Mislav Beslic

Well, we finally hit it. 100k day. Thanks to @shauneng and @spencepawliw for helping us push more. And of course the biggest shoutout goes to my team, wouldn’t be here without them.

At our spend levels a bad hook doesn't just mean a wasted creative. It means $5-10k in dead budget before you even realize the ad never had a chance. The way Meta works right now is simple: the algorithm tests your creative on a small audience. If thumb-stop is low, delivery dies. Your landing page never loads. Your offer never gets seen. Doesn't matter how dialed in your funnel is if nobody gets there This is why I spend more time on hooks than any other part of the creative process. Every creative we produce gets the most energy on the first 3 seconds What's the first visual? What are the first words? What's the pattern interrupt that stops someone mid-scroll when they've already seen 200 ads today? Now I’m not gonna explain hook psychology too deeply because of one key thing: It ALL depends. This should be something you should test out for your own offer and product. If you're spending $5k+/day and your CPA is creeping, before you touch the landing page or do anything… Look at your hook rates across your active creatives. That's almost always where the bleed starts.

@saarth2204 @iamshackelford 😂

@iamshackelford @mislavbeslic

Watched more CPG brands get killed by scaling than by failing, and it's almost always the same moment. Ads start working too well and the cash flow can't catch up. Ran it up with BREZ from $0 to $90M+ in 3+ years. Sprouts, HEB, Wegmans, Now Walmart. Deployed over $50M through ads along the way. The whole climb taught me one thing people don’t talk about until they're inside it. When you're spending hard, that money is gone the second the campaign runs. The revenue from those sales doesn't fully settle for 5-7 days. So at any given point during a real scaling stretch, there's a meaningful gap between what you've already spent and what you've collected. That gap is where brands die. The worst part is everyone else expects payment inside that gap. Co-packer wants 50% to start the next production run and the next run has to be bigger than the last because demand is bigger. 3PL invoice hits regardless of what you've collected. Payroll hits regardless. Retail orders need to ship before you see a dollar from them. The only player in the entire chain who isn't pushing is the card processor. So you end up sitting on a stack of obligations with six figures parked at Stripe and your bank balance is making you sweat even though the P&L looks great. Lived this firsthand. Came off a season staring at accounts payable that would have made most people's eyes water, and the business was winning the entire time. The cash just hadn't shown up yet. That's what scaling actually feels like from the inside, and nobody warns you. The reason no one talks about this is because it isn't sexy. No course on it. No thread on it. No clean hook in it. It's the boring math that quietly kills CPG brands at the exact moment they're winning on paper. By the time you need to think about it, it's usually already a crisis. Plan for it 60-90 days out, every time. Build the cash flow model before you need it. Know when money leaves and when it comes back. Size your credit lines or reserves for the worst week instead of the average one. This is the unsexy operational shit that decides which brands actually survive the thing they were trying to build.

@hamzahhdubaisi This! Run more ads!!!

been in SF for 2 weeks now is running meta ads banned here every company i meet with millions in the bank aren’t running direct response ads you can literally open meta ads and you’ve already outpaced your competitor the bar to scale is so low

@shauneng 🐐

@mirowastaken1 Well said. It’s really about solving a real problem and actually doing deep research

So I sell skincare and makeup. The brand does $1.5M/month. But i’m a 24 year old guy from Croatia who couldn't tell you the difference between a serum and a moisturizer And I think there's a really damaging belief in ecom that your product needs to be your passion, your life's purpose, some revolutionary invention that changes the world. It doesn't at all. It needs to do two things: solve a real problem and actually work. THIS is the fucking bar My product isn't revolutionary and it’s not patented technology or a new formula. It's a genuinely good skincare product that delivers visible results for the people who use it. They buy it, they see improvements, they reorder. The product does its job. But I didn't pick this product because I'm passionate about skincare. I picked it because I studied the market and saw that millions of people have a real problem. Whether that's acne, dark spots, aging, uneven skin tone, they're actively searching for solutions. The demand already existed. I didn't have to create it. The founders I see struggling the hardest are usually the ones who started with passion first and market second. They created something THEY think is amazing without checking whether enough people actually want it And now they're sitting on a "unique" product with a beautiful brand and zero sales because the demand isn't there Meanwhile there are operators doing 7-figs/mo are selling products that are OBJECTIVELY fucking boring. Supplements that exist in a market with 10,000 competitors. Skincare that's similar to 50 other brands. Pet products, cleaning products, basic health items. Nothing groundbreaking. Just solid products in markets with proven demand and operators who are really fucking good at marketing them. The innovation isn't in the product. It's in the creative strategy, the positioning, the angles, the way you present the solution to the customer's problem. Two brands can sell a nearly identical product and one does $50k/month while the other does $1.5M because the marketing is on a completely different level. I think the obsession with "unique products" is actually an avoidance mechanism for a lot of people. Finding the perfect product feels productive. You're researching, evaluating, analyzing. But what you're really doing is avoiding the hard part: which is learning how to sell. Because selling requires skills that take months to develop and the results aren't guaranteed. Product research feels safe. Marketing is where you actually risk something. My second brand is even more proof of this. We’re doing $600-700k/mo on a product with absolutely nothing unique about it. Commoditized market, dozens of competitors selling similar stuff. The product is good quality. Customers are happy. But the reason it scales is the creative, not the product. If you're sitting around waiting to find a product you're "passionate" about before you start, you might be waiting forever. Pick something in a proven market that solves a real problem. Make sure the product actually works. Then put all your energy into becoming the best marketer in that space. That’s how it should be. And your personal feelings about the product have almost nothing to do with whether it scales or not.

@TheoClarkePPC Congrats bro that's beautiful.

Me at 27: - Still living at home - Staring at my bank balance every morning - Wondering if I'd ever figure it out - Moved to Dubai for inspiration Me at 30: - Gifted my mum a Mercedes C220. - Send her more money than ever before. - Paid for her and my sister to come to Dubai. - $0 to $1.3M ecom brand in 12 months.

@JxrdanB_ This is some serious work congrats man keep pushing

500k in the last 3 months. Used to think this was impossible not long ago. If you aren’t failing you aren’t trying… so keep on failing. This will be you soon too.

@nicktheriot_ And this is why before/afters work so well in skincare, you're literally showing them the future version of themselves in the ad

Stop torturing people by dwelling on their pain in your ads. Instead, quickly acknowledge their struggle to qualify them. Then immediately paint the picture of the future version of themselves. Bad ad: → 60% "here's everything wrong with your life right now" → 30% "here's what our product does" → 10% "buy it now" Winning ad: → 10% "struggling with this too?" → 30% "here's what changes when you solve it" → 60% "imagine waking up feeling like THIS tomorrow" People buy the future version of themselves they want to become. Not a lecture about everything they're doing wrong right now.

@ecom_rickx you just do the same boring shit every day until the numbers go up that's literally it

For the ecom mfers still asking “what’s the secret to scaling?” Stop it. There isn’t one. You don’t magically find some setup that prints forever. You create it. With decisions, data, optimization, creative, and consistency, etc. A “perfect setup” doesn’t exist. There’s only a repeatable process. And once you realise that. The whole ecom game gets stupidly easy.

@aporiabuilds Best part is that people barely use it but it makes them way more comfortable buying.

Something I noticed about every store I've studied that scaled past €50k/month: They all had a strong guarantee. 30 days. 60 days. Money back. No questions asked. The guarantee doesn't increase refunds. It increases conversions. Removing risk is the cheapest conversion rate optimization available. Use it.

@clayyroy Went from 5 airbnbs in dubai to my childhood bedroom in croatia in a week lol.

The whole point has always been freedom. Not “doing nothing”. Just deciding where the laptop opens.

@Peter_Quadrel Yea study brands that are 1-2 steps ahead not 100, way more relevant data on what actually works at your level

Stop Copying Ridge Wallet, AG1, and Jones Road for Creative Inspiration If you're a new brand, you're making a critical mistake. These brands have 100x the market penetration you do. Why Big Brand Creative Fails for New Brands: - Creative assumes high product awareness - Content over-indexes on broad messaging for sophisticated markets - Focus is more on brand maintenance, not education (except new products/categories) As a new brand you need specific messaging for 1 persona You don't have ad spend to spray across multiple audiences. You're starting with zero market awareness. Focus on brands with less sophisticated/aware audiences like yours. Not brands 1000 steps ahead, just 1 or 2. Match your creative strategy to your market position.

@ron_ecomm Meta making us do their job for them and charging us for it at the same time. Beautiful business model honestly lol

can't wait until the day we don't need to waste our time on stupid shit like ad frequency or "is my ROAS incremental or not 🤧" who the fuck would want to retarget people non-stop when they did not set retargeting as an objective? why do we have to play this stupid fucking game. why isn't the algo perma doing hold out on its own to optimize for incrementality across all variables? there's already a hold out experiment feature isn't there? it clearly is possible. how many countless collective hours have we wasted doing this shit instead of spending that time actually doing things that move the needle like speaking to customers. all of this is anti human flourishing i do it but I absolutely do not enjoy it

@maxxmalist It's not that AI ads are "better" it's that you can test 10x more of them.

AI animated ads are converting HARDER than almost anything we’ve tested this year and they’re way easier to make than realistic AI UGC our new ai animation pipeline lets us mass produce ads daily while keeping the quality insanely high we’ve already created these for brands in nearly every industry imaginable: - ecom - info - spiritual stuff - supplements - relationships and so on... in every single niche, ai animations performed at least well click below and do not miss this AI gold rush

@Bogzabs96 basically anything that doesn't look like an ad outperforms

Podcast-style ads are killing it. Here’s why: 1. Trust Building Certain demographics are used to consuming short-form content podcast clips. Most of these are created by authority figures. That's why when the initial frames of an ad contain a person or two speaking to a microphone... Your audience's attention is drawn towards it. 2. Conversations A podcast clip’s casual, laid-back style makes it easier to drive action & desire. The key is to not make it seem like an ad at all A couple of must-haves for this: - A great script to keep the viewer's attention - A reason to include your product in an organic way - A benefit that's proven to be valued highly in your customer's eyes How can you do the same? Easy. Invest in high-quality creatives. There’s no secret to it. One of my clients is currently spending over 6 figures on this format alone. Book a call in the link in my bio to do the same.

@hamzahhdubaisi Software name?

we built the first platform to track quantitative and qualitative data end to end users can now not only see what happened in their funnel, but why it actually happened funny enough this has become a main selling point of callix by accident.. now its one of the most valuable parts of the product

@iowntraffic This is why I went deep on direct response fundamentals recently. The words do all the selling. Everything visual is just the container. A great script in a shitty looking video will outperform a bad script in a cinematic production every time.

spending $2M per month on meta to tell one thing: your long form copy your ad video script the text on your ad static the copy on your lander copy is the only thing that matters not the realism of the video not the quality of your static not the design of your lander

@advertising_jan Same thing applies to video ads. You're not selling in the first 3 seconds, you're earning the next 10. Every stage of the ad has one job: get them to the next stage.

An advertorial reader is not a buyer yet. They are a person trying to decide if your article is worth the next 90 seconds. Earn the 90 seconds first. The buy comes later.

@kimcoghlan4 We win some, lose some, and miss some. But what matters the most is that we're making money in the end. If every single sale is profitable you're definitely not testing or scaling aggressively enough. The losers are the cost of finding the winners.

We break even or lose money on about 15% of our sales. This means we make money on about 85%. That's a profitable and sustainable business model. If you never lose money, you might be playing it too safe and missing a lot of opportunities.

@williamkast_ Good breakdown. The mistake I see is people running unaware ads on cold traffic at low budgets. Unaware ads need serious spend to work because you're educating before you're selling. Problem aware is where the money is if you're under $10k/day

Brand Aware Ad: - Direct Offer - Urgency - Scarcity Product Aware Ad: - Comparison To Competitor - Your USP - Social Proof - Your Offer Solution Aware Ad: - Acknowledge Knowledge - Failed Solutions - Your Difference - Your Offer Problem Aware Ad: - Pain Point - Educate on cause - Solution - Your product - Your offer Unawre Ad: - Big Win / Buried Desire - Unravel Problem - Solution - Your Product - Your Offer