Digital Ads | Founder @hstreetdigital
Austin, TX
Joined February 2020
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- Followers308
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Hal Smith retweeted
The most real shit ever, and he’s basically describing flow state, which applies to basically everything
High ROAS ≠ good ads.
It can mean you’re under-spending, retargeting existing demand, or selling a low-margin product.
The goal isn’t to maximize ROAS.
The goal is to maximize profitable, incremental customer acquisition.
Hal Smith retweeted
I think everyone agrees that as businesses scale, the amount of work they take to run also grows. Everywhere. Supporting greater scale requires more work.
This is true in your ad account. A $100k/mo account and a $1mm/mo account don't take the same amount of work.
Your pushing for a flat rate retainer isn't savvy. It's begging for disaster.
At best, you're overcharged at the start to account for cost growth on your partner's side.
More likely, as the work grows, the agency either under-services the account or routes more work to lower cost talent to maintain margin.
If you want to work with the best, and you should, you have to share the upside. If you want your agency partners to invest more resources in your success, you can't expect them to do it to their own detriment.
Hal Smith retweeted
I'll die on this hill...
There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you're doing $5 to $10 million in revenue.
Learn how to create demand organically through content, partnerships, and outreach first. That's enough to take you to that 5-10M mark. Then once that engine is running, layer ads on top.
If you do it the other way around you risk getting eaten up by rising ad costs before your margins can absorb it.
Hal Smith retweeted
The new ChatGPT ad platform still sucks.
I’ve talked to a lot of agency owners, and they’ve said it is a nightmare.
The $500 in matched spend is horrible. They should have come in with something serious, like $10,000 to $20,000, and made a hard hit into this.
Brands desperately need more viable places to spend.
We all want another serious competitor to Meta and Google...
@chrislukehall: “Platforms in the past have said, ‘We’ll give you $10,000 in matched ad credits. Please come spend your dollars here.’”
“I actually think this is a really negative sign for what they’re trying to do.”
@chrisorzy: "I don’t care what platform it is, as long as it works. If I put a dollar in and get more than a dollar back, I’m going to do it.”
“I’m pulling for it to work because I would love another platform beyond Meta and Google.”
@ecommcowboy is live M-F at 12P CT.
Hal Smith retweeted
I think any company that principally sells digital goods, but even potentially DTC / eCommerce brands, should position the CMO role as a marketing economist, primarily focusing on measurement and optimal budget allocation.
Digital marketing is increasingly opaque, with the largest platforms absorbing placement-level and audience logic. This requires measurement to be abstracted upward into a full-time executive role that can a) align disparate marketing functions and b) maintain harmony with the CFO’s office. “Marketing economist” strikes me as the right profile to meet those demands.
I know this role indeed exists at many large CPG brands, but what I’m claiming here is that it should exist at digital-first companies as the head of the marketing organization.
Hal Smith retweeted
Groq Founder @JonathanRoss321 says the ability to “choose the dominant game being played” is what determines whether a company succeeds or not:
“MySpace was focused on number of accounts signed up. Facebook focused on monthly active users—it was the dominant game.”
“If you maximize the monthly active, you're going to beat someone who's maximizing accounts signed up. You're playing a better game.”
“What most really successful founders and entrepreneurs do is, everyone else is playing this game, and they realize that if you play this higher level game, you win.”
A conversation with @JonathanRoss321, founder of @GroqInc. This is the first podcast that Jonathan talks about his $20 billion partnership with NVIDIA.
In this conversation, we talk about his decade building Groq: why West Coast VCs kept passing on the company, how fast Jensen works, overcoming near-death experiences, and why he thinks the entire AI age turns on a single skill — knowing what to ask.
Hope you enjoy this conversation:
0:00 The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks
0:25 Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together
1:46 When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins
3:30 Always Start With A Hobby Project
5:55 Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them
8:23 There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader
13:00 I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders
14:34 Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You
16:31 At NVIDIA There Is No Politics
19:44 You Have To Learn Confidence
22:23 East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow
23:50 The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley
26:48 The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal
30:07 Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster
34:52 Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient
35:44 Find The Dominant Game And Play It
37:11 A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management
38:34 Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone
42:54 You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It
46:32 I Intend To: Intentional Leadership
51:07 Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival
54:13 Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives
58:46 Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early
1:00:37 How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation
1:03:13 Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything
1:05:02 Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost
1:07:07 Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free
1:10:04 Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them
Includes paid partnerships.
Looking for a hungry, high-agency Growth Strategist who wants to help scale some of the best outdoor brands in America.
You'll thrive here if you:
→ Have 5+ years scaling DTC brands on Meta and Google
→ Are obsessed with customer acquisition, contribution margin, and profitable growth
→ Understand attribution, MTA, MMM, incrementality, and the limitations of each
→ Love pulling data, finding insights, and presenting recommendations to clients
→ Have strong opinions on growth, testing, and scaling, but are willing to change your mind when the data proves otherwise
→ Take ownership, solve hard problems, and proactively bring new ideas to the table
This is not a "manage campaigns and wait for instructions" role.
We expect our Growth Strategists to diagnose constraints, build 90-day growth plans, challenge assumptions, and help clients make better decisions.
Compensation: $120,000–$210,000 OTE
To apply, email [email protected] with the subject line: "Growth Strategist Opportunity"
Please do not apply if you prefer being told exactly what to do, dislike presenting to clients, or are uncomfortable taking ownership of outcomes.
Hal Smith retweeted
This is an unprompted @andrewfoxwell appreciation post. Foxwell Founders Slack is so insanely valuable.
Got some great prompt guidance and creative inspo already and it's not even 8am.
Hal Smith retweeted
Rick Rubin’s fishing metaphor:
This is the sign of a true professional. He doesn't sit around waiting for inspiration to come— he goes to the studio rigidly, every day, ready to work, knowing that it will be there for him when he calls on it.
“It's like fishing. You can go out and spend the whole day fishing and not catch any fish. You can work for a day or for a week and nothing good can happen. That happens. It's out of our control.”
You have to trust the process. You have to keep showing up.
Most brands try to scale all year, and that’s the mistake.
The real growth comes from knowing when to plant… and when to harvest.
The data to grow your brand is already in front of you.
You just need to see it through the right lens.
Check what percentage of your ad impressions are going to existing customers vs new ones.
Ask whether your creative is speaking to a specific person with a specific problem or just saying something vague that could apply to anyone.
Look at your pixel quality score and your conversion event hierarchy.
Those 3 things, in plain sight, will tell you more about why paid ads aren’t scaling than any strategy session will.
Imagine spending $6M in just 11 hours… and learning faster than everyone else because of it.
That’s what happens when testing becomes your biggest advantage.
Hal Smith retweeted
The graveyard of amazing products that died because founders refused to admit that sales and marketing is 90% of all startup work is never ending
Before I look at ROAS, CTR, CAC, or anything else, I want to know what the contribution margin on the product we’re scaling is.
That number is the ceiling on everything.
It’s the max we can sustainably pay to acquire before the economics of the business start to deteriorate.
If that margin is too thin, no amount of creative brilliance, audience precision, or landing page optimization is going to make the math work at scale.
You might be able to engineer your way to a slightly lower CPA, but you can’t engineer your way out of a fundamentally broken unit economics problem.
What surprises most brands is that contribution margin isn’t as fixed as they think.
It’s actually one of the most adjustable variables in the whole system.
Bundle strategy, for example, changes it immediately.
When one of our recent clients saw customer that were just as likely to buy the home and travel kit bundle as a single unit, the blended contribution margin on that offer improved enough to justify more aggressive bidding.
Other strategies to move the margin lever without requiring a product redesign include:
- Pricing tests
- Upsell sequences
- Post-purchase offers
- Subscription conversion
Most brands are so focused on reducing what they spend on media that they never think about increasing what they make per transaction.
But it’s an equally valid path to improving CAC efficiency.
A $10 improvement in average order value on a $100 product can do more for your CAC ceiling than a month of creative testing.
Start with contribution margin, model what target CAC needs to be at your current and aspirational spend levels, and then build your acquisition system backward from those numbers.
The math tells you where the opportunity is.
A Google brand keyword campaign is where we often find the selection effect in full operation.
When someone types your brand name directly into Google, they already know you and are likely intending to buy.
Meaning, they’re going to your site whether your ad appears or not.
Bidding on your own brand name and taking credit for those conversions inflates your Google performance numbers while telling you almost nothing about whether paid media is actually driving incremental demand.
That doesn’t mean you should stop protecting your brand terms, since competitors will bid on them if you don’t, but you should be clear-eyed about what those campaigns are.
They’re defensive rather than growth-oriented.
Your incrementality story lives in non-brand prospecting.