🤑 Matthew Bertulli show you how to acquire more customers

✌️ Sean Frank tells you not one but two places you should go

🚨 Top five headlines from this week in consumer (DTC) news

Sean Frank CEO, Ridge

SEAN, WHAT EVENT SHOULD I GO TO NEXT?

If you are in LA like Connor and me, you should go to the League of Originals LA Summit.

It is Nov 7.
I have spoken there before.

This is an unpaid RECOMMENDATION

I have known the team that runs it since we were agency media buyers together.

They are good people. The day has a lot of good people too.

Outdoor Voices, Bala, Beekeeper's Naturals, Aviator Nation, Converse, Dr. Squatch, and there are more.

It's curated- not crowded.

Every attendee is vetted. People that you actually want to meet.

It is not free.

But they gave us this code
OPERATORS25GA

But Sean...

"I am not in LA."

You should go to the online workshop Fulfil is doing because they are sponsors of everything we do (THANK YOU) and because it is about using AI for Black Friday ops and finance.

Oct 28. For one hour.

They are going to pick 5 brands to get live feedback.

If you tell them something you want help with and say that Sean sent you- they will probably pick you.

- Fulfil's Claude MCP
- Forecasts
- Doing fulfillment better
- How to ask your data real questions

It is free.

This is the link to register.

It is on Oct 28. The day before our Operators masterclass. THAT IS HOW MUCH WE LIKE Kabir and Fulfil.

Matthew Bertulli CEO, Pela & Lomi

Everything You Need to Know About Customer Acquisition

It’s no secret that 2025 has been a giant pain in the ass for a lot of brands. Acquiring new customers with Meta ads being chief among the thorns in our backsides.

Here’s the harsh truth.

This is a huge mistake, and a missed opportunity.

Today, I’m documenting everything I know about acquiring customers at massive scale.

Not media buying hacks. Not the settings to turn-on or off in Meta. Not account structure or campaign types.

I’m giving you a complete framework for how to think about customer acquisition strategy. From personas to the emotions that drive purchases, from channel strategy to growth ceilings … to expanding channels, products, and markets.

Let’s get into it.

Customer Personas & Why People Buy

Every single marketer or executive who’s read anything about marketing can tell you about “customer personas.”

I’ve been coaching CEOs for the better part of a decade and I rarely encounter a brand who’s done this properly.

If at all (which is scary).

We build complicated brand decks and detailed descriptions of who the customers are, what else they buy, where they shop and what their interests are. We name these customers with cutesy acronymns that everyone feels good about.

Hear me now.

Until you are a very big company, this is largely a waste of time. It doesn’t help you acquire more customers in the $1M–$50M range, especially in consumer brand building.

There’s only two questions every growing business should ask about identifying and acquiring customers:

1. What are the underlying emotional drivers that make someone buy our product or service?
2. What media do they consume that influences their shopping decisions? Who do they trust?

If you answer these two questions, you don’t really need to know anything else about your customers to drive effective acquisition.

Let’s get started on emotional triggers that cause human beings to part with hard earned cash.

Chief among these are things like fear, regret, greed, and sex.

Some products have the good fortune of being able to tap into these primal emotions. Most don’t.

For the rest of us, we need to go deeper and sometimes wider.

I have a rule.

If we can’t pinpoint several of these for a new product, we don’t invest in it and we definitely don’t invest in marketing.

Without knowing the emotional triggers that drive your ideal customer, I am not confident anyone can scale up customer acquisition profitably.

I don’t write a stitch of sales or marketing copy without first pulling this list up.

21 Reasons People Buy Things

1. To avoid effort
2. To save time (faster)
3. To be comfortable
4. To escape pain
5. To make money (get)
6. To save money (keep)
7. To gain praise
8. To feel more loved
9. To be healthier
10. To increase status
11. To be appreciated
12. To feel important
13. To be secure
14. To be attractive
15. To be sexy (visceral)
16. To be distinctive
17. To be happier
18. To gain knowledge
19. To gratify curiosity
20. To alleviate fear
21. To assuage guilt

People make a decision to purchase emotionally first.

Then they rationalize it and justify it.

Focus on the emotions that drive them.

Media Profiles & Channel Selection

Once you know the underlying emotional triggers, you can move on to media profiling, which will be shape where you go to acquire customers.

This is also known as channels.

90% of the time, this is a little easier for most businesses than figuring out why people buy.

Mega ad platforms (Meta, Google, Amazon, etc.) have given us some very obvious places to begin looking for customers.

For all the talk in business about product-market fit, we don’t talk enough about product-channel fit.

Some products are better suited for Facebook than others. Some are better suited for TV. Some for magazines.

Unless you stop and think about the customer, and which media they consume, you can’t make the best channel selection.

Your goal as the CEO is to identify the very best channel for acquiring your customers.

I don’t know of another way to do this than to start with the customer. I’m sure there’s a fancier term in some book somewhere, but I call this media profiling.

Media Profiling

To do this, you need to ask the right questions.

If you have the ability to survey existing customers, this is where it can come in handy. If you don’t have existing customers, you might be making educated guesses.

Either way, it’s valuable to have a thesis around your ideal customer’s media profile.

Which types of content do they consume?

• Social media
• Online publishers
• Books
• Mobile games
• Magazines
• YouTube
• Streaming TV
• Linear TV
• Podcasts
• Radio
• Newspapers
• Reddit
• Other communities

Get specific.

Actually list out the publications if you can identify them.

How often do they consume that media?

Do they trust it? How much?

If you listen to headlines and marketing influencers, TikTok is chewing up hours of time a day for every human on the planet.

However, if you sell a high-end product to an older audience like Lomi does, TikTok is likely not the best place for you.

The older the person, the less likely they trust TikTok content. Same goes with Facebook.

Show me a 55+ person and I’ll show you someone who still consumes a lot of TV, radio, and even print media.

Sure, they might spend an increasing amount of time on Facebook and Instagram, but they trust what they see on TV.

Before you jump down my throat, think about the other companies advertising on TV. Now think about the products people see on social media.

Which would you prefer your brand be associated with?

Don’t get me wrong, digital ad platforms are magic customer acquisition machines that you should most likely allocate the vast majority of your budget to.

Just don’t do it blindly.

Your product + customer media profile will guide you to the right channels. You probably need more than one. So why not map them all out up front so you know what the potential moves are?

Channel Leverage

Speaking of channels, this is the most important concept.

Do not wait until after your primary acquisition channel begins to stuggle before you start expanding into new ones.

Anyone who overindexed on Meta can back me up on this.

It has been significantly harder to scale Meta this year. I know many brands that are struggling and having to cut their ad budgets back because things broke.

I also know brands who are diversified in their channel mix and have real leverage.

Channel leverage is a more complicated concept, but super powerful when you get it right.

Roman Khan, the owner of Raycon and holding company Peak 21 has been very public that the key to its scale on Meta was scaling up influencer + creator programs first.

The team gifts product and runs endorsement deals with thousands of influencers. Those influencers post to their own followings and that creates bigger audiences for Meta to leverage in serving ads more efficiently.

In other words, Meta ads only became profitable and scalable once Raycon had a working influencer program.

Similarly, our own success at Lomi with Meta ads is entirely dependent on our use of TV and YouTube to generate larger amounts of “top of funnel” demand.

HexClad anchored brand and awareness in Costco using the roadshow program, turning on ecommerce and digital advertising after it had showcased live demos of its products to customers all over the US.

Simple Modern built on Amazon, then moved into mass retail, and now have a booming DTC business where they do multiple eight-figures without spending much on advertising. This is beautiful, sexy channel leverage at its finest.

Some channels are amazing at building awareness.

Some are pure snipers for converting shoppers.

Others are a total waste of your resources + life force.

There is rarely such thing as a true impulse purchase. Most impulse purchases are people who’ve been in-market for a while and simply chose you when they were ready.

Growth Ceilings

I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds of businesses hit a growth ceiling. I’ve experienced it in my own companies more times than I care to think about (or admit).

You know what I’m talking about. Plateaus. Flat years. The times where your growth just feels stuck.

In my experience, one of the most important jobs of a CEO is to raise the ceiling on the business. Your team’s job is to constantly push the business up against the ceiling.

When it comes to acquiring customers, there are some common problems that many entrepreneurs encounter.

And they all come down to three things.

Products, Markets, and Channels

Whenever a founder or CEO asks me for help in breaking through a growth ceiling, I bring it back to these building blocks.

If you want to raise the ceiling of your business, you more than likely need to …

1. Add products
2. Add markets
3. Add channels

Many brands I know are only growing YoY because they have added new markets. Their US businesses are relatively flat and it’s new markets that are driving new growth.

In some cases, it’s companies who have added entirely new product categories that are experiencing growth.

Deciding which to invest in though?

That’s a whole other story.

Let me help by giving you my decision matrix on this topic.

Markets

You should almost always go here last.

Adding new markets (cities, countries, etc.) brings with it a larger amount of brain damage. You could be dealing with new languages, currencies, cultural norms, and patterns.

Logistics might be more difficult. Duties and taxes. Legal.

Bottom line? Markets might be nice to test and see a lift, but you should only be going to market expansion if …

You believe you’ve exhausted growth in your launch market by exploring new products or channels.

Products

If you’re in a category with fairly quick product development cycles, this is a great place to lean into.

But it likely isn’t your first move either.

Lomi has very long product development cycles (2-3 years) so we tend to not look to new products to grow that business. Pela Case, Ridge, Hexclad, and Simple Modern have all added product categories to help grow our businesses.

Think about clothing brands who start off selling t-shirts and add dozens of other apparel items.

My preference is to add products that can serve as their own customer acquisition rivers. Cross-sell and up-sell products are less valuable than products you can acquire new customers into.

Acquisition products have larger TAMs, higher margins, or higher LTV. Better still …

They solve unique pain points in highly emotional areas.

Great companies move customers through product ecosystems. They acquire into a front-end product and then sell back-end offers, driving up the profit per customer acquired.

Channels

Channel leverage is a beautiful thing and often the very first place a business should look to raise the growth ceiling.

If you have one profitable acquisition channel, you should first look to see if you can add another one. I prefer to test each channel with their own funnel so I can see how it performs independent of others.

Channels impact channels.

They overlap. They support. They fuel each other. Your job is to identify which are big levers, and which are supporting dials.

Channels are a great place to start because they also cause the least amount of operational brain damage. You can often use or modify existing creative assets, technology, and human resources when you expand.

Moving from Meta ads to AppLovin or from YouTube to TV (streaming or linear) is a lot easier to digest than building new product teams or entering new markets.

Read this email again, and think about which of these areas you haven’t put enough thought into.

Do you need to revisit your ideal customer profiles and see why they buy and where they consume media?

Do you need to consider expanding?

• Channels
• Products
• Markets

Do you have a way to evaluate which of these moves has the highest risk-versus-reward payoff?

One last thing.

If you would like me to write about the foundational concepts that you need to know before you spend a single dollar on marketing, write back …

“Make Matt cover the foundations!”

Aaron (our chief content officer) reads every response. He’ll make sure I do it.

THE FEED

Operators X Baseball Lifestyle

Is Media Buying Dead? And How We’re Hiring for Culture, Autonomy, and Execution

Operators Titans E004: David Herrmann, the Media Buyer’s Media Buyer

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, this week’s biggest headlines in consumer news.

1. Chobani’s Valuation Surges to $20B: Inc Magazine

20-year-old yogurt maker Chobani raised $650M in funding and the company’s valuation surged to an all-time high of $20B. Chobani will use the infusion to expand its manufacturing footprint in Idaho and New York.

Chobani’s ambitions haven’t diminished in recent years. In addition to acquiring La Colombe and Daily Harvest in the past two years, annual sales are now approaching $4B.

2. Mammoth Brands Bets on Diapers: Business Wire

Mammoth Brands — owner of Harry’s, Flamingo, and other personal care brands — is entering a new category by acquiring Coterie, a premium diaper and baby wipes brand. Reuters put the price tag in the range of $1B, inclusive of earnout.

Coterie debuted in 2019 and has sold more than 700 million diapers since launching. The primarily DTC brand generated over $200M in net revenue over the past 12 months, and Mammoth is eager to take the brand into retail.

3. Built Bar Explores Options: Reuters

Fast-growing protein bar brand Built Bar has hired Houlihan Lokey as the company explores a possible sale. Founded in 2018 out of a garage in Utah, the brand’s novel protein puff bars have become a staple at retailers like Target, Walmart, and Costco.

With multi-outlet sales up 75% year-over-year according to SPINS, Built Bar could fetch as much as $1B. A number of other protein bar brands (e.g., FitCrunch, PowerCrunch, and Fulfil Nutrition US) recently exited, so the category has been a sustained hot streak.

4. Equip Foods Unveils New Look: Twitter

After selling a stake to HighPost Capital earlier this year, clean nutrition company Equip Foods just revealed its sleek new brand identity. The company nixed its matter-of-fact branding in favor of a more lifestyle-oriented look that will appeal to a wider array of consumers. Equip is currently a high eight-figure brand and it’s preparing to launch in the retail channel.

5. Bubble Skincare Hires Bankers: Cosmetics Business

Five-year-old skincare brand Bubble has hired Centerview Partners to explore potential deal options. Founded by Shai Eisenman and based in New York, Bubble was one of the first skincare brands to target Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

The company’s products are clinically-backed and accessibly priced for teens. Eisenman confirmed that Bubble’s annual sales are now north of $100M. With skincare brands like Rhode, Medik8, and BYOMA recently transacting — it’s a good time to be looking for a buyer.

Like Sean said, we’re running the Operators Masterclass with 25+ ecommerce leaders on Oct 29th.

But I want to give his recommendations room to breathe (so I won’t link to ours).

• League of Originals: Nov 7
• AI for BFCM Workshop: Oct 28

Instead, here’s my ask.

If you want Matt to put together his foundations on customer acqusition, please write back and let me know!

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓
Chief Content Officer

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