How we took a men's supplement brand from $10k days to $27k days in 3 months

This brand came to us stuck around 300k/month, they had tried pushing past 10k/day previously but their ROAS would drop every time & they had to go back down.

90 days later they're doing close to 30k days (profitably), heading toward 40-50k, & they're running the entire thing with a team of 6.

So I'll break down everything we changed, the ads, the pages, the creatives, the research, the offer, the upsells, & the team, so you can do the same for your brand:

1. The massive mistake they made with their ads

Before, every single ad in the account was solution-aware, all of it hammering the middle of the funnel.

Nothing was talking to the BOF (people ready to buy right now), & nothing was pushing TOF (colder, less-aware people).

Now, solution aware audiences is just one slice of the market, so once you've saturated it & you spend more on ads, you reach colder audiences your ads/funnels can’t convert & your ROAS drops, which is exactly why this brand was stuck.

So we kept the solution-aware ads running, added bottom-of-funnel ads for the ready-to-buy crowd (there was some money to be made there as well), & pushed into top of funnel to open up a way bigger, less competitive audience. That alone gave an immediate performance lift.

2. How we sold profitably to ice cold traffic

This brand only ever ran ads to their product page. That's fine if you’re only running solution/product/most aware ads, but it doesn’t work when you send colder, less-aware traffic there, since those people need their pain agitated, education, & trust before they buy, & a PDP doesn’t give them that.

So we just built listicles & advertorials that we sent cold traffic to before sending them to the offer.

I’ll link deep dives into both listicles & advertorials at the end of this article if you wanna learn how to create them.

This opened up a ton more scale since he was now converting ice cold traffic.

3. The tweak to their creative strategy that changed everything

This is just a quick note on what they did with their ads, but it made a massive difference so decided to include it.

Before, the account was running mostly AI creatives that just talked about the mechanism. There was basically zero social proof in there & no real people.

So they introduced transformational ads with people, testimonials, & emotional storytelling, & those performed really well.

This idea came from just studying what was working for their competitors.

Important: we didn't kill the mechanism-based ads, those were still performing. We just added a kind of ad the account was missing.

4. The most important part of all this (research)

No, I will not stop talking about the importance of research.

It’s by far (& it’s not even close) the most important thing in ecom, especially now when everyone’s using AI to do it, so the people doing manual research (or using AI properly, which most don’t) will have an easy competitive edge.

& if you’re wondering, the problem with AI is that it’s inaccurate most of the time. It’s great at spitting out ideas or pain points but you can’t be sure if those pain points even exist in your audience, how large portion of your audience has them, or how painful your audience deems them.

We’ve used Manus a lot for research & it’s pretty good, so you can try that but fact-check the answers manually the first few times.

Now for this brand:

We just set up proper research: manual research, review forms, post-purchase surveys, & built it into something their team could actually pull from.

This also surfaces stuff you can improve about the product & feeds your support & fulfilment. It’s the foundation of ad angles, funnel angles, copy, & basically everything else you do.

So do your research.

5. How we increased their subscription take rate, conversion rate, & RPV

They were running subs but their whole incentive for the sub-option was just like “20% off”, which if you’ve consumed my content, you’ll know is really bad incentive.

So we built a proper welcome kit to incentivize people onto subscription. The first test we ran with this saw significant increases in sub take rate, conversion rate, & RPV. So it was just (almost) free profit.

I made this example just to show you the things you can do to incentivize higher AOV options (not this brand, just an example):

I’m trying to show you that you shouldn’t just rely on discounts for incentive.

Even though the left has a bigger discount you probably thought the right looked more attractive.

6. Post purchase upsells

Not too much to cover here.

We did 2 main things for PPUs:

• We created a VSL for the upsells which worked great
• We ran incentive-based upsells, so upsells that complemented the product in some way in order to incentivize the upsell

& they split tested a bunch of upsells here as well & found the highest performing ones to be the products that solve another big pain point that the first product doesn’t.

There’s a ton of pure profit to get from upsells so I’ll put a recent post I did on PPUs at the bottom of this article if you wanna have a read.

7. Split testing

Before working with us, they hadn’t really split tested anything. Partly because they were unsure what/how to split test properly & partly because their philosophy was “we can just hammer more ads”

So we got them to run a ton of split tests all across their funnel: pre-sell pages, upsells, price, cart, etc. & to quote him: “being able to actually start split testing and then seeing the results from that was huge”

I’ll also link a CRO guide that basically tells you what/how to split test at the bottom of this article if you want to learn how to do this properly

8. The team structure

I usually tell people to keep their team as small as possible & learn to use AI so you can move faster & stay more profitable in the beginning.

So, this brand now does over $1M/month profitably with a team of 6 people. Which goes to show you don’t need a massive team nowadays to scale to 8 fig.

The setup is: one lead strategist (an A-player who'd worked with big brands in the past, massive change once he got that guy on board), a second strategist, a VA, one editor under each strategist, & him.

They worked with a creative agency previously but they couldn’t spot the gaps in their ads so they fired them & replaced them with the A-player strategist.

Moral of the story: keep your team small, don’t do any unnecessary hires, & hire few A-players instead of many B-players. They’re more expensive but communication will be faster, fewer learnings get lost in comms, & you’ll spend less overall.

Links to other posts that might be of help:

• Listicle deep dive (an even better guide will be posted soon): https://x.com/CarlWeische/status/2063577589126471955
• Advertorial deep dive: https://x.com/CarlWeische/status/2071987458040897583
• PPU guide: https://x.com/CarlWeische/status/2078810452759388610
• CRO (what/how to split test) deep dive: https://x.com/CarlWeische/status/2075611043523375253

Appreciate you reading & I’ll see you in the next one.