Lock in. Strap down. And get ready.

What you’re about to experience is an unabridged excerpt from our long-foretold Operators Guide to Expansion.

🔥 Connor MacDonald reveals Ridge’s entire channel strategy

💰 Cody Plofker wants you to make more money per checkout

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

Cody Plofker CEO, Jones Road Beauty

Getting Paid for the Checkout Methods You Already Offer

I’ve always said … don’t touch the payment page unless you’re sure it won’t hurt conversions.

So when I heard about Rokt Pay+, I was skeptical.

But after an A/B test showed a slight CVR lift, it clicked. The checkout can do more than process a card.

Aftersell by Rokt, the team behind $1B+ in post-purchase revenue for over 40,000 brands, is now bringing monetization to the payment step.

What is it? Rokt Pay+ adds a single, native placement from digital wallets like PayPal or Apple Pay above payment options (just a logo and short text, no redirects), encouraging customers to complete their purchase.

And then pays you for it.

Top brands like Raycon, MoonBrew, and (of course) Jones Road are earning $0.20–$0.25 pure profit per order.

This season, make every checkout count. Let Rokt Pay+ offset processing fees and turn traffic into lasting profit.

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

This is an excerpt from the Operators Guide to Ecommerce Channel Expansion. Full playbook releases this Thursday.

Three Stages of Expansion: Maturity Curve & Checklist

As brands mature, their need to diversify into new ad channels increases and eventually becomes required for growth.

However, the maturity curve can vary greatly between brands.

Running three business units at Ridge gives us a unique perspective that I hope will be helpful:

1. Travel: Immature
2. Rings: Maturing
3. Wallets (EDC): Mature

If you have a large TAM and a well-differentiated product, it is completely possible to reach +$100M without ever needing a second channel. I know brands that hit nine figures on Meta; others at mid-eight figures with nothing but YouTube.

While diversification is inevitable, brands often underestimate how much scale they can get from Meta.

Over the medium term, the constraint of a single channel can be highly beneficial. It forces you to refine your approach to scaling rather than chase new channels, new content, and questionable forms of measurement.

Find the message, content, offers, and landing pages that work. Maximize the value you can extract from Meta.

And only then should you begin seriously considering diversifying. At that point, it will be easier anyway.

I speak to mid-sized brands constantly who want to do YouTube partnerships, or live shopping, or linear TV.

I tell them the same thing …

Are there exceptions?

Of course there are. Sometimes, a new channel is so inefficient as a nascent platform that it’s truly arbitrage for brands.

For us, AppLovin was one of those channels. When we launched, it was wildly undervalued — fewer advertisers, lower CPMs, and a user base eager to see non-gaming-related ads.

But that’s the exception. Not the rule.

 Taking Our Own Medicine 

My thinking on channel diversification developed because we did the opposite. At <$20M a year, Ridge was on every ad channel that would take our money, plus newsletters, YouTubers, obscure websites, affiliates, etc.

There was a lot of arbitrage early on. But it delayed mastery in our key channels. We didn’t really get good at Meta until 2021, when we had done +$50M.

Luckily, I’ve learned from my mistakes.

My don’t-diversify-too-early mantra can be seen in our strategy today. With recent product category expansion, we have three unique lines of business at different points on the maturity curve.

• Travel: Immature
• Rings: Maturing
• Wallets (EDC): Mature

The difference in channel mix is clear.

Naturally, maturity reflects in our budgets. During Q3 …

• Travel spend: 7.4% of total
• Rings spend: 20.0% of total
• EDC spend: 72.6% of total

Actual dollars spent will increase in Q4, but the mix doesn’t change substantially.

Going into 2026, rings diversification will become essential.

The men’s online wedding band business is simply not that large. If we want to continue growing our share of the category, we’ll need to expand in order to reach new people in unique ways.

Travel, on the other hand, can remain Meta-centric much longer.

Given AOV, market size, and improvements we still have available to us, I don’t foresee channel expansion being required.

Rings are a more intent-based category, and SEM is able to be a large percentage of budget. Travel is more considered, and we’ve found greater success driving upper-funnel awareness and interest with YouTube.

 Ad Channels vs Sales Channels 

As you move up the maturity curve, you’ll likely also begin diversifying sales channels — having a presence on Amazon, maybe retail.

This is related because as you diversify ad channels, you’re likely also moving further away from a direct point of purchase.

YouTube in-stream, linear TV, etc. are all less-click, more view-based channels that benefit from having more optionality in the point of purchase. We see channels like YouTube often drive 40% of their incremental revenue on Amazon.

 Bucket Your Creative Formats 

One of our foundational beliefs is content comes first. The majority of attention online currently goes to short-form vertical video. While there are some differences in consumption, much of the same content can work across placements.

• AppLovin
• Reels
• YouTube Shorts
• Snapchat
• TikTok

Separate those from placements with horizontal video:

• CTV and linear
• YouTube in-stream

That makes testing + iterating easier.

 Rapid Fire on Channels 

Mastering Meta is underrated.

It’s funny to say in 2025, but most of your problems can be solved by just getting better at the greatest money-making machine to ever exist.

At least that is still the belief that I approach every day with.

Your best next dollar is probably spent on Meta.

The value of spending $300-$1,000 per day on any new channel is negligible, even if measured to perform well. It’s distracting, prone to errors over time, and you can most likely figure out how to spend that much on Meta at a higher iROAS.

Google may be overrated.

We’ve observed both brand and non-brand, SEM and Shopping ads drive a smaller iROAS than in-platform and even MTA reporting. Meaning many of the purchases are non-incremental — they would have occurred otherwise.

I believe PMAX is largely a trap. Google is one of the most popular channels that advertisers are not skeptical of enough.

Good ad inventory is underrated.

Not all impressions are created equal. AppLovin and YouTube have extremely valuable, non-skippable seconds in their ad units.

Many advertisers ignore those nuances.

Last Q4, we got a $15 CPM from AppLovin, roughly 20% higher than Meta. But the cost per 3-second view was 50% lower due to differences in ad units.

Sometimes all you really need is high-quality ad space.

Organic content (social) can be arbitraged.

I’m out of my element here, because I would say we are not good at organic social, but optimizing social content for free algo distribution is essentially its own channel at this point.

Post-purchase surveys are good.

This puts you at risk of “too many inputs and no clear source of truth,” but has its place. At one point in Q4 last year, “mobile gaming app” was driving almost 20% of all PPS responses — that gave us conviction in scaling AppLovin further.

Always add the survey response for new channels before you launch ads to get a sense of your baseline. Not only did “mobile gaming app” hit 20%, it was up 10x from when we originally added the response.

Scaling up PPS results is not good.

Some people recommend adjusting your survey responses by response rate — i.e., if you have a 25% response rate and have 10 responses of Meta, then Meta likely drove 40 purchases:

We see meaningfully different response rates by channel, making unadjusted response data inaccurate for anything beyond directional reads. Trying to adjust them by response rate makes the data even less reliable.

An imperfect system is better than no system.

Is it cliché? Yes. But still true.

There are 1,000 ways to skin your channel expansion and measurement. Find your data points, build workflows around them, and refine from there.

 Channels Checklist 

Lastly, I boiled all these hard-won lessons into a straightforward Google Sheet checklist you can use.

It will guide you through three stages:

1. Assessment
2. Pre-launch
3. Post-launch

THE FEED

​Why Winners Go Broke​

​Inside Our Forecasting, Pacing, and Holiday Shipping Strategy for BFCM Success​

The Trends

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

1. Graymatter Secures $1.3M: FinSMEs​

Graymatter Labs, a Chicago-based purveyor of nootropic drink mixes, closed a $1.3M seed round led by Venrex and APEX. Founded by Jim Phillips and Novisa Petrusich, Graymatter aims to make cognitive supplementation the next daily ritual à la AG1. Its debut product, Bright Mind, supports long-term brain health while also delivering noticeable cognitive enhancement.

2. Dua Lipa Launches Skincare Line: Hypebae​

Global superstar Dua Lipa has entered the celebrity skincare fray via a partnership with Augustinus Bader, the luxury beauty unicorn that launched in 2018.

Dubbed DUA by AB Science, debuted with three products powered by Augustinus Bader’s proprietary Trigger Factor Complex technology. With Hailey Bieber’s Rhode exiting for $1B and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty hitting a $2.7B valuation earlier this year, this should come as no surprise.

3. Cove Soda Grabs $15M: PR Newswire​

Better-for-you soda brand Cove closed a $15M Series A round led by Vanterra Ventures. Palm Tree Crew, RiverPark Ventures, Simple Food Ventures, and a number of celebs also participated in the round. Cove originally launched as a kombucha brand in 2017 but pivoted to to the modern soda category in 2023.

Since then, Cove has exploded and is now stocked in over 7,000 doors across North America.

4. Novak Djokovic Joins Cob as Co-Founder: Fast Company​

Novak Djokovic led a $5M investment in Cob and joined the better-for-you snack brand as a co-founder. Blanck Capital, Bullish, Venrex, and a handful of other investors also participated in the round. Jessica Davidoff co-founded Cob, a clean-label popcorn alternative. Cob is sorghum-based, which is more nutritious and sustainable to produce than corn.

5. Cymbiotika Closes $25M Seed Round: Fitt Insider​

Fast-growing wellness brand Cymbiotika closed a $25M seed round led by David Grutman. A slew of other entrepreneurs, celebrities, and creators also joined the round.

Cymbiotika launched in 2019 and bootstrapped its way to over $150M in annual revenue without raising any equity funding. The company will use the funding to expand its product range and support retail expansion.

 Operators Guide to Channels 

Did you like Connor’s excerpt today?

Here’s a very short preview of what to expect, because there is so much (freaking) more inside …

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff 🤓
Chief Content Officer

Disclaimer: Special thanks to Aftersell by Rokt for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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