In August we spent $3.4M on ads across my two DTC brands.

Below is the breakdown of our creative output for the month

I’ll also share:
- some lessons we learned
- breakdown how we track output across Creative Strategists, Editors, Designers and Agencies

Hope it’s helpful ✌️ Obsessing over “win rate” of your creative output is stupid, focus on spend.

It’s up to the media buyer to only scale spend if performance is strong.

Spend is the highest value KPI when assessing your creative team’s work —> are they creating ads that are eating up spend

This is the paid acquisition playbook the team at Homestead uses to scale brands from 7 to 8 (and sometimes even 9) figures in revenue!

It's also the exact playbook I used to launch my apparel brand from $0-$1.7M (at 20% profit) in 15 months.

Buckle up. 👇 #1 - Choose your hero product.

We always start by studying a brand's product catalog and choosing a hero product to focus on.

Your customer acquisition strategy should never start by trying to sell an entire catalog of products. This adds too many variables when testing.

I was asked this question from someone I’ve helped mentored over the last year

What is the best business to start if you want to optimize your time with family/fun + have the goal of making $250k/year?

My answer: Start a brand, not an agency.

Let me break down my thoughts.👇 First let’s talk about the elephant in the room…$250k/year

I believe if you have the work ethic, grit to solve hard problems, a leadership skill-set and the ability to sell people…making this kind of money is very possible within 1-2 years of starting a business.

Continued 👇

You can still win with a pure play DTC model despite what the bear market data says.

Proof?

I just took my apparel brand from $10k/mo to $700k/mo (profitably) in 37 days.

*Major Caveat* if your product sucks...this will not work for you.

Here are the 5 things I focused on. 👇 #1 Product Margin

The biggest reason why DTC brands can’t scale is their lack of margin.

For my own brands I like to see +50% contribution margin before advertising spend.

Meaning if you sell a product for $100, your cogs + shipping to a customer's door should cost you sub $50

Back in October I handed the Homestead Email+SMS team the keys for one of my brands…and over the last 90 days they’ve been able to grow my email list by 8x!

Here’s how they did it...

Spoiler Alert: Rigorously testing popups! Your pop-up is the gateway to your list.

We’ve been tweaking pop-ups constantly over the last 90 days and we've been able to hit a 12.8% conversion rate in January (collecting both email + sms)!

Here are the elements we’ve been testing:
- Offer
- Stages
- Design Elements

Why did I launch a brand at possibly the worst time in DTC history? 👀

In the first 15 days my store hit $50k in revenue and $1.5k in net profit...all while being cash flow positive.

Over the next few months I'll share my process on how it will hit $30k/mo in net profit.

🧵 I know you’re curious about what I’m selling..

All I'm comfortable sharing today is that it's in the apparel category and made in the USA.

More details:
- Average price per unit is $27 (w/ discount applied)
- $73 AOV (2.7 units per order)

But how are you cash flow positive? 👇

Here comes a rant about UGC.

BRANDS…please stop wasting your money on content from UGC platforms. 99% of the people on these platforms have no skill in shooting high quality content. Also most of these people have no idea how to sell products.

Let me expand on this more… First “high quality content”

If the video is not shot in good lighting (literally requires standing in front of a window) it’s not going to work. No one wants to watch someone talk about a product from their dimly lit basement. The creator loses all credibility when they do this

We started working with this client 45 days ago. It’s been a fun couple of weeks working with them on scaling their account. Its crazy to know that we’ve helped them do 70% of their 2019 revenue in last 45 days. We’re pacing to crack $200k in rev for April. 🚀 Here's exactly what our team did over the last 45 days to achieve this:

Key things we're still working on improving:
-We haven't sent a single promotional email in the last 30 days
-Our site-wide CvR is still very low (less than 2%)
-We've only tested 20 creative assets so far

Last January I started working with this client as a small side project. I loved their products and wanted to see what I could do to help them grow. They were doing $10k-$15k per month in 2018, so it’s been a fun ride to get them here. Now let’s see if we can 6x YOY again 🤑 Here's exactly what I did over the last year to achieve this 😎

1) First, I knew we needed to increase their conversion rate. So on March 1st, I launched the site on a new Shopify theme. Biggest addition was updating their checkout flow. We increased CvR rate from 1.5% to 2%.