Thread by @jspujji

Sooo… I’m stealth-ishly launching a dtc brand.

Here is how I’m testing on FB ads from zero (with a bootstrapped approach)

Of note… it’s not working, yet!

🧵🧵🧵

First, conceptually there are 5 categories any idea can live in:
1) backlog
2) test
3) validate
4) scale
5) cash cow.

An idea has a full funnel orientation meaning targeting/ad type/creative/price/offer and landing experience.

There are an infinite amt of combos.

There are a ton of levers btw: targeting, creative, messaging, price, offers, landing experience (content, quiz, etc).

That’s why some testing system is important vs throw sh!t against the wall or doing too much too fast.

I prefer to test in series vs parallel.

Ideas come from intuition, customer research, competitors, historical learnings, brainstorming, etc.

The bar is EXTREMELY high for an idea.

Our target CPA is $100. If we do not see any conversions with 2x the target CPA, we shut it down.

Note: early days ampush, we were even more conservative. It was 0.5x target CPA.

This is of course arbitrary. The lower the number, the “higher the bar” is for the test.

This ensures we start with the best performing stuff!

Importantly, just because we shut something down, doesn’t mean we throw it away.

We just say it doesn’t meet our bar for now.

Because of this bar, I may test…in series… 50 things before something finally works.

To me the time investment is worth it. Go slow to go fast.

Also important if you’re bootstrapping and getting the highest return of learnings for each $ you spend.

Now the categories:

1) Backlog - not live yet. Long list of potential ideas.

Prioritized by a simple “ICE” type framework.

Impact. Confidence. Ease.

Impact - hard to guess early on.

Confidence - formulaic, have I seen it work before? Competitor doing it? This is 30/60/90 % confidence based on previous reps.

Ease - important. How expensive and how fast? Ugc video, article, quick pic from my phone? All are different.

Test - these are live tests running.

If they hit conversion within the spend limit, they graduate to validate.

If not, they are shut off.

Tactical deets: fb is setup on Shopify, using the pixel.

1 campaign: 2-4 adsets. 1-2 interest cat. 1 Broad. 1 some LALs from WCs or emails. 3-4 creative per ad set trying diff hypothesis. 2-3 LPs. Low cost bidding

I’ll run these as a series though so I don’t blow a bunch of $

Also one hack: I like to get 1-3 affiliates driving traffic as a sort of control for conversion.

If that traffic isn’t converting, it is a great way to know my LP, price, offer or website are no good.

2) Validate: goal is to answer “is this for real?” - I may tweak things a bit, focus spend on that idea and see if it can maintain performance and show elasticity.

Either it doesn’t: shut it down. It starts to show scale: move to scale bucket or it keeps producing but at low scale: cash cow.

3) Scale: turn up the dials!! Open up spend and budgets.

Create slight variations. Test with different Landing pages. Test with different audiences.

A true “scale” winner tends to dominate performance and should be unleashed.

Once you have this (may take weeks or months)…

Your program is about constantly beating that winner or sets of winners.

I use a champion challenger framework.

5) Cash cow: goal here is to keep these producing at a high margin.

Keep adding to this category.

It strengthens everything over time.

The most important metric in FB land was created by @ampush: APM “acquisitions per 10k impressions”

Think of it as combining ctr and cr. It is the “yield per impression”

If you can keep improving this, you can keep paying FB a higher cpm while your cpa goes down.

The behaviors: as a founder, I’m obsessing over this.

Right now it’s hourly. Hopefully soon daily. Then weekly forever.

Not outsourcing it. To be clear, I’m not building the campaigns and I haven’t touched a FB account in years. But I am deeply engaged.

I know the strategies, the creative, the numbers and I am driving the testing roadmap.

The team for those who are curious is former Ampush contractors on fb and creative, an amazing Shopify dev and of course: 2 Awesome people from GrowthAssistant.com

Whew, So that is my approach!

I hope it serves others well and would love to hear alternative strategies and questions.

Follow me @jspujji for more cool threads on dtc, growth mktg, bootstrapping and more!

Forgot to link to this thread Re: GrowthAssistant

https://twitter.com/jspujji/status/1397318178150170629