of our stack, but we're also like, you need to diversify around it.
And ideally that diversification is also like a specific use case. Like I like with working with creative agencies, I was telling you before the pod, typically if I'm getting on a sales call with a creative agency, it's because I've already vetted them and they're still trying to pitch me on their product, but I've already said yes at the beginning of the call.
creative production agencies for paid that have that serve a very specific format um that's that's typically what i like so like a street talk like a street talk yeah exactly so so street interviews with street chalk um looking for an agency if you have recs that are like all about the podcast style ads um what are i actually have one it's this guy's matrix media okay um they're out of the uk they're pretty dialed in i really liked working with them they have a good flow where they like hire actors build the set, do the whole thing.
They actually did a great job for us. Awesome. Yeah, would love to talk about that because, yeah, it's how...
Free card for you as well, boys. Fucking ripping ad slots. Yeah, dude, I need to set affiliate links in the bio.
Honestly. Yeah, you have sponsors on your t -shirt. Yeah, yeah.
I'm no better than an NIL school. No, no. When you love a service, you love a service, man.
Yeah. Please only answer if you can. What is the way that you invest in creative as it relates to your ad spend?
Do you look at creative as a percentage of your ad spend or as a percentage of your revenue or like MER? How do you structure that program? I'm going to answer it differently.
When I started, we signed a ton of different paid creative agencies intentionally. We staffed our internal team and threw everything into paid social ads to start to get benchmarks on what is, for our brand, what is our ROI on an individual piece of creative? Like one concept.
And then when we found that benchmark, that's what we measure against. So that can vary from brand to brand. Is it 5x return on ad spend on whatever you produced?
uh on the cost to produce or is it 10x like it could vary on the brand um but we yeah that's i i spent like two to three months figuring out that number um and then cut the agencies that weren't within that return uh benchmark and then the goal is now to continue to improve on the benchmark uh consistently um there are you know like yeah it's we we modeled around that benchmark But then it's a lever that we can always adjust because we do have creative agencies that are delivering more than that return.
And so if we needed to reduce just down to them, we could. How do you model scaling and investing in creative and your target on that as well? Because I think one thing you guys have obviously done successfully is push into that nine -figure range and run rate.
That's really dangerous because if you miss target. you're pretty fucked. You know, you overspend.
Now you might be in the hole of all the gains that you just made in the last few months. You ordered inventory that you can't sell at the same level that you thought before. So the question is, how do we think about investing?
How are you scaling efficiently as it pertains to like, A, like we have a CAC target and we're going to double ad spend. Are we modeling like a 30 % CAC target to make sure that we don't overorder inventory? We're always...
we're always consistent with our incremental growth there's never like a let's just double it okay see what happens um and where i come in is ensuring that we're delivering consistently growing volume uh and and diversification of of ad creative of ad creative yeah so the most like when you start to get into nine figures and and and beyond It's you start to care a lot about Okay, how do we continue to scale and keep winning concepts alive?
not by Making a small small tweak to the winning ad and relaunching it but by scaling it out Yeah, and still announce how their formats. Yeah, so so other formats other other individuals other other like styles to the video or other placements too, like this is working in meta.
Why hasn't it worked on YouTube Shorts? What do we need to adjust to it to make it work on YouTube Shorts? Okay, cool, we unlocked it.
And so we're investing in our team, growing a team that can focus on, okay, these pillar messaging angles are working, keep them alive. And right now, a little bit more of my attention is on what are the more angles that we can add in. And when I say angles too, I don't just mean like a concept.
I mean like a funnel. I think a good example is we've seen that, and this really came from customer testimonials first, that the pre -workout alternatives use case for Ultra was real. And so one, we produced more ads about that.
Two, we built a landing page, like I call it like, I'm sure there's probably an official name, but I just call it a hybrid intro offer LP, where you're kind of forced to read a little bit more about our product and its use case in that situation before you see the buy box. So again, you're like giving them a little bit more reasons to buy before they have the opportunity to.
That has helped a lot. When you say help, that help conversion or that help conversion, right? Yeah.
Because something that I've also seen with that strategy is when they come in through a pre -sale page or they have more education, they actually are a stickier customer as well. Because they can, like they have better LTV because they're like more educated on the product and more bought in. Yeah.
I don't have numbers on the retention for our LPs. Yeah. I want that big time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we, yeah, we're on. messaging angles, we have an idea of what LTV looks like.
And now, so after you build the LP, then it's also building the post -purchase funnel to also reconnect with the customer when they receive their product. Hey, this is how to use it in the gym as a pre -workout alternative. And then after they've used it in the gym, hey, how did you like using it in the gym?
And so it's closing the loop on the original reason they purchased. What we did learn though, is if that funnel is too specific to just that use case, it does hurt retention. Like we do know that.
And we've learned that in the funnel, if you start to sprinkle in about, this is great for a pre -workout, but also take it after lunch. It'll give you a little boost after lunch. You start to sprinkle in those other reasons, then they're stickier because maybe they stopped going to the gym.
but they now have the use case of, oh, I started taking it after lunch and I love it. Yeah. Basically you're building congruent funnels is what you're saying, right?
Like how much of your traffic are you sending to LP versus product page? Good question. I don't know the most recent numbers.
I could say like back when I was fully in the head of growth role, I'm now focused more on brand and creative, but fully head of growth role back in the spring, it was like 70 % of our traffic. To LPs? Yeah, to LPs.
At times more.
But yeah, it worked well enough that we scaled it out to different messaging funnels. Yeah, that's awesome. Real quick, a question for anyone running affiliates.
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Link is in the description. Okay, guys, let's get back to the show. At what point did you, with Ultra, did you start, you guys run paid ads?
Was that right at like day one? Day one. Okay.
Day one, yeah. Did you all raise? I don't have the context on that.
We did raise in January. And yeah, we raised in January. I can see.
And we hit profitability in Q3 of this year. Still growing. It's like right now.
With profitability, which is amazing. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I'll let you know if we raise another round.
No, it's just interesting because I've spent, again, like I was mentioning the CPG side for me. I spent my entire career on the organic side. Yeah.
Right. So when I'm looking at launching on, I'm just thinking about everything I'll be doing on the organic side, all the funnel building I'll do, but driving traffic through nothing but organic content and probably my founder pages or my pages and then some creators that I'm going to work with. Yeah.
And I want to invest in paid out the gate because I know we're going to have a strong organic presence, but I'm also thinking about like, should I do three months probably first with just organic, you know, and kind of like, find some angles that are going to land and then go into into paid and be because i'm again i'm bootstrapping it versus yeah not raising or i didn't raise um so i'm just trying to think through that scenario any thoughts there on mine i think with your skill set it is completely valid to start purely organic and test out what angles are going to work and what what resonates because genuinely like algorithmically you're biased meta and I'm much more of a meta guy, so I can definitely speak to that.
I'm sure TikTok is similar. It's much more biased to finding the people that are going to resonate with the messaging very quickly in the very similar way that if you're running an ad and your engagement, what people are saying in the comments, how much they're sharing it as signals for how this would do in paid. It's pretty relevant.
The one thing I'd say, which again, I think you're probably well equipped to do this really well. is make them want to try it so bad that it doesn't matter what hoops they have to go through to actually purchase. That was the TubeScience nugget that we learned was at TubeScience, we had zero control over the landing page and the product page that people were going to land on.
And so to control the outcome, we packed selling points into our ads and we led with the strongest, most most emotionally resonant reasons to purchase such that by the time you finished a video there's no way you weren't buying that thing you're going to find it wherever it is if it's sold out and it's on ebay you're going to buy it that's how bad you want it and so if you think about it that way then yeah i totally i'd say test an organic first you know do burner profiles if you want to run more performance style ads see what gets eyeballs and And then yeah, start doing paid.
Once you have a couple pillars of messaging groups that are working, I'd say. Can you package that into an example of like, what was an ad that you created where no matter what, like somebody was going to - Or even do it for creatine. Yeah, if you want to.
Because I mean, his product is a creatine sachet, like a Symbiotica delivery system for like creatine. What's the flavor? Wildberry.
But it's like the vehicle is maple syrup. So you do not taste the creatine. Okay, sick.
What are the benefits of maple syrup versus other sugar substitutes? Well, the biggest thing is on the creatine side. The second you mix creatine into water, most of the creatine is going to sit at the bottom.
You're not going to get a good portion of it. Creatine and water don't mix well. In the gummy version, the heat actually destroys the creatine.
So if it says five grams, you could be getting three grams. Maple syrup is so low on the acidity level and on the water level that it's like a perfect vehicle for creatine. where it's a very stable creatine.
And then from the athletic performance side, taking in 12 grams of natural carbohydrate is phenomenal when we're talking about pairing it with a pre -workout, pairing it with a coffee, et cetera, before you go lift versus trying to replace it. It's an added, it does have nootropics in it as well. It has cognosine added into it.
It does have L -theanine and then taurine. You just did a five, six reasons ad that is classic tube science style format that every pay performance ad is copied. Like what are five reasons to try this product?
I'm going to watch to the end of that no matter what, even if I don't agree with each point. In fact, if I don't agree with one of the couple points, it might rage bait me a little bit and I'm still going to watch through the end. So yeah, just package that as five reasons to try this product.
Try in your aesthetic and style with your skill set. Do it on a podcast studio. Do it as a talking head.
Do it in different formats. And for organic, you might think I'm packing way too much into this. For a paid ad, you're not packing too much into that.
You want that to be almost too many reasons. I like the idea of doing the burner account too. Because I don't want to just blow up my profile or the on the page.
The on the page, I want it to feel... like the world that you're stepping into you know what i mean of high performance of athletic performance etc like this gritty this gritty lifestyle chasing greatness but then if i could have that separate account on on whether it's tick tock whether it's ig that it's like more so built around just product benefits and selling the product then you also again if you really want to protect your brand and this is like a very like niche way or not niche but a very like tiny way to do this is Don't even mention your product in the front of the video.
Just literally wait to mention your product until the end. And the hook is like, what are like five aspects of your dream creatine product if you were to create one today? And then you hit the five reasons.
And at the end of the video, you're like, I did make it actually. That's one way to do it. And that's, again, very paper performance.
Sell people on the benefit and the effect of the product before they see what the product is. For Ultra, this was a unique case where showing the product in a pay -per -performance ad in the first frame was very successful simply because nicotine pouches cannot advertise on paid social. And if it looks relatively close to a nicotine pouch, people go, what is that?
There's no way that's nicotine. And that was just like the most basic hook. It's a visual hook out the gate.
Yeah, that's not always the case for very pay -per -performance products that are very function focused. But yeah, for us, it's huge. Very helpful.
Very helpful. Of course. How important is differentiation in your strategy?
It's huge. It's everything because of how the most recent algorithms reward those who are advertising. It's all downstream from that.
It was completely to our advantage back in the OG tube science days to do one shoot. maybe like every three months and then just reuse that footage constantly. I mean, one of the brands that eventually exited through Nestle and then just like died was called Freshly.
It was ready meal deliveries. So that's the first account that I really scaled at TubeScience. And we used the same fricking steak shot of like gravy pouring on steak from literally our first shoot for maybe three years.
And that is simply not, that is actually punished in today's meta delivery. It's craving new visual. Now, the problem to solve is not how do I hack the algorithm and find a way through like burner paid ad accounts or something to keep running the same visuals.
The hack is how do I get more visuals, more ads. um for the same or less money um one the benefits to that one meta is going to deliver your shit without you having to be hacky about it and two it's the right incentive for you to unlock new angles and for you to continuously listen to your customers and reinvent how you talk about your product and progress it and evolve it um like it's it's a healthy pressure yeah yeah i feel like uh to your point earlier you're like should i launch paid or not And I mean, when you talk about ultra, you talk about grooms, you talk about any IMA, whatever, like we now live in a world where if you understand creative diversity and angles, funnels, all these different things, like you really can reach an insane outcome, you know, in like 14 to 16 months for the paid ad strategy, which like you already have the organic side down.
So like not launching paid would just be like, why? And that's where I'm at. I'm like, we've published 12 pieces of content on the onto page, 500 ,000 views in the last 30 days, all organic, where I'm like, you know.
I think the difference is that he's bootstrapping it and that like putting that investment into shooting different creative and different messaging angles is going to teach you more about what works because you're still going to get delivery on those and you're whatever is going to get better delivery is, I mean. Really, as any performance marketer knows, you're looking at what gets the most spend, and that's very strongly correlated with what gets the most conversion.
And so the closest thing to that is what's getting the most views and most impressions. And so if you're fully bootstrapping, I think it makes sense for organic. As soon as, though, you have something that's resonating, yeah, paid.
Go paid. My unfair advantage is... So I have a content studio that focuses on nothing but organic content for brands in the health, wellness, supplement space, and in a lot of luxury fashion space.
But that's completely what we focus on. We have a 12 -person content team. The goal is being able to place that content team now inside of Honda to be able to rip as much content as possible.
My overarching goal after we launch is, can we get to 3 to 5 million pretty fast through the run rate via organic? and then raise because we'd be able to raise at a much higher valuation out you know out the gate if we could do it um after proven via organic and then raise capital and then infuse a ton of pain i i would say getting the return on organic to then fund your raise like you could we could unlock some messaging angles in a couple weeks and then go put that in paid and then raise based off of success both on organic and paid I would do my recommendation.
And how much capital do you think that, that. A hundred K. Yeah.
I mean, that'd be a great start. Yeah. A hundred K would be a great start.
People launch brands like 25 bands. I've, I've been like all gun shy about like putting real money into a lot of these things. And like, people will just be like, why not just launch it with like 25?
And I'm like, damn, I thought I needed like 300, you know? Um, but I mean, I think, I forget who it was. Someone, someone was like, yeah, I launched my brand with $50 ,000.
Um, but I mean. generally speaking you think like you know you're also just testing right like cac ltv payback period that's really all these investors sophisticated investors are going to care about and then what you do is you kind of model that inflation of cac over your new incremental levels of scale which is kind of why i was trying to like prod him a little bit i was like tell me exactly how you modeled your 14 month payback period um but yeah yeah so yeah i mean Go to paid sooner than that, I would say, because being able to learn and show that when you're raising is, it's going to show your investors a more realistic picture of what growing the brand is actually going to look like too.
Dude, Levi, this was so fun, man. Of course, man. Yeah.
This was great. Are we already at time? That was crazy fast.
all right time amazing yeah dude uh where can i do you want them to follow you on social media anywhere like anywhere you want to direct people ultra pouches okay go buy some ultra pouches uh if you really need to lock in get a double lock in going better than nicotine focus our hero skew sleep came out a couple months ago and then energy which is a caffeine packed pouch mainly for pre -workouts actually we've leaned into that with a whole product yeah um yeah Do you have one of the sleep pouches by any chance?
I did. Yeah, I brought some sleep pouches. Okay, I would love to try it.
Yeah, they're really nice. Cool.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A nicotine-free pouch went from first ads to a $100 million run rate in under a year. The person who scaled its creative says the trick is not cleverness: it is listening for the one thing a customer says the product does, putting it in a real situation, and shipping new footage faster than Meta can get bored of it.
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Two agency founders lay out a 30-day sprint of copy work, shot listing, and five posting formats, designed to be run before any growth tactic gets touched.
Devon Levesque and Albert Matheny on building a nine-figure supplement empire without running a single paid ad for years -- and the philosophy that makes it last.
A paid-social agency opens a real Meta ads account on screen to show why three to five ads carry most accounts, and the weekly system that keeps new winners coming before the old ones fatigue.
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