Prosper Pathway

… And the biggest and most successful agency founders will double down on OWNED media with their personal brands I never treated it as the most important thing in my business until the past few years. If I could go back, I would’ve started building out my owned channels more aggressively MUCH sooner. It takes a lot of time and it’s a whole different world from paid ads, but the ROI is insane. 90% of our business comes from it.

8 years ago my life sucked, but I felt like I had no better options: – $1M and 60%+ margins in year 1 of business – Every decision running through me – Dealing with super simple questions from the team – Replying to Slack in under 5 minutes – Ending every day exhausted and calling it productive – Counting down to an exit I hadn't even planned yet Then I realized I didn't actually want the exit. I wanted a business I loved running. 9 years, 75 people, and 400+ brands later, here's what the day looks like now: – $400M in attributed revenue – Lower margins, but amazing 75+ person team – People on payroll better than me at their jobs – One hard problem solved instead of 40 small ones – Wanting to keep playing instead of plotting the exit – Leaving the desk before dark with energy for my family The question is: which one are you optimizing for?

Got a DM from a guy in Riyadh last week. $18k/day on a single skincare offer. Same product he sells in the US for half that volume. He told me his entire Saudi creative library was reverse-engineered from active ads he scraped off gethookd, then localized by a native Arabic copywriter before launch. Saudi Arabia is the most underrated premium ecom market on the planet right now and almost nobody in the US ecom scene is paying attention. 35 million people. Among the highest disposable income per capita in the region. Smartphone penetration above 95%. Meta CPMs at $4-9 on most niches. AOVs run 50-80% higher than the US for the same products because the buyer behavior is premium-first and discount-resistant. The catch is regulatory. You need Arabic creative done by a native. You need a payment processor that supports SAR. Some product categories (anything wellness-adjacent) need clearance from SFDA before you can ship. Not easy. Not untapped. But worth testing for any premium brand willing to do the regulatory homework — the AOV uplift alone makes the friction math out.

Everyone fixes the obvious technical issues. Broken links. Missing meta tags. Slow page speed. That’s not where technical SEO wins are hiding. Here are the technical SEO wins that actually move rankings: 🧵👇

Has it only been 4 days since Commerce Roundtable Austin?! Taking my dogs for a long walk in silence, grateful for the incredible week we had and thankful for the community Thank you to everyone who attended from around the world Thank you to the amazing speakers who crushed it Thank you to the incredible team who made it happen Thank you to our incredible MC @iamshackelford Thank you to the sponsors who supported us Thank you to all the event vendors and helpers Thank you to all our partners Thank you to the City of Austin Proud to say we did it again I appreciate the supporters, the haters and the lurkers. You all make me better❤️ Going to get much needed R&R this weekend See you in San Diego: Sept 21-22 for CR San Diego! Have an amazing weekend everyone ✌️

Few ads I made with GPT Images 2.0:

Taking it a step further for a new concept:

3 things ecom founders get wrong about their credit card: 1. The cashback trap “1% back on $100k in spending is $1,000.” Founders don’t even realize how much this kind of thinking leaves money on the table. 2. The statement cycle problem You accumulate a balance all month then pay it off in one lump sum before you can keep spending. Nobody questions it because that's just how cards work. 3. Limits tied to your bank balance Your credit limit should be tied to your revenue, not whatever cash is sitting in your account that day.

25 AI tools you NEED in 2026 1. Claude.ai – solves anything 2. Ranked.ai – rank higher on Google, ChatGPT, Claude, Etc! 3. Syllaby.io - create viral AI videos that you can monetize 4. Wisprflow.com - AI powered speech-to-text 5. Skysnail.io - create perfect YouTube thumbnails 6. GetViktor.com – AI employee in your Slack 7. Threadmaster.ai - create viral Facebook posts 8. Submagic.co – turn long videos into shorts 9. Hellowarrant.com – marketing compliance to not get fined 10. Gemini.google.com – best ai photo editor 11. Fastread.io - create ebooks & audiobooks 12. Bibley.io - ai for Bible study 13. Manus.im - the ultimate ai agent 14. Heygen.com – creates AI avatars 15. Webinarkit.com - ai for webinars 16. Creatorunlock.com - ai for YouTube 17. Getmakerai.com - build and sell software 18. Adcreative.ai - ai tool for advertising 19. Canva.com - design anything 20. Brandbutler.ai - create a perfect brand identity 21. Replit.com – the most powerful vibe code tool 22. Perplexity.ai - computer, is a powerful AI agent 23. Anderro.com - best affiliate marketing platform 24. suno.com - create ai music 25. gohighlevel.com/austinarmstrong - best ai marketing tool Read the first comment 📷

Nano Banana Is FREE. OpenClaw is FREE. Syllaby is FREE (free trial). Claude AI is FREE. Microsoft Copilot is FREE. Perplexity AI is FREE. Bing Image Creator is FREE. Grok is FREE. Playground AI is FREE. Runway ML is FREE (limited). Pika Labs is FREE. ElevenLabs is FREE. Audacity is FREE. DaVinci Resolve is FREE. OBS Studio is FREE. Blender is FREE. Figma is FREE. Photopea is FREE. Deepseek is FREE. QuillBot is FREE. DeepL is FREE. Tome is FREE. Gamma is FREE (limited). Notion is FREE. Zapier is FREE. HuggingFace Spaces is FREE. Wifi is FREE. (Public libraris, coffee shops, malls, bars etc) The internet is your free university. Stop looking for excuses. Start building today 📷

2009-2014: - $500 for an ebook - Course era hit - Wild West 2015-2019: - ClickFunnels shows up (now a multi $1,000,000,000 brand) - Behemoth funnels - Huge automation sequences 2020-2022: - COVID hits - Digital product sales exploded (2,000,000,000+ buyers) - Dropshipping took off 2023-2024: - Skool was in its heyday (Hormozi bought it) - Online communities in general took off 2024-2025: - Grifters move onto AI (adoption 2x’d from 33% to 71%). - People said digital products are dead - They’re wrong 2026-beyond: - Digital products can be apps now (75% of new apps are built with no-code tools) - Things with inherent obvious value that sell themselves. Digital products have always been the greatest customer acquisition tool ever created. They cost you nothing to spin up, you can test endlessly, and every customer you get is a credit card on file you can sell to again. The model will never die.

"Healthmaxxing" is a scam. More is not better. I got a near six pack at almost 48 by removing one food my bloodwork told me was destroying me from the inside. Get your bloodwork done, run a food sensitivity test, track your biomarkers. Knowing your own body will do more for you than any biohacker's supplement shill.

Most Amazon brands are running 1 or 2 of the 5 ad formats Amazon offers. The other 3 sit untouched. That's where the compounding revenue is. Here's the full stack a serious account should be running and where brands typically leave money on the table: >> Sponsored Products - highest intent format on the platform. Shoppers are actively searching for what you sell. Accounts for 60-80% of most ad budgets. If the structure is wrong, everything downstream suffers. >> Sponsored Brands - banner ads at the top of search results featuring your logo, headline, and up to 3 products. 60-75% of traffic from these campaigns comes from new-to-brand shoppers. Also includes video format inside search results that drives 2x the click-through rate of static ads. >> Sponsored Display - the only sponsored format that runs both on and off Amazon. No minimum spend. Most brands use it for retargeting only. The competitor-targeting and audience-based placements are where challenger brands actually take share. >> Sponsored TV - non-skippable video ads on Prime Video, Fire TV, Freevee, and Twitch. Fully self-serve, no minimum spend, no Seller Central account required. Upper funnel reach with Amazon's first-party data precision. >> Amazon DSP - programmatic ads across Amazon properties and the open web. Display, streaming TV, audio, and video. Uses Amazon's first-party purchase and browsing data for audience targeting that no other platform can replicate. Minimum spend starts around $5K/month, so it is built for brands playing at scale. One ad type captures demand. The full stack builds it, retargets it, and compounds it across every stage of the funnel. Most brands are running the capture. Almost none are running the compounding.

Your website had 2,000 visitors last week, you converted maybe 40 of them, and the other 1,960 were your exact ICP browsing your best pages, and you have absolutely no idea who any of them were

Ankur Nagpal (founder who built and exited Teachable) sold his next company, but there are 2 different stories at play here. The first is the obvious one. Breaking the company into distinct value pods, each sold to the buyer best positioned to compound it. That's a sophisticated move, and most founders never even consider it. But the more important story is underneath. At about $4M ARR after 3.5 years, this was no longer on a clear venture-scale trajectory. Good business, real assets, strong product, but the path to a generational outcome was narrowing. That is when great operators shift the lever. There's usually a tell when you're at that point. Growth is solid but no longer accelerating. The buyer universe starts to fragment. Different parts of the business are worth more to different owners than they are together. When growth alone won't carry the outcome, structure becomes the strategy. Running two processes here wasn't just clever. It avoided a blended discount from a single buyer and let each part clear at its highest value. There's also a broader point easy to miss in posts like this. The headline exits people see are far more nuanced when you understand the underlying deal mechanics. Preferences, dilution, earnouts, and role transitions. Sophisticated founders optimize for how value flows through the cap table: > Who gets paid first > How much goes to investors vs founders > What's left after preferences and terms are satisfied Often very different from the headline number. These outcomes often come down to aligning time horizons. Investors seeking liquidity, buyers with longer-term compounding ability, and founders redeploying into their next opportunity. And depending on the funding structure, time itself can become expensive. > Participation > Liquidation preferences > PIK-style terms… ..quietly compound in the background, compressing founder equity the longer a company takes to reach an ideal outcome. Sometimes the right move is to transact before those dynamics work against you. None of that takes away from the execution here. If anything, it reinforces it. Recognizing reality early and optimizing for the best available outcome is a rarer skill than holding out for a perfect narrative.

met a guy doing $10M/yr from a YT channel: -> boutique IT consulting for Boomer business owners on one specific software suite -> ugly YouTube channel, simple screen recordings, basic thumbnails, no production value -> he's number one in his niche on YouTube and the content does the selling for him -> his service is stickier than anything I've seen, basically no churn -> costs clients less than a full-time IT hire, and they get a specialist instead of a generalist -> doing well over $10M/yr, probably closer to $20M+ -> projected exit in the $200 to $300M range because of how sticky the client base is -> nobody in the YouTube world even knows he exists if you saw his channel tomorrow, you'd assume he was wasting his time the loudest channels are rarely the richest ones

I built a $90M brand working 2-3 hours a day. At 35, these are the 10 things I wish I'd normalised sooner: - No alcohol - No parties - Train every day - Asleep by 10 pm - Wake up at 5 am - Work 2-3 hours daily - Journal every morning - Give back every week - Cut low-frequency people - Meditate before your phone One year of this gave me a $1M day, 6.8% body fat, and my dream wife.

Kinda feels like Claude + Obsidian is my best employee now. Whenever I have a problem, I ask, and it immediately one-shots the answer. It’s based on a vault of knowledge where I uploaded everything. - Staff names, their roles, pay - What each person does - The depth of their role - How they're paid - How much money we’re making Everything is in there, so it has perfect context and remembers all the little details I forget. So when I come to it with a real operational problem (hiring, restructuring, pricing, a workflow that's broken), it already knows the full picture of the business. So I get an answer in literally 5 seconds. And I’m not spending thousands on a manager or consultant to do it.

300+ winning Collagen & Hair Growth ads running on Facebook right now. Peptides, biotin, keratin supplements. Videos, statics, UGC. All currently active. Full swipe file below. Study them. Replicate them. Print. app.gethookd.ai/share/board/15… app.gethookd.ai/share/board/15… I use @GetHookdAI to spy on 80M+ winning ads. They scrape 110,000+ brands daily on Facebook. NOW GO FUCKING PRINT 🔥

This advertorial is fucking genius. RejuvaCare built a landing page that 1,679 ads are driving to. Here's the full breakdown 🧵