How do you build a performance creative team for a DTC brand? Start with the most experienced hire you can afford, a director-level player-coach for nine-figure brands, a senior agency-trained strategist for smaller ones, and let them build the team top-down, using freelancers to fill gaps while full-time roles get approved. Match output goals to headcount, because ad volume is determined by team size, and vet every candidate with a paid assessment that tests both craft and how they use AI. Building a performance creative team starts with hiring the most experienced brain you can afford, a director-level player-coach, then filling in strategists, editors, designers, and a creator manager around them. In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Joanna Wallace, who founded the creative department at HexClad and served as VP of Creative Strategy at Birddogs, to map out exactly who to hire, in what order, what they cost, and how to test them before you commit millions in ad spend to their strategy.

We discuss:

• Why going cheap on your first creative hire is the most expensive mistake in DTC
• What a creative strategy director actually costs in 2026 (It's not what you think) and why
• Why your ad volume is determined by your team size, full stop
• Why agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires
• How to run paid assessments that expose AI-generated word salad
• The coordinator role: the smartest entry point into creative strategy

Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

Connect with Joanna Wallace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannasloamewallace/ Joanna's creative strategist evaluation template: To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com. This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Scalability School is the podcast for DTC media buyers and e-commerce operators who want to scale profitably — hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck.

Chapters

• 00:00 How to build a performance creative team for a DTC brand
• 02:02 The #1 hiring mistake: going cheap on your first creative hire
• 03:04 What a creative strategy director costs in 2026
• 05:06 Player-coach: what the director does in the first six months
• 09:10 Why ad volume is determined by team size
• 13:13 The hiring order for seven-figure brands
• 18:18 Why agency experience beats brand-side experience
• 21:21 What nine-figure creative teams do differently
• 25:24 Sharing creative learnings across the whole company
• 31:27 Where to find great creative strategists
• 37:36 How to evaluate candidates with paid assessments
• 41:38 How to break into creative strategy (the coordinator route)
• 47:43 How to keep a creative team from burning out

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Hannah Houg and Matthew Gattozzi to answer the question every team is quietly avoiding: how do you use AI for creative strategy without losing the judgment that makes ads work? The short answer is that you bring AI a hypothesis instead of asking it for one. You'll learn which four parts of the process to protect from AI entirely, why the briefing stage is where ad quality actually degrades, and how to give your strategists room to think without torching your output.

Hannah has built ads and campaigns for 300+ DTC brands. Matthew's studio has driven $100M+ in client revenue. Both use AI daily. Both have watched it quietly weaken the same muscle they get paid for.

We discuss:

• Why every creative brief in the space suddenly looks the same
• The difference between AI helping your research and AI writing your hypothesis
• Why AI is good at following rules and bad at breaking them, and why that matters for scale
• How Hannah lost the ability to write a script after a few months of AI-first drafting
• What a genuinely good AI input looks like (and why it's built before you open the tool)
• The one-sentence goal every brief needs before anyone writes a word
• Why building 7 personas on a $10k/month budget is a math problem, not a strategy
• What "deep context" actually means, and why most teams don't have it
• Why the efficiency-vs-quality fight is a leadership conversation, not a tools conversation

Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter

This episode is sponsored by Proppel, the hiring agency that has placed more than 75 employees for Foxwell Founders members. Get 10% off your first hire when you mention the Scalability School Podcast: https://www.weareproppel.com/foxwell-founders-proppel

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Hannah Houg send a DM at: https://x.com/hannahhoug

To connect with Matthew Gattozzi send a DM at: https://x.com/MatthewGattozzi

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com

Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com.

Chapters 00:00 Intro: why AI creative strategy is producing the same ads everywhere

04:08 Why every creative brief suddenly looks the same

07:18 What makes a great ad, and why AI can't break rules

10:22 Is research or briefing where AI actually hurts ad quality?

12:26 Why AI can't come up with the big idea

14:33 The danger of letting AI write your hypothesis

16:39 How AI quietly degrades your copywriting muscle

19:45 How to find an insight before you open AI

25:55 Why hyper-specific creative is winning on Meta right now

29:57 Why your team needs space to think, not more output

30:58 Has any LLM actually cracked ad copywriting?

33:00 Why creator talent match beats a perfect script

37:07 What a good AI input actually looks like

40:10 The one-sentence goal every creative brief needs

44:14 The persona trap that sinks small ad budgets

47:21 What "deep context" actually means

50:24 Why strategists want to slow down while owners push efficiency

53:27 Why this is a leadership problem, not a tools problem

56:32 Break your margins today for performance later

57:32 Bonus: the Michigan method

Brad and Zach go deep on the single biggest scaling lever most media buyers are ignoring: the landing page. The spine of the episode is a mindset shift, meaning you can scale spend without new creative, new offers, or more discounting. You scale with pages.

They open with creative-to-lander congruency: the ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it. Zach shares how MarsMen now runs 33 active landing pages organized by roughly 10 messaging pillars (aging, cortisol, energy, weight loss, GLP-1, TRT vs. natural), and the company has a hard rule that no ad launches without a congruent page behind it. The reason goes beyond conversion rate: Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading the landing page itself. Page copy is a targeting signal, not just a destination.

Brad backs this with a case study: a client sending all traffic to a PDP ($41K in spend) duplicated the exact same creative to a "5 Reasons Why" page. Same spend level, substantially better ROAS, lower CPMR, and the age breakdown showed 45+ ripping harder than ever. Same ad, new audience, unlocked entirely by the page.

From there they cover the format progression (listicle → advertorial → dynamic hybrid page → quiz), the specific page elements that matter (comparison charts, clear single CTA, social proof, FAQ, shoppable PDP sections injected below listicles), how to structure tests inside the ad account, kill criteria (48 hours at MarsMen's spend level, plus a "graveyard campaign" with cost controls to separate creative problems from page problems), what "winning" actually means (net new spend volume added to the account, not just beating the PDP head-to-head), and reporting (spend velocity as the success metric, heat maps, and session recordings, including one recording session that led to a single button change worth +20% revenue per session).

The episode closes with the getting-started playbook: don't reinvent the template. Go pull the landers from the biggest spenders in Motion or any ad-tracking tool and copy the structure, because they all run nearly the same one. The real bottleneck is copywriting, which is much harder than people think (raw AI output without heavy pre-prompting gets you "shit copy with a bunch of em dashes"), and perfectionism: your landing pages can be uglier than your website, and your ads can be uglier than your landing pages. Use your brand font and colors, but if it's not perfect, get started.

Key Takeaways

• Did you know Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading your landing page copy, not just your ad, and using it to decide who sees your ads?
• How one brand took the exact same ad, swaped the PDP for a "5 Reasons Why" page, and matched $41K in spend at a substantially better ROAS while unlocking an entirely new age demo.
• What if you could scale spend without a single new creative, new offer, or deeper discount, using only landing pages?
• Why "my lander beat the PDP" is the wrong definition of a winning landing page test.
• What watching just 20 session recordings revealed that a single button change fixed.
• Why MarsMen refuses to launch any ad that doesn't have a congruent landing page behind it, and how they actively enforce it with 33 live landing pages.
• Why nearly ALL nine-figure brands run the same landing page template, and why this one thing (and not design) is the real reason your pages take forever to ship.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

Chapters

• 00:00 – Intro
• 02:42 – Creative and lander congruency: the ad makes a promise, the page has to keep it
• 04:20 – Mars's 33 landing pages and the "no ad without a congruent page" rule
• 06:48 – Organizing pages by pillar and how wide to go
• 09:04 – Case study: same creative, $41K PDP vs. 5 Reasons Why page (and the 45+ audience unlock)
• 11:27 – "Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad"
• 12:52 – What CPMR is and why it's debatable as a metric
• 13:54 – The landing page format progression: listicle → advertorial → dynamic page → quiz
• 16:51 – The elements that actually move the needle on a listicle
• 20:48 – Testing individual page elements and the spend velocity you need to validate
• 23:46 – How pages get launched into the ad account (3 net new funnels a week)
• 26:44 – What a "win" actually is: adding net new spend volume
• 29:01 – Kill criteria: 48 hours and the graveyard campaign
• 30:08 – Persona-specific PDPs and injecting the PDP below the lander
• 32:32 – The Dr. Gundry VSL rabbit hole and why VSLs demand insane AOVs
• 34:29 – Using one open-ended quiz question to generate new creative pillars
• 37:23 – Landing page reporting: spend velocity, heat maps, and the recording that added 20% revenue per session
• 41:09 – How to get started: copy the top spenders' templates, copywriting is the real bottleneck, and "your landing pages can be uglier than your website"

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com

Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Made With AI

This episode is a tactical deep dive into two of the biggest measurement questions in DTC right now, capped off with Zach Stuck joining to break down how MarsMen sets ad budgets off forecasted recurring revenue.

The first half is a real client case study on Meta's Incremental Attribution (IA). Brad walks us through an apparel brand, with an AOV just over $100, strong organic and influencer traffic, and $150-200K per month in spend. A conversion lift study at the start of the year showed their one-day click ROAS almost perfectly matched their true incremental number, so 1DC became the account's benchmark. When they tested IA head-to-head against one-day click (each with its own holdout), IA looked terrible in week one, then dramatically better in weeks two and three, and the lift study combined with Triple Whale MTA data validated the win. Then Meta changed its click attribution definition in March (only outbound clicks now count as clicks, with profile clicks and comments moved to "engaged"), and IA performance deviated hard from one-day click, Triple Whale, and product-level MER. IA also stopped responding to bid adjustments. The takeaway: they reverted to one-day click, with a plan to retest IA in three to six months as Meta feeds the model more conversion lift data.

The second segment covers creative cohort spend analysis: breaking down each month's spend by the month the ads were launched. If most of May's spend is running through ads launched last year, your new creative isn't earning spend and something is broken in the pipeline. If nearly all spend is from ads launched in the last 30 days, you are over-reliant on a few recent outliers. Splitting the view by evergreen versus promo ads shows whether new creative is compounding month over month, which is what actually earns the right to scale spend. Zach adds Homestead's layer on top: tracking "breakthrough" ads ($2K spend in 7 days at target) versus scaled ads every month.

The final segment is Zach on how MarsMen scales: if you can forecast next month's recurring revenue, you can spend into that full amount, as long as your blended MER covers OPEX and your new-customer ROAS holds at target. He walks through the cash-flow traps (90-day subscriptions deferring revenue, promos shifting cohort behavior), MarsMen's rebuilt forecast model that applies retention curves at the individual customer level, daily new-customer targets by channel, and a reactivation play: offering discounted one-time purchases to list subscribers who never converted because they didn't want a subscription, which he estimates is worth hundreds of thousands per month.

Key Takeaways

• Why Meta's Incremental Attribution passed a conversion lift test, only to then fall apart three weeks later.
• How you can REALLY spend 100% of next month's forecasted MRR on ads this month, and when that math breaks.
• The one thing that might be the real reason as to to why your account performance suddenly shifted after March 2026.
• The percentage of this month's ad spend that should come from ads you launched this month, and what it means if the answer is almost none.
• Is your "dead" email list quietly hiding hundreds of thousands in monthly revenue?
• Why one-day click beats seven-day click for brands with heavy organic traffic, and how to know which one your account should trust.
• What a "breakthrough ad" actually is and why your creative team should be measured on them every month.
• Caution: How adding a 90-day subscription offer can put your cash flow at risk 60 days later.
• Should subscription brands hold email, SMS, and organic to daily new-customer quotas the same way they do paid?
• Is the creative volume game dead, or are the people abandoning it just measuring hit rates wrong?

Chapters

• 02:32 — Should you test Meta's Incremental Attribution in your account?
• 07:30 — How do you design a fair test of one-day click vs. Incremental Attribution?
• 11:32 — What did Meta's new click attribution definition change, and why did it break results?
• 14:02 — When should you turn Incremental Attribution off and go back to one-day click?
• 26:30 — How do you run a creative cohort analysis to see if your new ads are earning spend?
• 35:31 — How does a subscription brand use next month's MRR to set this month's ad budget?
• 46:02 — How do you turn a "dead" email list into six figures of monthly revenue?

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com Made With AI

In the words of Andrew Foxwell, "It's just the guys" and they framed this episode around one big shift: 2025 was the year of creative diversity and raw ad volume, and 2026 is the year that questions, "what is all this volume actually pointing at?" Call it a return to intentionality, and the part of the funnel many brands have been ignoring while chasing creative volume: the landing page.

Brad opens by reacting to a Twitter conversation where operators sounded burnt out on the volume game, then reframes the discussion around what you can improve outside of ad creative. The crew works through Cherene's "marketing tornado" idea: If the same person sees your brand 15+ different ways, and the job is consistency of message across all of them, then it's important to arm Meta with creative, landing pages, and offers so its AI (Andromeda) can deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

The heart of the episode is landing page strategy. Zach speed-runs the page-type hierarchy, then both hosts hammer funnel congruency, the ad-to-lander-to-PDP message match they admit was a big driver of their Feb/March scaling. Brad shares a beauty-brand example where simply turning a winning founder video's transcript into a congruent listicle scaled spend 60% month-over-month (twice) with zero new ads. The short: stop hunting for the one winning page, run many congruent pages live at once, and let Meta allocate spend across them.

Key Takeaways

• Why ad-to-landing-page-to-PDP "funnel congruency" is the piece most operators are still leaving on the table in 2026.
• How one brand scaled spend 60% month-over-month (twice) with zero new ads.
• Why you need to stop hunting for the single "winning" landing page and instead run many congruent pages live at once.
• What it actually means to "sell one product 50 different ways," and why your angle TAM is more important than your category TAM.
• Why the volume game is finally dead, and what the 2026 shift from "make more" to "what is this volume pointing at" means for your testing budget.
• Why a "marketing tornado," is your best bet to keep message consistency when one buyer sees your brand 15+ different ways.
• When it actually pays to set different CPA/ROAS targets by funnel stage and product.
• Why a congruent landing page will lower your CPM, CPMR and earn you a "back tap" from the Meta auction.
• The order you should be building and testing your landing pages.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Harry Delmege, co-founder of Roly Poly Digital, joins Scalability School for a tactical conversation about what actually separates an ad spending $500 a day from one spending $10K a day. Harry's agency, named by Andrew's daughter Nora, has rapidly become one of the most respected creative shops in DTC by pushing back on a lot of what the industry is currently selling: high-volume AI-generated workflows, format obsession, and the relentless push to do more without slowing down to do it well.

The conversation digs into Harry's creative philosophy, which he distills into three things he checks every ad against: promise, proof, and (workshopped live on the episode) puzzling (big thanks to Brad). They cover his preference for long-form "yapper" ads, why he insists on manual research over AI-assisted research, how he hires creative strategists from non-media-buying backgrounds, and why he thinks the closest thing to a real "hack" in the current environment is just relentlessly studying organic content and ripping off what's already working.

Harry also shares his real take on the volume-versus-quality debate, including a pointed observation that brand-side complaints about agency performance have spiked at exactly the same time the industry adopted AI and started preaching volume. Key Takeaways

• What actually separates an ad that spends $500 a day from one that spends $10k a day
• How AI-assisted creative research is actually hurting your hit rate
• What is a "yapper ad" and why are most agencies/ brands not running them?
• Why Harry believes a U-turn on creative volume is on the horizon
• Where true creative innovation actually comes from and is it what you actually need for success.
• Why "open loops" is the most misunderstood term in creative strategy
• This 1 thing is the entire secret of high-performing creative.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Harry Delmege, send him a DM at https://x.com/harrydelmege_

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com

Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Collin Slattery (Taikun Digital) joins Brad and Andrew for a no-fluff breakdown of why Google Ads breaks the brain of most DTC operators who cut their teeth on Meta. The core argument lands early and lands hard: your relationship with Google is structurally adversarial in a way your relationship with Meta isn't, because Google can't manufacture more search inventory the way Meta manufactures more feed inventory. The only lever they have to grow revenue is extracting more from advertisers, which means every default setting, every recommendation, and every "AI enhancement" is built to serve them first.

From that foundation, Collin walks through the operational stack that actually works: ruthlessly segmenting brand from non-brand across both search and shopping, building a real product feed instead of plugging Shopify into Merchant Center and calling it done, structuring shopping into heroes, sidekicks, villains, and zombies, and treating YouTube Shorts as the only YouTube placement worth touching unless you're running holdout tests. Along the way he drops a study Tyken ran across roughly $20M in spend showing that hidden search terms cost advertisers about $0.85 of efficiency per dollar spent, the case for YouTube being the single most incremental channel in digital (87% net-new traffic for one of his nine-figure clients, plus 34 million Americans reachable nowhere else), and a hard truth that Google scaling is brick-by-brick, never one banger creative away.

If you've ever wondered why your Google account "kind of works but never really scales," this is the episode that explains exactly why and exactly what to do about it. Key Takeaways

• How your "5x Google ROAS" is actually just brand search dragging a broken non-brand campaign across the finish line.
• How much of your Google spend is being skimmed by search terms Google won't let you see.
• Why your relationship with Google is fundamentally adversarial.
• How to reach 34 million potential customers that literally cannot be reached on Meta or TikTok.
• If you're not running holdout tests, 90% of your YouTube dollars are likely going to the wrong placement.
• The four shopping campaign buckets every brand over $1M should be using, and the one that is silently eating 80% of your budget.
• Could this one setting be making your entire Google account non-incremental without you knowing?
• Why Google scaling looks nothing like Meta scaling and what it actually means for your monthly growth curve.
• The $50/month tool that fixes the feed quality issue almost every Shopify brand is silently losing money on.
• When paying for brand search actually makes sense

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! To connect with Collin, send him a DM at https://x.com/CJSlattery or at: https://taikundigital.com/ To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected] To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/ Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Marin Istvanic joins Scalability School for a deep tactical session on what it actually takes to scale e-commerce brands to nine figures with paid media on Meta. Marin is one of the most hands-on media buyers in the DTC space, managing upwards of 5 to 7 million dollars a month in ad spend across his agency clients and his own internal brand (and this episode reflects that).

The conversation launches right into the hard hitting questions with the debate around ABO versus CBO and when each actually makes sense. Marin's full whitelisting flywheel (300+ influencer profiles, authority pages, dark posts running through multiple handles in the same session), cost cap weekend scaling and what he calls the "gladiators arena" ad set, how he uses different attribution settings as a signal to Meta that a campaign is structurally different, and why he still manually picks every thumbnail across all his accounts. He also shares how he used AI to synthesize his full YouTube library into a 50-page media buying philosophy document and then how he fed his top-spending ads into a landing page template that outperformed the control by 10%.

Key Takeaways

• ABO vs. CBO - is the debate actually settled, or does the right answer depend on something most people never measure?
• Is whitelisting dead - or are you just running it wrong?
• What does a "cost cap weekend scaling" actually look like in practice — and how to spend $25K on a Saturday without blowing up your CPA?
• How changing this window actually tells Meta this is a different campaign.
• Why Marin still manually picks every thumbnail - If the "hacks" everyone is chasing are mostly noise, this is what actually moves the needle at scale.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Marin, send him a DM at https://x.com/IstvanicMarin

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/

Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

The Zach Stuck returns to Scalability School for one of the most packed episodes to date. Coming off a massive run of activity: selling his agency, Homestead to Verndale, co-founding MarsMen and closing a $27.5M Series A with L Catterton (ofcourse lets not forget becoming a new dad, too). Zach walks through what actually happened, what it took, and what he'd do differently.

The conversation covers three major arcs. First, the sale of Homestead: how it grew from Zach posting case studies on Twitter to an 85-person agency specializing in paid acquisition and email/SMS retention, why they decided to go to market when they did, and what the M&A process actually feels like when you're in the middle of it for the first time. Second, MarsMen: the origin story of the brand, the subscription-first bet that changed everything, and what it means to go from six figures a month to a nine-figure run rate by obsessing over every detail, from landing page, CRO tests, to cohort metrics. Third, the bigger picture: where agencies are headed as AI compresses margins, why surrounding yourself with people ahead of where you want to be is non-negotiable, and what it means to finally be doing the thing you always actually wanted to do. Key Takeaways

• What it actually feels like to sell your agency and what they never tell you before the deal closes
• Why media buying-only Agencies likely only have 18 months left to survive
• How Mars Men went from six figures to a $100M run rate in under 18 months (without raising a single dollar until it was already printing money)
• Knowing when the right time to raise money is for your brand (Hint: It's not when you need it the most)
• The one thing most agency owners never do that would make their business 10x more sellable
• Why Zach went from agency life to brand building and how it actually feels to be on the other side
• What happens when you hire for vibes and smarts over credentials

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality , they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/

Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Host Brad flies solo to walk through exactly how his team structures Meta creative testing across eight figures a year in ad spend. The episode is a tactical follow-up to a previous episode with Phil, prompted by a viral Twitter thread Brad posted on the same topic.

The core philosophy: stop trying to outthink Meta's algorithm on budget allocation. Instead, run a single CBO campaign per product or offer, treat ad sets as simple folders (not audience segments), and let Meta decide where the money goes. Brad backs this up with real ad account screenshots, shows why a higher-spending campaign with a lower ROAS can actually be healthier than it looks, and closes out with answers to the most common follow-up questions he received from the community.

Key Takeaways

• Why Meta's algorithm is smarter than you at deciding which of your ads deserves more budget and what that means for how you should structure your campaigns.
• The single reason you need to stop creating more ad sets and start stacking all your ads in one.
• Your top-spending ad set has a lower ROAS than the one barely getting any spend, does that mean you're burning money, or is Meta showing you something you're missing?
• The truth behind what actually happens when you pull it into an ABO to force-test it.
• How do you build a creative testing system that generates consistent weekly output without needing a huge production budget or team.
• What "spend is a signal" actually means for your creatives and how you should decide when to turn an ad off (You might actually be turning them off too early)
• Is splitting your account into a testing campaign and a scaling campaign helping you, or just adding complexity that slows down Meta's learning?
• How new visitor percentage and frequency metrics should change the way you interpret your campaign's ROAS.
• The actual risk of running ads to two completely different customer personas inside the same ad set on broad targeting.
• How to tell when it's time to question your creative quality versus just staying patient with your launch cadence.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality , they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email [email protected]

To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch

To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck

Learn More about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com/

Learn More about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com