Ashley Wright

The $40M TikTok Shop Playbook @MROJayHunter CRO of @MaryRuths, breaks down exactly how they scaled on TikTok Shop. No fluff. No gatekeeping. Just the full strategy. You don't want to miss (Link below)

When Everything Falls Apart — That’s Your Biggest Opportunity

UGC farming is getting airtime now because the bigger brands are starting to talk about it. We were running it before TikTok Shop existed. What's actually changed is the infrastructure. TikTok Shop makes the harvest layer almost trivial. Creator sourcing, sample seeding, and testing with GMV Max are all native to the platform. What used to take five different tools and a lot of manual work is just built in now. But most people talking about UGC farming are glossing over the part that actually matters. It works when you have a hero SKU and a cultural angle the algorithm can latch onto. Without those two things, you're just sending out samples and hoping something sticks. The method was never the moat. Anyone can read the playbook and copy the steps. What they can't copy is the operating layer underneath, like how you build commission architecture, how you develop creator relationships over time, how you read what the algorithm is rewarding this week, and move before everyone else catches on. That's where the real advantage is.

If Meta and Google aren't working, TikTok Shop won't fix it. It'll just reveal more cracks faster. Most brands come to us assuming TikTok Shop runs separately from the rest of their business. It plugs straight into the same fulfilment, the same customer service, the same margin structure, the same returns rate. If CAC is broken on Meta because the product positioning is weak, TikTok Shop will just sell that weak version faster, generate worse reviews, and tank shop health in the process. If fulfilment is already struggling at 50 orders a day, a single TikTok live can hit you with 500 and break the whole operation overnight. If contribution margin is thin before commission, every affiliate sale will cost you money. Most brands don't realise any of this until month three, when the GMV looks great and the bank account tells a completely different story. The brands compounding on TikTok Shop right now arrived with the ecosystem already working. Meta paying efficiently. Amazon stable. Margin healthy enough to absorb a 10 to 15% commission. Operations able to flex with demand. TikTok Shop elevates a working business and exposes a broken one. If the foundations are shaky, fix those first. Arrive on TikTok Shop with momentum rather than hoping the platform creates it for you. What's actually broken in your business before TikTok Shop is the question worth answering first.

You’re Not a Brand — You’re Just the Middleman

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This is/was an absolute must!! Every top club has the resources to be doing this now, and I’d put money on it becoming a regular feature across the league soon. Can’t wait to see what they’ve got 👀

@andrehaykaljr Congrats brother

I became a father yesterday. Momma and baby are healthy. Thank you God for this most amazing miracle 🙏

TikTok Shop just opened the highest-margin category in its history. Most brands will not be allowed in. Last month, TikTok Shop launched Virtual Goods in the US, invite-only. Gift cards, video game codes, and software licences. Three product types, one very different margin profile. Physical D2C runs at a 30 to 60% margin. Digital goods run at 70 to 95%. But the margin isn't what's keeping brands out. Every seller in this category has to issue codes via API within two hours of an order being placed. That's the real filter, and it has nothing to do with who wants in or who has the right product. It comes down to who can actually fulfil that operationally. There's also a $500 retail cap per product and no way to convert back to physical once you're set up as a digital goods seller. So the decision to enter is a one-way door. The UK and EU rollout is expected sometime in the next 6 to 12 months. The brands that get in now, prove their operational capability, and build their creator pipeline before the wider rollout will have a position that brands entering in 2027 simply cannot buy their way into. Early-mover advantage on TikTok Shop has always been about timing. In this category, it's structural.

TikTok Shop consumers behave differently from buyers on every other platform. On Meta, you're interrupting someone's scroll with an ad they didn't ask to see. On TikTok Shop, they're discovering your product through a creator they already trust. That's a completely different starting point for a purchase decision. The creator doesn't even need a big following. That's not how the algorithm works. What matters is whether the content resonates and the product fits the audience watching it. What drives the purchase is the story. Someone showing their acne before and after using a skincare product. Someone is demonstrating a kitchen tool in their own home. That kind of content does something a static ad never can. It lets the buyer see themselves in the result. People have always bought from people. TikTok Shop just made that happen at scale. With a checkout that never takes the customer off the platform, it's one of the most frictionless buying experiences in e-commerce right now. What other channel gives you a demo video and a buy button in the same scroll?

WOW what a read

Good products don't guarantee success on TikTok Shop. I've seen more brands fail from internal disagreement than from anything the platform threw at them. The founder or CMO is fully bought in, ready to scale, and excited about the opportunity. But the CFO is looking at a completely different set of numbers. TikTok Shop isn't hitting the same P&L benchmarks as Meta or Google, and suddenly, the conversation becomes why we are even spending money here. That tension alone is enough to kill momentum before it builds. We've had this happen with brands we were working with. The growth marketer was on board, things were moving in the right direction, and then they left. Someone new came in, had a different opinion on the platform, and everything we'd built started to fall apart. TikTok Shop has more variables than Meta or Google. It takes longer to see the full picture. If the people holding the budget see it as just another performance channel, they'll pull the plug before the results have any chance to compound. The whole team needs to be aligned before you launch. Everyone needs to understand what TikTok Shop is, what it takes, and what to expect in the early stages. If that alignment isn't there before you start, the platform will expose it faster than anything else.

North London Forever ❤️

My club also the best at marketing 🤣🤣🤣

@jerryjones99 🤣🤣🤣😅 post already drafted

Can't wait for Arsenal to win the league, so I can go on LinkedIn and post about the power of patience and perseverance during hard times.

SharkNinja takes their top TikTok Shop creators out for dinners. Most brands don't even reply when a creator messages them after posting. That gap is why some brands compound on TikTok Shop and others spend every month chasing a new batch of affiliates to replace the ones who stopped posting. The Comfort founder runs weekly calls with his top creators. Training sessions, product Q&A, telling them exactly what the brand needs next. The creators are posting because they're part of what the brand is building, not just for a commission. That changes the economics. In a transactional creator programme, your top 10% of creators drive 70-80% of GMV in any given month, but the names rotate. You're constantly acquiring, briefing, and re-briefing. In a relationship-led programme, the same creators show up month after month. New launches go live with a ready audience. Acquisition cost on creators drops because retention does the work. Most brands run the first model and wonder why their creator programme plateaus. Are you investing in your top 30 creators, or sending samples to 1000’s and hoping?

If a brand comes to us sceptical about TikTok Shop, we don't work with them. I know that sounds blunt, but if a brand isn't fully bought in before we start, every single bump in the road becomes a battle. Sales slow down for a week, and suddenly the whole channel is being questioned. A creator underperforms, and now the entire strategy is wrong. That's exhausting for everyone involved, and it doesn't serve the brand either. We've had brands jump on calls after seeing a LinkedIn post or a newsletter, and within five minutes, it's clear they want to test TikTok Shop with one hand tied behind their back. They can't commit to sending samples consistently. They don't want to put ad budget behind it. They want to try it for a month and see what happens. That's not how this works. TikTok Shop takes real investment, and it takes time to compound. If a brand isn't willing to commit to that fully, the results are never going to reflect what the platform is actually capable of. Then they'll leave thinking TikTok Shop doesn't work, when the reality is they never gave it a proper shot. I'd rather spend that time and energy on the brands that are fully committed and trust the process. Those are the partnerships that actually go somewhere. Scepticism isn't something we can build a successful partnership on top of.

@itsalexvacca Ads

We built 12 Claude Code skills that run our entire paid media ops across Google, Meta, and LinkedIn at ColdIQ (and we're giving the whole pack away). Our head of growth Ivan Falco runs $200K/month in ad spend from a terminal. It's how we doubled client load this year without losing quality. The skills do the work that used to fill our media buyers' calendars: spot creative fatigue, adjust bids, upload audiences, run bulk edits, flag broken campaigns, build reports. Each skill does a specific job: Google Ads: → keyword-analyzer: audits quality scores and finds keyword gaps → negative-keywords: reviews search terms and blocks wasted spend → performance-auditor: compares periods and flags what changed → search-terms: surfaces queries burning budget with zero conversions Meta Ads: → audience-builder: turns CRM lists into custom audiences → creative-fatigue-analyzer: spots declining CTR before the metrics flag it → fatigue-monitor: flags when your audience is saturated → spend-tracker: tracks budget pacing across every campaign LinkedIn Ads: → audience-builder: builds targeting audiences at scale → bid-optimizer: adjusts bids across campaigns in bulk → bulk-editor: mass edits campaigns, ads, and naming in seconds → creative-builder: generates ad creatives from brand specs You drop them into Claude Code, connect your ad accounts, and tell it what you need. It reads the skill, plugs into the platform, executes. 300+ hours of work went into building these. Comment ADS and we'll send all 12 over.

@BenSharf Looks interesting!

We built the fastest-growing Shopify agency almost entirely off of LinkedIn. The hardest part isn’t posting content, it's making sure your content gets in front of the right people. Most people have no system to do this. Over the last few months, almost our entire GTM strategy has been powered by a tool called traxy (traxy.ai). It tells you in real-time when someone in your ICP engages with profiles you monitor. So if an ecommerce founder comments on a post... Or a VP likes content from someone in our ecosystem… traxy captures their LinkedIn profile and lets you know immediately. At Platter, we started using traxy-generated audiences for outbound, and the results have been insane: → $100K in pipeline generated → 200%+ increase in connections → 200%+ increase in reply rates It's become the highest-performing lead source we’ve ever had. But one of the most interesting parts is the people with the biggest LinkedIn audiences are NOT necessarily the people with the most valuable audiences. There are a handful of people whose audiences are disproportionately filled with ecommerce founders and operators. And when those people post, the intent signals go crazy. A few profiles that consistently show up in our data: → @Seanfrank → @chadjanis → @TaylorHoliday → @x_armand → @KarlsJake This is where modern B2B outbound is headed. Not spamming people. Not sending 10,000 cold emails. Simply identifying real intent faster than everyone else. I’m a proud roommate watching @benbuaron_ bring this to life over the last few months. If you're in B2B, traxy is a no-brainer. Message me, and I’ll hook you up with 50% off your first month.

Make this happen!!!!!