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AppLovin just opened to everyone, and most DTC operators still do not know how it actually works. Jacob runs Meta at Pilothouse, which has spent on AppLovin for nearly two years, back when it was invite only.

He breaks down what he sees in real client accounts: the product price points that work, the creative volume it takes to scale, and the end card, a full-screen animated step between the ad and the product page that has no equivalent on Meta.

What you get:

• The $50 rule. Why products in the $30 to $150 range win, why below $20 gets tough on margin, and why $1,000 products are a bad fit for someone mid-game.
• The end card. What it is, why it acts like a second landing page, and the basketball-into-the-hoop trick for matching the ad to the app.
• Creative volume. Start with about 10 videos, add 10 to 20 a week, and what the ramp looks like at $50k/day.
• First-hour buying. Around 80% of purchases land in the first hour, and the other 20% almost always convert on a different video.
• The learning phase. Why you confirm tracking, then leave it alone for a week, sometimes two.

Who this is for: DTC operators and media buyers weighing AppLovin as a third channel next to Meta and Google.

What to steal: the creative-volume cadence, the end-card structure, and the measurement discipline to prove new-customer CPA instead of trusting platform ROAS.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

02:00 AppLovin vs Meta Performance

05:20 Best Products & Creative Strategy

11:10 Measuring Incrementality & New Customers

17:10 Scaling with Creative Volume

23:00 Halo Effect & Campaign Best Practices

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Most brands treat unauthorized sellers and copycats as a cost of doing business. Mario Simonyan treats them as your biggest untapped revenue source.

Mario is a former Amazon seller turned brand protection attorney. He started selling kitchenware and artificial turf doormats out of his driveway during law school, got ripped off, and discovered that not a single attorney he called understood how marketplaces actually work. So he built the firm he wished he'd had.

In this episode he breaks down how one eight-figure fitness brand walked away from 1.5M a year on Amazon after attorneys and enforcement agencies failed them, and how his team got them back to 95% control of their listings. He explains why cease and desist letters get burned in people's fireplaces, why sellers fear account suspension far more than lawsuits, and the three-pillar approach his firm uses to get marketplaces to do the enforcing.

He also goes into the dark side: the seller who allegedly flew a duffel bag of cash to Costa Rica to bribe an Amazon employee, the competitor who planted the word cocaine in a rival's backend keywords to trigger an automatic ban, and the copycat running a cloned website doing a million dollars a month off someone else's brand.

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What you'll learn:

• Why 15 to 25% of your revenue may be leaking to sellers you've never heard of
• The trademark material difference argument that removes sellers moving genuine product
• The three pillars: IP, marketplace policy, and regulatory compliance, and why using only one is why most enforcement fails
• Why an unauthorized seller priced higher than you is still an emergency
• How brand protection raises your multiple when you sell the business

Who this is for: Brand owners and operators doing 5M or more who sell on Amazon, Walmart, or any marketplace with a shared buy box.

What to steal: The 500% ROI framing, the material difference memorandum, and the free brand audit at esqgo.com to see what you're actually losing.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:53 How unauthorized sellers steal 15–25% of revenue

4:09 The Amazon strategy that actually removes unauthorized sellers

11:56 Why brand protection is a revenue driver, not a cost

17:47 The 3-pillar framework for Amazon brand protection

31:02 How to find marketplace revenue leakage

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Ari Murray runs DTC, Amazon and customer experience at Salt & Stone. She came from Sharma Brands, and before that worked on influencer and celebrity brands including a Kardashian line and Halsey's beauty brand. She started as a customer service agent.

In this episode she breaks down why the old brand-versus-performance argument is collapsing. Customers now shop with a chatbot in the loop. Those bots read your reviews, your Reddit threads, and your actual customer experience. You cannot hack that, which means product quality and brand protection have become growth levers.

She also gets specific on creative: what "socially native" really means, why she is chasing ads that don't look like ads, and the protein powder ad where the product is the seventh ingredient in someone's recipe.

For: DTC founders, growth leads, creative strategists, retention and CRO teams, brand marketers.

In this episode:

• Why she left the agency side for Salt & Stone
• Why Salt & Stone has never acted like a deodorant brand
• AI visibility, Reddit indexing, and why you can't hide from real customer feedback
• The collapse of the middle of the funnel in agentic shopping
• Why she doesn't feel a desperate need to move spend out of Meta
• How they actually measure incrementality (holdouts, Status, Northbeam, Triple Whale, hunting for an MMM)
• Socially native creative, and why splitting a hook five ways is played out
• Why a brand with boundaries makes better ads
• What makes a brand feel cheap
• What makes a brand deserve to be iconic

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Jordan Gordon runs CRO and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, The World's Best Email and Retention Podcast. He has audited somewhere in the range of 400 to 500 brands and been inside more Klaviyo accounts than almost anyone in DTC.

In this All Killer No Filler episode he breaks down why most email programs are structurally backwards. 85% of campaign revenue comes from people who have visited your site recently, and yet most campaigns are sent to anyone who opened an email in the last 180 days. You are risking your entire sending reputation to chase the 15%.

Then he gets to the good part: a flow he says he has basically never seen a brand run, and why it is the most valuable one you can build.

For: ecommerce founders, retention leads, email marketers, CRO teams, agency operators.

In this episode:

• Why free traffic is the "forever job" and paid is the spike
• Why small counts hide truths (nobody hits fold 10, but the people who do are your buyers)
• The 85/15 rule of campaign revenue

• How brands blow up a Klaviyo account: too many campaigns, too-broad segments, and the sunset flow that sends to ten years of dead addresses in one go
• Why recent repeat buyers are whales you should not over-message
• Campaigns are zero-intent messages, so they can only ever be about newness or offers

• The essentials core flow: triggered by site visit, not lifecycle, selling your hero SKU to people who came for something else
• Sending less in a margin-compressed Q4

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Most DTC brands put the bulk of their paid budget where attention is thinnest. Viewers spend about 99 minutes per session on Connected TV and 8 minutes per session on social, yet only 9% of standard marketing budgets go to CTV. This episode is about closing that gap on CTV with the same measurement & targeting you get on social (starting at $7 CPMs!)

Emily Huo built ad businesses at X (Twitter), Reddit, and Spotify, and now runs SMB advertising at Paramount. She walks through how a DTC brand actually gets onto Survivor, Landman, or RuPaul's Drag Race, what to spend, and how to know if it worked.

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This episode, we get into:

• The seasonal play: build awareness over the summer, retarget in the fall, convert in Q4
• Why you start broad on targeting and let the data tell you who is really watching, not the persona you imported from Meta
• The pixel setup that ties a TV impression to a site visit, a lead, or a purchase
• The geo holdout test for measuring halo effect with no third-party tools
• Why a 30-second unskippable spot changes how you tell a brand story when you are not a household name yet
• Budgeting: carve out 10% as experimental, expect a three-month ramp, scale from there

Who this is for: DTC founders and growth marketers who have maxed out social, anyone planning Q4 now, and operators curious whether CTV is real or just a hot label.

What to steal: the install-pixel-now, build-in-summer, convert-in-Q4 sequence, and the broad-then-narrow targeting approach.

Timestamps:

0:00 Emily Huo's Journey to Paramount

3:10 Why CTV Is Growing So Fast

8:07 CTV Targeting vs Meta Ads

12:14 CTV Budget & Testing Strategy

23:18 Measuring the Halo Effect

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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.

In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.

What you'll learn:

• Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
• The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
• How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
• The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
• How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
• Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery

Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.

What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.

Timestamps:

00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand

02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume

08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics

16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business

32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst

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This week on All Killer No Filler, we're giving you a preview of Agency Confidential, the new podcast from our co-founder Jeff, and this episode's is a truly killer.

Jeff sits down with Nick Shackelford, who's everywhere in DTC. Three agencies (Structured, Konstant, Lucid), an events business, and a decade of showing up on every feed, stage, and group chat. Jeff calls him the Coca-Cola of ecommerce. Eric calls him the Drake of DTC.

But halfway through, Nick stops and shares something he says he's never told publicly. Last July, cash got tight and he had to bridge the gap on one of his companies. Not with a loan or a raise, but by getting paid as a public agency owner to talk about SaaS products. Ten years of being a face turned into a cash-flow lever almost no other owner has.

Then it gets stranger. That same decade of posts and videos is now training data for every LLM on earth. Ask ChatGPT or Claude about DTC agencies and Nick, Structured, Konstant, and Geek Out all come up. A personal brand he built to win deal flow quietly became free distribution in a channel that didn't exist when he started.

They get into the real cost of being the face, why building a faceless brand (like DTC and Pilothouse) trades built-in pull for durability, AI in the agency space, and why Nick thinks the market's about to splinter back into specialists.

What they cover:

• The never-shared story of how Nick bridged a cash-flow gap in a rough month
• Why a personal brand is a lever most agency owners don't have
• How ten years of content became free distribution in AI search
• The real cost and risk of being the face of your agency
• Face vs. faceless: durability, transferability, and selling the business
• Where Nick thinks the agency market is heading in 2026

Who this is for: Agency owners, DTC operators, and founders weighing whether to build in public or build something that doesn't hinge on one person's face.

Catch the preview here, and if you like it, go subscribe to Agency Confidential for the full episode.

Timestamps:

00:00 Nick Shackelford on building agencies and personal brands

02:19 How Nick built three agencies and scaled operations

11:59 Why AI is changing agency work and client communication

27:56 How a personal brand became a business advantage

39:18 Why AI will bring back specialized agencies

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Gifting is one of the biggest reasons people buy online, and most brands never build for it on purpose.

Matt Heckathorn runs digital marketing at Wolfe, the company behind Gift Card Granny, PerfectGift.com, and GiftYa. His ICP is close to everyone, which kills the usual narrow-audience playbook and forces a different approach to growth.

What you will learn:

• How a bottom-of-funnel team moved into CTV, programmatic, and out-of-home without losing measurement
• Why CTV retargeting outperformed what Matt expected, and how scale made brand channels measurable
• How Wolfe uses second-tier DMAs to test incrementality before spending up
• How gift card fraud actually works at the physical retail level, and why it shapes the product
• Where Wolfe is drawing its AI line: creative and fulfillment yes, fully agentic media buying not yet
• The cost problem almost nobody is planning for as AI usage scales

Who this is for: DTC operators and growth leads working top of funnel, anyone selling into gifting, and marketers thinking through where AI fits in a real team.

What to steal: The second-tier DMA incrementality test, the recipient-first product framing, and the human checkpoint on agentic media buying.

Timestamps:

00:00 The Future of AI in Marketing

02:12 Reinventing the Gift Card Industry

09:00 How Card-Linked Gifting Works

15:12 Top of Funnel Messaging That Converts

23:12 Building an AI-First Marketing Team

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Meta used to let you pick your customer in the backend. Those days are over. Post-Andromeda, the creative itself carries the targeting signal, which means the old spray-and-pray playbook now works against you.

Rafael Gi spent a decade in traditional creative agencies, then led marketing at a nine-figure apparel brand, and now runs strategic growth and partnerships at Pilothouse. In this one he breaks down why the algorithm is forcing marketers to be good marketers again, and what that looks like in an ad account.

What he gets into:

• Why "creative is targeting" is now literal, not a slogan, and how Meta reads your creative for who to serve it to
• Salience and memory structures: how brands like Volvo, Red Bull, and AG1 got remembered, and how to build the same
• The spend discrepancy that caps scaling brands: 80 percent of budget chasing 20 percent of revenue
• Why structuring an ad account by product instead of by persona burns money and buries your message
• The shift from "all revenue is good revenue" to winning the customer instead of selling the product
• How to evolve one message into new occasions without breaking the memory you have already built

Who this is for: DTC founders and operators between eight and nine figures who are seeing diminishing returns on creative volume and cannot figure out why more ads are not buying more growth.

What to steal: the "one tank of gas, twelve cars" test for whether your budget is spread too thin, and the account-structure fix that lines your media budget up with where your revenue comes from.

Timestamps:

00:00 Why Meta's Andromeda Changed Marketing

02:34 Creative Is the New Targeting

05:55 Building Brand Salience That Lasts

14:32 How to Fix Creative Strategy at Scale

24:42 Applying Salience to Better Meta Ads

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Most list-growth advice assumes you have a website people visit. Cove Soda doesn't. They sell zero sugar soda in roughly 7,000 retail doors with no real DTC store, which means no site traffic, no purchase pop-ups, and no easy email capture.

Zoe Kahn runs marketing for Cove as interim VP. In this episode she breaks down how a retail-first brand still builds a direct, owned channel, why she treats in-person events as the acquisition surface, and how she competes in a soda aisle that already has Olipop and Poppi running Super Bowl ads.

What you'll get:

• The event tactic that grows an email and SMS list without DTC: trade a full can for an opt-in
• How to segment by geography so US news goes to US fans and Canadian news goes to Canadian fans
• How she picks which events to sample at, and why marketing assets in a state change the math
• Using Amazon attribution links to test creative and copy when you have no DTC
• A clear take on why an oversaturated category is not a reason to quit
• The early-career mistake that shipped roughly 700 wrong orders, and what it taught her

Who this is for: retail-first and omnichannel operators, beverage and CPG founders, retention and lifecycle marketers, and anyone who has been told they can't build a list without DTC.

What to steal: the can-for-email swap at events, geographic list segmentation, and an event-selection checklist built on demographic fit and asset location.

0:00 Intro

3:16 Building a Canadian Brand in the US

7:55 How Cove Soda Stands Out in a Crowded Market

10:09 Using QR Codes to Grow Email and SMS Lists

17:50 Practical AI Workflows for Marketing Teams

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