Jay

we’re in a bubble here

You can clone a competitor's ad in minutes. You can't clone their economics. Earlier this week, a client I consult for on paid told me they'd subscribed to an AI tool that promises to clone competitors' ads, create variations of them for their own product and launch them in minutes. But the ad only tells you what the front-end offer is. It doesn't show you what happens after someone swipes their card. The upsells. The repeat purchases. The retention. How long they're willing to wait to make their money back. A competitor might be willing to lose money on the first transaction because they know what that customer is worth over time. Can your business afford to wait as long as theirs to get paid back? You can copy the ad and the landing page, but without the offers and retention behind them, you could be copying a loss without the mechanism that makes it profitable. We all study competitors. Hell, it's part of the job. But don't confuse seeing their ads with understanding their business. The ad is easy to swipe. The landing page is easy to copy. The economics that make them work aren't. And that's where you're likely to get f***ked if you copy blindly.

eating everyone’s lunch innit

I’ve tested practically every web3 ad network and publisher and Specify is one of the few ones that care about the ROI for the advertiser.

my moat is that “i will figure it out”

Everyone is a genius when things are working out just fine.

watched a lot of @higgsfield reels in the middle of the night and it clicked that they're not really a gen ai company it's a media and entertainment studio that happens to sell subscriptions people don't sub because they need the tool. they sub because they saw something that made them want to create the content is the hook. the creative dopamine is the real product. the tool is just the delivery mechanism this is the pattern. sell the outcome, not the product show people what they could make. make them feel like they could be the person who makes it. then sell them the tool that gets them there lessons in their playbook for anyone selling a tool: nobody wants the tool. they want who they become using it

we are all beginners again you have to admit things aren't the same anymore. we're living through a reset ai has redefined how work gets done. the tools, the expectations, the entire game. if you're not willing to start from scratch, you get left behind i remember learning how to set up facebook and google ads. i ran campaigns for friends and anyone who'd let me, for free, just to build fundamentals everything was new and genuinely exciting. i was barely making enough to cover my internet, but i kept doing it because every day i learned more about how things worked i remind myself every day that the same energy is required now. the tools are new. the rules are being written. people who treat this like a continuation of what they already know will miss it but there's a real tension between making a living now and learning the new thing if you're lucky enough to have your tools subsidized, make the most of it. as someone paying out of pocket, i can tell you using ai every day is expensive, and not everyone has the runway to be a beginner again it's scary and it's exciting. both at the same time

"How do we get high value users at the lowest cost?" I hear this from almost every founder I've had a chat with about paid. The question itself is the problem. My response is always: who is a high value user to you? And why would a high value user come cheap? If they're high value, you're not the only one who wants them. That's exactly what makes them expensive. It gets more interesting because "high value" means different things to different brands, even in the same category. What you call an expensive CAC is someone else's dream CAC. "Okay but we can just look at industry benchmarks" Benchmarks are directionally useful, but they're just benchmarks. They don't know your margins, your payback period, your retention curve or your offer. Using someone else's benchmark as your target KPI almost always ends badly. So it comes down to what stage you're at: If you're just getting started with paid, your goal is getting off the ground. Drive real traffic to stress test your initial assumptions about your offer and your funnel. Chasing the cheapest click just buys you the lowest intent users. Worry about whether your funnel is ready for paid traffic before you worry about what it costs. If you're in high growth and still looking at CAC in isolation, you're not reading your data. The answers are already there: contribution margin on the first transaction, 90D LTV, payback period. Read those right and you'll land where I did: >> You can't scale by optimizing for the lowest cost. You'll look efficient on paper, then growth stalls, because costs are bound to rise as you scale and you're forced to cap spend at the slightest increase. >> The biggest leverage is in payback period and LTV. Higher retention, complementary back-end offers to the front offer. A strong LTV:CAC with fast payback beats a cheap CAC every time, because it's a lever you can actually control. Stop asking how to get high value users cheap. Ask how much a high value user is worth to you, then pay it.

just set up meta's muse from a friend's invite. the referral mechanic is standard but the offer is clear invite a friend within 48 hours and you both get a billion tokens. a $20 sub gets you 500M tokens a week. do the math and a billion tokens feels like real value whether that value is real doesn't matter. i instantly saw it as good value and a risk-free way to test the app the other clever one is the $1 "age verification" charge. enter your card, get $1 refundable charge. now your card is connected and the friction to buy more tokens later is gone the referral hook is really good but that $1 charge is the trap

platforms change. algos fluctuate. the only future-proof strategy is a product people actually want

Seeing a lot of people flexing on how well designed their landing pages and marketing assets look and it's yet another reminder that "well designed" does not mean "interesting" or "more conversion". The simpler, the better if you are optimizing for conversion as long as it's not boring. People forgive simple. They never forgive boring. Simple also doesn't mean less effort or easy. Simple means one idea, one message, one thing to remember. Easy means no effort went into it and people can tell the difference. You can be simple and boring. That's the worst combination. Nothing to grab onto and nothing interesting either. Or you can be simple and interesting. One clear idea delivered in a way that stops the scroll. Nobody ever scrolled past an ad or tweet because it was too clear. They scrolled because it wasn't perceived to be worth their attention. Simple for clarity and being interesting gets you the click.

the fear of being known for one thing is why nobody knows what you do