Daniel Crocker

@oliviaakory Please put this on a billboard

Quote of the week from a VP growth “I run our ads creative, not our brand team. And I build creative that gets me in trouble with my brand team. All of our winning ads get me in trouble. Then my brand team comes and says ‘we made an on brand version’ and I tell them that’s not the point.” 👏 👏👏👏👏

@dennishegstad this is perfectly said. i wish more execs understood this. at this point IMO: creators > influencers

A lot of the time I think influencers spend more time influencing marketers than they do consumers.

I cringeeee whenever I hear consumer brands say “We want to be the Apple of X” at this point because you are literally shooting your own growth in the foot, and here’s what I mean: It is TABLE STAKES for anyone selling a product today (physical or digital) to get eyeballs online. But consumers are inundated with ads, which means we have shifted from a brand/aesthetic centric environment to attention based ones. Apple doesn't have to play this game because it’s a 50 year old company with an ecosystem that’s impossible to leave, but you sell t-shirts/gummies/wallets… YOU ARE NOT THE SAME. You need a smartphone —> Apple is one of 3 companies that make them —> so they get to run pretty, brand-forward ads to broad audiences. But you are selling clothing/gadgets/CPG —> you are not special, you are a commodity —> you need to make hyper-specific, attention grabbing advertising that’s messy, rough around the edges, and actually hooks people. I’ve worked for a handful of consumer brands at this point, I talk to people in the industry all the time, and the BIGGEST internal fight that everyone is having is brand vs performance. In 2026, performance needs to trump brand 8 out of 10 times. If you are a brand guru reading this you probably hate hearing this, but it’s the truth. Stop saying "ItS nOt On BrAnD" and start taking more chances. I’m not saying you can’t still have a nice looking brand, but you need to leave room for your content to be messy, be authentic, and be bold otherwise you are gonna be dead in the water. And if you don’t believe me, even fictional advertising legend Don Draper agrees with me on this one 🤷🏻‍♂️

@_kaushalshah sounds like you need a new social manager asap, it’s literally their job to make content interesting enough to watch

Our social media manager was saying this - “Putting efforts on posting good content on Instagram regularly feels like a waste of time as only 10 people likes the photo even though we have a genuine 10k followers” and I silently agreed to this as I know IG hardly promotes organic content

@aakashgupta And now she runs a gambling platform disguised as investing. Great back story but nothing about how Kalshi is impacting the world is inspiring

Her ballet teachers held lit cigarettes under her thigh to test how long she could hold her leg to her ear without getting burned. She was 10. Luana Lopes Lara spent 8 years at Brazil's Bolshoi Ballet Academy. 97 applicants for every spot. 13-hour days. Classmates hid glass shards in each other's shoes. She graduated, performed Swan Lake in Austria, then quit ballet entirely at 18 to study computer science at MIT. She interned at Bridgewater and Citadel during summers. Then cofounded Kalshi with her MIT classmate in 2018. They spent two years with no product, no revenue, nothing. The entire company was a regulatory application to the CFTC. Then she made the call that changed everything. She pushed to sue the CFTC for blocking election contracts. Her own regulator. The agency that gave them their license. Everyone told her the odds were below 1%. She won. Kalshi did $1B in Super Bowl volume alone. Valuation went $2B → $5B → $11B → $22B in nine months. $1.5B revenue run rate. Her 12% stake is now worth roughly $2.6 billion. She's 29. Bolshoi trains you for one thing above all else: staying in position when everything in your body is telling you to quit. Turns out that's the entire job description of building a regulated financial exchange from zero.

@alexgroberman this is why. him’s didn’t make fake doctor testimonials and use AI ugc

Confused as to why Matthew Gallagher and Medvi are catching so much heat. Still haven't seen one person calling them scammers explain why. The New York Times verified the financials. Hims and Hers is a publicly traded telehealth company prescribing the same category of weight loss drugs through the same type of online platform. They did $2.35 billion in revenue last year with 2,442 employees. Nobody calls them a scam. Ro raised over $1 billion in funding to build a telehealth platform that prescribes GLP-1 weight loss medications through online consultations. They were valued at $7 billion in 2022 and employ between 500 and 1,000 people. Nobody calls them a scam. Noom generates over $750 million a year in revenue and launched its own GLP-1 program in September 2024. It reached a $100 million run rate in GLP-1 revenue within four months. Nobody calls them a scam. LifeMD did $194 million in revenue with over 300 employees. Cerebral raised $462 million in venture capital. WeightWatchers paid $106 million to acquire a telehealth platform called Sequence just to get into this space. Amazon started offering GLP-1 prescriptions through Amazon Pharmacy in January. These are all doing essentially the same thing: connecting patients with licensed prescribers through an online platform to access weight loss medications. The model is identical. The regulatory framework is the same. The drugs are the same. The difference is that Gallagher did it with two people and $20,000 worth of AI tools instead of 2,000 employees and a billion dollars in venture capital. Yes, the FDA sent Medvi a warning letter for how it marketed compounded GLP-1 products. They sent the same letter to tens of other telehealth companies on the same day. It was an industry-wide crackdown on how compounded drugs are marketed, not a Medvi-specific action. The concerns about compounded drug safety and marketing practices are real and worth taking seriously. But the people calling Gallagher a scammer are not upset about FDA compliance so much as they are upset about what a two-person company generating $401 million in revenue means for businesses that raised hundreds of millions in funding to do the same thing with a hundred times the staff. The infrastructure advantage is gone. The moat that used to protect large companies was never the product so much as it was the cost of building the product. It was the engineering team, the design team, the customer service department, the marketing staff, the legal team, the operations team. It was the fact that standing all of that up required years of runway and tens of millions of dollars. That is what kept two-person competitors out. And that barrier disappeared the moment AI tools made it possible for one person to do the work of dozens. This is exactly what is happening across most marketing budgets right now. The businesses spending $30,000 a month on a marketing agency, $15,000 a month on paid ad management, $10,000 a month on social media, and $8,000 a month on a PR retainer are operating on the same assumption the telehealth companies with 2,000 employees were operating on: that headcount and budget are the moat. That spending more means building more. That the size of the team determines the quality of the output. It does not. Not anymore. (If you want to see where your site stands across Google and AI search, start here: seo-stuff.com/free-audit) SEO and AI search visibility is the channel where this shift hits hardest. Building real search authority used to require a dedicated content team, a backlink outreach department, a technical SEO specialist, and years of consistent investment before anything compounded. It still requires the strategy and the consistency. But the infrastructure needed to execute it has collapsed. One person with AI tools and the right search strategy can now publish authoritative content, build topical depth, earn citations from AI answer engines, and compound domain authority at a pace that would have required a 15-person team three years ago. When ChatGPT cites a source, it does not check how many employees the company has. When Google's AI Overview selects a reference, it does not evaluate the size of the marketing budget behind it. When Perplexity assembles an answer, it does not care whether the content was written by a solo founder or a 200-person content team. These systems evaluate authority, depth, and relevance. That is it. The infrastructure moat is gone. The only moat left is whether you built something worth citing. The businesses still spending six figures a month across five different agencies are the Cerebral of marketing: $462 million raised, and a two-person company is generating more revenue doing the same thing with better tools. That is the gap SEO Stuff was built to close. seo-stuff.com Nobody called Hims a scam when they hit $2.35 billion with 2,442 employees. The model was the same. The drugs were the same. The platform was the same. The only thing that changed is that someone figured out how to do it with two people and $20,000, and that made everyone uncomfortable. The question is whether your marketing budget is still built on the assumption that headcount and spend are the moat, or whether you have figured out that the only moat left is authority, and authority does not care how big your team is.

Goddamn… who doesn’t wanna run through a brick wall after reading this

@thattallguy This is so scummy. AI doctor pages that don’t exist? No one should be praising business practices like this

Looks like they're creating a bunch of sock-puppet accounts (Doctors, wellness professionals) and running ads through them. Dropped some screen shots below. Im sure this is a widely used strategy, but does make my spidey senses tingle.

@brian_blum1 The AI UGC part is a giant lawsuit waiting to happen. Fictional people claiming they got weight loss results from a product they never used is textbook deceptive advertising… yikes

Storytime for people who don't think this is real.. Last year I launched a GLP1 biz as well We did ~$20m in rev in 6 months It's surprisingly easy to setup but ruthlessly competitive because there is virtually no differentiation. Every brand is selling the same stuff. As a result it is a pure marketing arms race, and Medvi was the best. They are known for a few things - Shadowy billing practices - Highest converting lead funnel - Running thousands of AI UGC / Theme Pages When you search Medvi in the Meta Ads library, you'd almost never see something running from their page. They heavily rely on partnership ads, whitelisting and listicles / advertorials. On top of leaning heavily into publisher affiliate (Forbes "Best GLP1 Providers") and TikTok's beta for telehealth. Our funnel was primarily Meta Ads using TikTok Shop style UGC. Worked well til it didn't The customer is very price conscious and as a result, switches between several brands' intro offers. So tons of brands spent into CAC's expecting LTV's that didn't materialize. Huge revenue numbers but not a ton of super profitable companies. Anyways, i've never seen the speed with which we got to $4m/mo in rev. The market was that good. And behind the scenes everyone knew Medvi, Remedy Meds, Amble were doing $300M+ Everything in the article is true and this guy is a dog

@Danielsrotaryo1 @AlexReimer1 rent prices haven’t tho. all they do is build luxury housing for the rich which means you have to live outside the city if you are younger

@danieljcrockerr @AlexReimer1 LOL it's actually gotten better.

Boston is way too expensive and not nearly cool enough for young people to stay. You pay NYC prices for a parochial experience. The state government is totally devoid of innovative leaders or legislators who even pass much of anything. Massachusetts is in trouble.

@nypost slow day huh?

Kai Trump was miles away at Miami Open during Tiger Woods crash trib.al/cFVy170

@WesamMikhail @kylegawley well said man

@kylegawley AI is good depending on what you compare it to. And most people compare it to themselves. That tells you a lot about how bad they are, not how good AI is.

why is everyone lying about how good AI is?

@drewfallon12 and they say AI will be replacing everyone’s marketing teams…. lol

take my money

@alexxgrowth i get creators/brands, but i don’t follow on the platforms part?

everyone can make money with organic marketing: - the platforms - the creators - the brands one of the only business models that makes EVERYONE money

@WhaleInsider gambling market*

JUST IN: Kalshi prediction market raises over $1 billion at valuation of $22 billion in new financing round.

@mansourtarek_ 👎🏻 You continue to hawk this product just like a gambling site despite avoiding all of the rules they have to follow. Gambling is destroying thousands of lives in this country. It’s a shame what Kalshi has become.

90 minutes left to attempt generational wealth. The odds are not zero. And it's free. You owe it to your grandchildren.

Big consulting is gonna be COOKED soon: check out this BCG ad that openly admits modern consulting is nothing more than AI generated summaries, and uses terms like “complex client engagements” and “high impact solutions” to make the work sound more sophisticated than it is😂

@mikefutia making up fabricated before and afters? this is textbook deceptive advertising, we need to do better than this this is garbage

AI UGC is f*cking cracked 🤯 This fitness transformation video got 15 million views on Instagram. None of it is real. Every frame is AI. Stack: → Nano Banana 2 for seed images → Kling for animation → CapCut to splice it together The whole video is just static AI images animated one by one and clipped into a 20-second transformation. No actors, no shoots, no editing team. Perfect for DTC brands and agencies running UGC-style ads on Meta and TikTok who want to test transformation creatives at scale. I recorded a 30-minute step-by-step Loom walking through the entire process: From generating seed images, to animating each frame, to editing the final video in CapCut. Want the the Loom video for free? > Like this post > Comment "UGC" And I'll send it over (must be following so I can DM)

@RobertFreundLaw interesting