Portfolio Update + First 6 Month Overview

It feels like I have been heads down trying to make sure I continue to share as much value through shit posts on Twitter/X while focusing on building and scaling our brands while also supporting my team that works with our incredible clients.

I have not been as consistent in my newsie as I would have liked, but I am making sure to send out 2x a month moving forward. I don’t have a sponsor so it isn’t making me money, I am just going to share what is working for me, and I will just ask you to help others as you build your brand/agency/business.

Portfolio Update: May

Brand 1 - 907k - 11% MoM growth

Brand 2 - 222k - 99% MoM growth

We have two brands that are growing at different phases. We are happy about the growth and expansion. I find it interesting to see how things are going and what is working for one brand and not the other. I’ve found that there are clearly different phases of growth which I’ve shared in this previous newsletter.

In the end, it gets harder to scale over time, but there are some key factors that can help unlock growth and scale. That’s for another newsletter though.

We hit our monthly goals for both brands and we are continuing to learn through the process. Just to give some of you hope, here’s a screenshot for our smaller brands revenue in August of 2023 (I was about to give up)

I think the thought process was:

• We are spending 3k/month on ad spend and our CVR is TERRIBLE

• This is not going to work, we need to shut it down

• Fuck fuck fuck we put in 25k into this brand 😭 

Pretty much in that order. But then I spent a good amount of time reviewing our funnel, competitors, creative, language, and positioning and I decided we needed to take some major big swings to adjust our messaging to turn things around.

And almost 2 years later ‼️ we are at a much different position and growing fast. This is something I don’t believe is possible for all brands, but I also think it comes down to a few key learnings:

1. Positioning & Research

2. Creative testing process

So I will walk through what helped us grow the brand to where we are today (will get to around 4-5M this year). And then in future newsletters I will talk about what it will take to expand and grow our brands including how we are thinking about: media buying, creative, hiring (in house, agency, etc), as well as problems we’re facing as we scale.

Positioning

This is something that I think is extremely important and I followed a few different directions to uncover this early on before we had any customer data. We had an idea of what kind customers we would be bringing in. We thought it was specific to a certain issue we could address. The problem was it wasn’t a present pain point and it was actually not even a big deal to most people.

So we were seeing wildly high CACs, like $85+ and low CVR. This was a problem that needed to be solved. Once I did a bunch of research about our competitors and read thousands (literally) of competitor reviews on Amazon, competitor websites, etc — I realized that the problem wasn’t what we launched with and talked about in our ad copy and landing page copy.

So I immediately had our team adjust our ads (all statics early on) and changed the language in our landing page to focus on the specific pain point. Generally I find in the health & wellness space that you need present pain points for things to really hit home.

One example of this is if someone is dealing with acne and you have a beef tallow brand, you would be better off hitting on the bad skin pain point than talking about how much more soft your skin will be after using the tallow.

I think this is especially important in the health & wellness space. People are struggling with something at this very moment.

So that is what helped us scale early on.

Eventually, we started digging into our post-purchase surveys and made massive adjustments to our survey and now have about 30 questions that are logic-based. Built by Steven from Knocommerce and it’s amazing.

We learned that almost 50% of our customers were buying for someone else. That’s helpful but then we dug some more and found through the post-purchase survey that those customers were buying for their son/daughter.

Massive unlock.

This created a whole new angle for us and essentially helped us scale up spend to a completely new audience that was already buying but we confirmed through post-purchase they are there.

As you scale, you should be able to find these windows of people through your post-purchase surveys + reviews that can help you find new angles to scale spend behind. Early on, you research competitors to understand this, then as you scale you research your customers to understand this in a deeper way.

You need to know where your customers are hanging out. What they’re reading, what they’re using, what content they’re consuming, what they are worried about.

Also, when someone is buying for someone else the pain point isn’t as big of a deal at times. Usually it actually is a bit more motivational. For example, you may be able to talk about an end result that would be amazing for the individual.

Going back to the Beef Tallow example. You could talk about someone’s son who feels confident and has clear skin after just 6 weeks (talk to your lawyer about this type of claim on Facebook though ha).

But just as this example shows — it’s less about the pain point than it is the actual end result. If someone is buying for someone else this is going to be a better way to position at times.

Creative Testing Process

With limited resources, you need to be able to be scrappy with what you have. We operate each brand in their own bucket of resources. So that means we aren’t sharing resources between brands.

This forces us to either grow or die. We have launched 4 brands and 2 have succeeded and 2 have died. That’s ok.

So what is our process from early on to where we are today? First off, static ads are what you want to try to test a lot at the beginning. It’s easy to execute and test a lot of different variations and wildly different colors, angles, language, and even offers in the content.

Then as you scale a bit I highly recommend testing out mini clips. I have talked about this in previous newsletters as well and some of you have sent me messages later on saying they have worked really well for you. I think one guy has scaled to like 700k/mo and has been using mini clips a lot.

I love that.

Essentially you can use copy that is winning copy in your static ads or other ads and add it to b-roll related to your product/brand. I think it’s a really easy way to grow and a low cost way.

Eventually you need to be creating authentic UGC content with strong creators, and then you can invest in more high quality creative over time. I would say our smaller brand is not even there yet. We are using a few creators that fit our target demographic but our goal is to be scrappy AF until we really need to scale down the line in terms of creative.

I am currently building out a plan to budget about 8% of our ad spend to creative budget like my buddy Zach Stuck talks about in some of his content. That is quite a bit of a budget but I almost guarantee most of you are under budgeting on your creative budget.

If you think you’re spending enough, you’re probably not.

We definitely are not spending enough and need to up our creative budget drastically. That is part of our plan as we continue to grow.

Growing Pains

I think it’s important to note that scaling fast (we’re pacing 10x for our smaller brand and 40% for our bigger brand) that there are things that break you need to fix.

I think one of the next newsletters I will talk about some of the issues we have had in scaling our bigger brand to the next level and what it will take to get there. I really liked a post from a really smart dude on Twitter about this here:

This is some of the best advice I’ve seen in a while. If you’re in this range in terms of profit months I truly believe this is your best path to truly scale fast. But for us inventory has been a process and we have been self-funded (bootstrapped) which has its own pitfalls which is usually slower growth.

I feel pretty happy about our growth and what we have been able to do with a nimble and small team and I feel bullish on our future but I realize it’s always going to take more learning and growing to get to the next level.

Conclusion

We are still growing and I will be sharing more tactical insights as I am very involved in growing and scaling our own brands along with our client brands. I think it’s really fun for me and I am finding a lot of joy in the struggle of scaling. But every problem brings a new solution and learning lesson.

Ways to work with me or support me:

Agency partnership: We are looking for one new health & wellness brand for 2025. We are working with 8 brands including 2 of our own and only have room for one more this year. If you’d like to learn more about our work and how we can support you (through creative strategy/production + media buying) you can do so here. We are a true growth partner and we would be supporting growth as we do for our own brands and brands like Carnivore Snax and others.

Consulting Call: If you want advice on scaling your agency or your brand, I am happy to help. I usually keep this to no more than 3 calls a month. You can find a time to meet with me here. I don’t talk offer this outside of my newsletter readers.