Digital Ads | Founder @hstreetdigital
Austin, TX
Joined February 2020
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- Following891
- 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
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.
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.
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
Hal Smith retweeted
Thiiiiiiis is why I warn people about focusing too much on any individual metrics.
"People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up."
CVR, CPM, CPMr, CPCs, Frequency, etc.
You can improve any of these numbers while the business goes down.
(Thanks @heyitsalexP for sharing this)
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs
“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”
For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics.
“We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.”
People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable:
“The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.”
He continues:
“Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.”
They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something.
“We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.”
Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)
Hal Smith retweeted
Performance Summit Summary:
Meta just sent a clear message to advertisers: the old ways of doing things are becoming outdated. If you're still measuring success with last-click attribution, focusing only on the very end of the customer journey, and treating creators as optional partners, you’re working with a version of the platform that’s on its way out.
This isn’t just a small change; it’s a significant shift. Meta is redefining how ads are ranked—now it’s about the entire sequence of interactions, not just those final moments. They’re also shifting the way we should measure performance; it’s no longer just about clicks but about the overall lift in engagement. The algorithm is rewarding richer context, diverse creative approaches, and genuine signals from creators. These aren’t just tweaks; they’re foundational changes.
The brands that will really thrive are the ones that start adapting now, providing the system with better data and insights before their competitors catch on. Companies that wait until these trends are obvious will find themselves playing catch-up against those who’ve already established a lead with valuable data.
foxwelldigital.com/blog/meta…
Hal Smith retweeted
THREE WAYS DTC BRANDS QUIETLY DIE
@JonAlbertBlair has audited 50+ brands. The patterns:
1. OPEX over 10% of revenue. (Modern ecom is 10% or less. The lean ones? 6-7%.)
2. Scaling broken unit economics "scaling a problem instead of scaling profitability."
3. All the cash trapped in excess inventory.
Most brands don't have a marketing problem. They have a math problem.
Hal Smith retweeted
Too many advertisers give Meta weak signals, so it optimizes poorly.
When Meta optimizes poorly, advertisers trust it less.
Give Meta better signals, it optimizes better, you trust it more.
Giving Meta the right signals is hard.
The advertisers who trust Meta most are the ones who fed it the best signals. That's not a coincidence.
Can't give it good signals? You'll need to manually control more (and you'll convince yourself manual control is the best way to optimize)
Meta is good at optimizing for immediate volume or value. It's not good at optimizing for LTV off the shelf.
If LTV matters to your business, you need to feed it a proxy (subscription events, predicted LTV) or accept that you're optimizing for a different goal than you think you are.
Meta is a mirror. If you don't like what it's optimizing for, look at what you're telling it to optimize for.
Hal Smith retweeted
Every time a founder tells me agencies are too expensive, I ask what they think a $100K/year W2 media buyer actually costs. The answer is always wrong.
They quote the salary and maybe they add benefits, but never They never add the rest.
Here's what a $100K media buyer actually costs you in year one:
1. Recruiting costs. Agencies charge roughly 20-30% of first year salary to place someone. Even if you run the process yourself, your time, job board spend, and interview hours aren't free. Call it $15-30K depending on how long the search takes.
2. Payroll taxes and benefits. Health insurance, 401K match, employer-side taxes. You're adding another $20-30K easy on a $100K base.
3. Onboarding and ramp time. They're not fully productive on day one. You're paying full salary for weeks or months before they're actually moving the needle.
Add it all up and you're looking at roughly 160% of gross salary in true all-in cost (the model we use internally). That $100K hire is a $160K commitment before they've touched an ad account.
And that's assuming you hired well. Performance marketing has a massive talent deficit, and the hiring process is where professional bullshitters thrive.
Now compare that to an agency. Cleaner termination, no wrongful termination risk, and no severance negotiation. The contracts are defined and generally short-term. If it doesn't work, you move on.
Just something to keep in mind.
Anyway, if you want senior-level paid media expertise without the $160K gamble, feel free to DM me. Happy to walk you through what working with us looks like.
Hal Smith retweeted
Imagine every pixel on your screen, streamed live directly from a model. No HTML, no layout engine, no code. Just exactly what you want to see.
@eddiejiao_obj, @drewocarr and I built a prototype to see how this could actually work, and set out to make it real. We're calling it Flipbook. (1/5)
Hal Smith retweeted
Our 2026 playbook has been our most downloaded resource this year.
We've updated it with new chapters added - including a full breakdown of Meta's algorithm update published 31 March 2026, the rise of personas, partnership ads, AI UGC and how the next wave of ugc is developing.
The same frameworks behind £600M+ in revenue across the DTC brands we work with. Four pillars: Meta, TikTok, AI, and Creative.
Platform mechanics. Account structures. AI workflows. The creative formats actually driving incremental growth right now.
Retweet this post and comment "2026" and I'll send it over.
Hal Smith retweeted
Your Meta ads playbook is obsolete, and most marketers have no idea.
While they chase outdated tactics, the game has fundamentally changed. Post-Andromeda, success is driven by two things: powerful creative and a strategy called Signal Engineering.
Here’s the new formula 🧵
Hal Smith retweeted
Throughout:
The number one thing to understand before you launch a physical product.
What is it?
It’s the sales volume in your category.
I see this mistake time and time again-
You have some widget, let’s say a backpack.
You raise funding.
You are going to build a BILLION DOLLAR bag brand.
But you never actually look-
Has anyone done that before?
Sure, the TAM is huge.
20 billion+
But has anyone actually captured a billion of market share?
Samsonite is the strategic.
They are only worth $3 billion dollars.
What about LVMH?
Designer is different.
Fashion houses don’t sell bags, they sell logos.
So you need to understand not only the TAM, but what % of the market you can take.
Throughput is critical in sales channels too.
“I’ll just sell bags in REI!”
REI did 3.5 billion in total sales last year.
It shrunk 6%. That’s all stores, all online.
Bags are MAYBE 500m a year there.
And how many brands are fighting for that?
The best selling bag, the best selling brand, might do 100m in rei.
If you want to get to a billion in revenue in bags, and your grand plan is rei…
The throughput isn’t there.
Category is the most importantly decision you can make.
Apparel is a knife fight.
But TAM is huge.
500+ brands with over 1 billion in sales each.
Vs maybe 1-2 bag brands (non luxury)
Even adding luxury, you get to like 20.
TAM + Marketshare X throughout = opportunity