It's my second ever AMA! This time I'm talking about all things creative strategy for your Facebook Ads account.

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Mehtab Bhogal is obsessed with growing profitable DTC brands.

His team at Karta Ventures own majority stakes in 2 ecommerce brands and minority positions in 8 more. They see a LOT of brands and have big incentives to grow them profitably.

In this episode, Mehtab explains how to negotiate your shipping rates, save big on Google Ad spend without sacrificing growth, how to capture more of the money your customers came to spend by thinking like a hotel, and much, much more.

If you don't pause this episode multiple times to implement what he says, you only have yourself to blame.

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Nate Lagos is one of my favorite thinkers in DTC.

That's because he thinks as well or better than anyone I know about how to do "brand building" in a way that actually generates profit. Put another way, "brand building" doesn't have to = "money burning." At least not for Nate.

On this episode we talk about how Original Grain (where Nate is the CMO) is generating huge growth and profits via brand colabs, working with YouTube creators, and more.

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Am I embracing creative testing campaigns? Am I going all ABO? Am I ditching manual bids?

No. No. And no.

But I've nonetheless made a significant change to my approach to media buying, and so far, it has worked well for every client with whom I work.

Today on the show I explain the best argument against my media buying approach (that no one ever makes) and the change I've made because of it.

This episode is extremely actionable and I hope it helps you as much as it has helped my clients.

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Gregg Carey felt overwhelmed by the number of things he had to do in his 7-figure ecommerce business. Anyone who has been in that phase knows the feeling: there's too much to do, not enough time to do it, and not enough money to hire help.

Except that last part isn't true: Gregg hired Lara Guevara to take over his supply chain from her home in the Philippines, and the result was growth, profit, time, more Filipino employees, and eventually, a Filipino staffing agency that the two co-founded so other DTC businesses could experience the same.

In this sponsored episode, I talk to Gregg and Lara both about their experience working together on Gregg's business (https://section119.com/) and why these relationships work so incredibly well when they're done right.

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Riley Stricklin had a question for me.

He had left his role as CEO of Lume Cube, a mid-8-figure DTC brand that he co-founded and I'd worked on briefly a number of years ago, and was thinking about what he wanted to do next. One idea he had: start an ecom HoldCo and try to spin up multiple new brands.

When he reached out to ask for my input (as a former aggregator CEO myself), I told him, "Let's talk. And how about we record it?" And Riley agreed to it.

Come for the conversation about the good, bad and ugly of DTC aggregators, stay for Riley's insights about the CRO tests that led to 30-40% conversion rate lifts for Lume Cube.

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"Every brand is different. Make sure to test what works for yours."

That's some of the most common advice about how to run an ecommerce business and I think it's deeply misleading and unhelpful.

In this episode of the Andrew Faris Podcast, I make the case that instead of testing everything, you should learn from the collected wisdom of the people who already have.

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WHAT IS OPENING THE BOOKS?

"Opening The Books" is my series of live-recorded coaching calls with brand operators who get my time for free in exchange for recording the call, including showing actual ad accounts and other financial data on the call.

For more info and resources from this episode, visit ⁠www.ajfgrowth.com/zollie

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Sarah Resnick has been helping crafters and, more specifically, weavers create beautiful custom projects for years. And as she did, she realized something: people need help understanding how color works.

So she spent two years developing a product that can help makers of all kinds get better at making color decisions more effectively without going to the trouble of learning the intricacies of color theory. The product is brilliant: it's a simple deck of cards that takes the customer by the hand through the decision-making process on their projects.

Sarah realized that the product had big potential for one of her brands, Zollie, so she got together with Andrew for a specific request: how can she launch the product as effectively as possible without a monster budget?

So on this Opening The Books, Andrew coached her through the entire process on each of her channels. They talked about how to handle hype emails, building product-specific lists, and how to approach it in her Meta Ads account.

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Where do you need to focus your attention to grow your Meta spend?

Is it in writing new angles? Increasing the volume of ads? Adding influencer content? Better media buying tactics? Or solving attribution?

Well: it depends. Growth with Meta Ads is different depending on which stage your account is. Today, I'm breaking down the 3 stages of account growth so you can think through where to dedicate your resources next.

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I'm amazed at how good some ecommerce businesses are.

Not necessarily the ones you read about or see on social media. They may or may not be good businesses.

I'm thinking instead of businesses that I have seen up close and personally. In these businesses, when operators get crystal clear that bottom line profit is the ultimate driver of the value of their business, they can build SERIOUSLY profitable, valuable businesses.

It sounds so simple: relentlessly pursue profit.

But it's much easier said than done. And today, I'm explaining what I mean by that phrase and how to actually do it.

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