Exciting. Thrilling. Terrifying.

It’s launch day here at Operators. Yes, a new show. But far more nail-biting … a new brand we created ourselves.

😴 Cody Plofker reveals Winks + every step of start from zero

🤑 Connor MacDonald with the easiest way to increase profits

😯 Connor Rolain shares three Black-Friday tips and an invite

Plus, the five top headlines in consumer.

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

The Easiest Way To Make More Profit

During Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you can spend buckets of non-incremental dollars and still be happy with the outcome … just because the numbers are so big.

However, you might make more profit by spending less.

Last year at Ridge, we ran a scale-up test. The results showed that we were overspending and getting worse MER.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way we add incremental revenue that has no additional cost.

They’re responsible for a ton of our revenue during Q4. Not to mention the rest of the year.

We use Aftersell. So does HexClad. Jones Road. Grüns. Kitsch. True Classic. And 40,000 other brands.

There’s a reason the top brands are all using the same platform. I don’t know of an easier way to make more profit.

You can get setup in under an hour. Also, Aftersell has put together a complete Black Friday prep hub.

• 22-step checklist
• Revenue leak report
• Custom AI benchmarks
• Upsell profit calculator
• “Yes Ladder” playbook

It’s jam-packed with strategies to make more money from the dollars you’re already spending. Check it out. Then book a free 30-minute strategy call with their team.

Cody Plofker Co-Founder, Winks

We Launched Our New Brand and Operators Build. Here’s How, Why & What’s Coming Next

It’s here. A very exciting day, and also a terrifying one.

Launch day.

They say if you’re not embarrassed by v1 of your product, you launched too late. That’s certainly how I feel.

We’ve been working hard to get things ready for this deadline, but it’s a rough v1. Honestly, it feels vulnerable being this public about it. But instead of taking more time to perfect things, we decided to ship it and iterate quickly on feedback.

Ads are live. So is the site: GetWinks.com​

Matt and I built them ourselves. No designer or devs (you can probably tell). We’re shipping more ads ASAP, locking in our initial creators via Trybe, and putting together an advisory panel of doctors for validation as well as partnerships.

Quick backstory if you missed it.

When I stepped down as CEO of Jones Road in July, I said I wanted to find something I was excited to wake up and build every day. Well, months before that, Matt told me about this brand at the Meta conference. I remember being straight up jealous. I knew I was stepping down, hadn’t told anyone yet, and the thought of building a new subscription brand from zero sounded perfect.

I’m now a co-founder of Winks alongside Matt, Sean, Mike, and Curtis Christopherson. Huge pay cut, but zero direct reports. I’m six weeks in, having more fun than I’ve had in years.

We’re documenting every bit of it on a new show called Operators Build. Five guys who’ve run nine-figure brands, starting from absolute zero, on camera.

Season one is 10 episodes. Here’s every step, plus what I’d steal if I were starting over because I am!

1. Launching a New Brand

Five of us funded this ourselves with $500k. $100k already went into the product. We want as much of the remaining $400k as possible going toward marketing.

We’re taking an educated guess that this works. If it doesn’t, we’re not going to keep funding it out of pure belief. Being honest with yourself is way harder than it sounds.

If your answer to every problem is writing another check, you never find out if you have a real business.

The targets: $100 CAC, and opex at 5%–1% of revenue. Around $200 CAC it can still function. If we’re paying $1,000 a customer, no retention curve saves us.

2. How to Create a Product

Category before product. Curtis has spent 23 years in health and wellness; his insight was that wearables trained everyone to measure their sleep without giving them a way to actually improve it.

Lots of supplement brands have a sleep SKU. No brand really owns sleep. That’s the gap. It’s a big one.

The second filter was consumable. All of us have built businesses where you get paid once, then spend years begging that customer to come back. I’ve said forever that if I ever did DTC again it had to be subscription, bootstrapped, and profitable as early as possible. This checked every box.

The tradeoff? Everyone sees the same opportunity. Huge markets attract killers, which makes PMF harder, not easier.

3. Forming a Supplement Company

The unsexy episode, and probably the most useful one. Co-man, formula, business license, LLC, COGS math.

The product is 10 premium ingredients, no melatonin, each one doing a different job. That was a year of Curtis’s work, plus delays nobody planned for.

If you’re launching a consumable, efficacy is everything. It drives reviews, retention, and word of mouth, and it’s the one thing you can’t fake. Don’t cheap out here.

4. Design, Brand & Packaging

You’ll get watch the real design process. We recorded it.

Packaging (look and feel) matters more than people think for a product living on someone’s nightstand.

We did two small shoots to build a base asset library for the site, landers, emails, and organic. Shoot once, use everything 40 different ways. Lots of AI. Cheapest leverage in a launch.

5. First Idea to Purchase Order

We spent a year on the product and bought inventory before testing a single message, price point, or offer. It’s sitting at a 3PL right now. Real money, real pallets, zero proof anyone wants it.

Sean’s take is he would have started with the closest off-the-shelf product, sold it to prove demand, and worked toward the dream formula from there.

Honestly, hard to argue with. We’ll find out if skipping that step costs us. You’ll get to watch either way.

We felt okay doing it because we’ve collectively made mistakes enough times to make assumptions other people shouldn’t. If you don’t have that experience, test before you order.

6. Setting Up a Subscriptions

It’s been years since I touched subscriptions, so I’m learning like a white belt again — loving every second.

We’re building on Skio, Ominsend, and Aftersell.

What I underestimated is how much of the business lives inside the portal. Cancel flows, retention offers, product swaps, gifting, frequency changes. One of my favorite plays so far is moving new customers from monthly to quarterly right after checkout, before their first order even ships.

The bigger mindset shift is that first-purchase profitability isn’t the game. The montly P&L won’t tell you if it’s working. Cohorts will. What a customer is worth at 30, 60, 90, and 180 days against what you paid to get them.

That’s the whole game.

7. AI: What We’re Building & How

I went all in on AI at Jones Road, but changing how a large team works is really, really hard. Trust me, I tried. Here there’s no team to change, so we get to go AI-first from day one.

I built our entire email program out of Claude and Codex using Omnisend’s MCP; I barely log into the platform. Most of our ads are AI too — statics and videos. We’re piling all of our context into HQ, building agents on top of it.

Prove something can’t be done with AI before we hire for it. That’s how you get to 1% opex. I don’t know if we’ll hit it, but the constraint changes every single decision.

8. All Things Growth + Marketing

One channel out of the gate. Shopify plus Meta. We’re not trying to boil the ocean.

We built about six lander templates …

• Listicles
• Reasons why
• Advertorials
• ePDP

… that we’ll rinse and repeat across our top personas. We don’t know our beachhead persona yet. Figuring out who we’re selling to is most of the early work. I missed it so much.

On creators, we’re starting with a small, tight Trybe group instead of volume maxxing, plus whitelisting as it comes. Mike’s carving out an equity pool for doctors.

As for channels, expansion is earned, not assumed. Around a $250 CAC we stand up Amazon, around $150 we add TikTok Shop. Both are high leverage once they exist.

9. Offer, Price & Promotions

We did a bunch of competitor research and landed on a v1 offer we like, built to push subscription hard. Guess what … we’ve already changed it once.

10. The Results & Q1’s Big Show

The finale. Two things happen here.

First, we open the books. Every number from launch. Real spend, real CACs, subscription take rates, early cohort data, what worked, what flopped.

No vanity metrics, no “we’re thrilled with the results” fluff. If we’re paying $600 a customer, you’ll hear it from us. We said we’d build in public.

Second, the ramp to January.

If you’re in health and wellness, that’s your Super Bowl. New year, new habits, everyone finally ready to fix their sleep, all while Q5 CPMs drop and Q1 intent spikes.

A subscription brand that nails January builds cohorts that carry the entire year. Every creative test, offer test, and funnel fix between is really about one thing: being fully loaded when that window opens. Launch day was never the moment. January is.

So here’s my ask.

Use code OPERATORS25 for 25% off GetWinks.com. It stacks with our subscribe + save offer!

Or just QA it and tell me what we missed.

I’ve caught a bunch already and I know there’s more. I’m saving everything and actioning the common themes.

Any support is appreciated. Any orders are appreciated. Whether you’re rooting for us to win or fail …

It’s going to be fun to watch.

Connor Rolain Head of Growth, HexClad

Three Things HexClad is Doing Before BFCM

Every impression you serve right now is worth more than at any other point in the year. Because Q4 is right around the corner.

Here are three things we’re doing at HexClad

1. Scale-Up Holdout Test

We still don’t have a great feel for how incremental it is to spend up on peak days. So before BFCM we’re running a short-term scale-up holdout test. That way when we’re deciding whether to spend up, we’re confident it’s incremental instead of guessing.

2. Not Reinventing The Wheel

Last year we produced a bunch of seasonal CTV and YouTube assets that worked really well. They’re still relevant, so we’re not going to go shoot a ton of new CTV this year.

3. Non-Hero Presale

Products like our roasting pan get buried under our hero products during Black Friday. So we’re running an early sale to give those products their moment to shine. We did this last year and saw massive growth.

But I’m just one operator from one brand.

That’s why we’ve assembled a 25+ speaker lineup for this Friday’s BFCM webinar. I’ll be there. So will they …

Each is going to share a tactic for you can take into Q4.

If you miss it, you are most definitely going to get cooked.

THE FEED

​Funnel Coverage: The Upsell Fix Most Brands Never Check​

​Building Solo Past $1.4M in Only a Year and a Half: Help an Operator Out​

​Every Step to Start an Ecommerce Business Revealed: Operators Build (E1)​

The Trends

Curated by the editor of CPG Wire, the five top stories in commerce and DTC.

1. Dolce Glow Secures $11M: LinkedIn​

Dolce Glow, a premium at-home tanning brand, closed an $11M Series A round led by CAVU Consumer Partners.

Founded by celebrity spray tan artist Isabela Alysa in 2015, Dolce Glow launched its at-home product offering in 2021 which recently debuted online and in-store at Sephora. CAVU has been particularly active lately and their recent investments include Sauz, 4AM Skin, Recess, Crazy Mountain, and others.

2. Everyday Dose Appoints New CEO: PR Newswire​

Fast-growing functional beverage brand Everyday Dose just named Kyle Thibaut as its new CEO. The founder and former CEO, Jack Savage, will step into the role of Chairman.

Prior to joining Everyday Dose, Thibaut spent more than two decades scaling consumer startups like Robinhood, Credit Karma, and TrueCar. Everyday Dose also recently debuted nationwide at more than 300 Sam’s Club locations.

3. Sazerac Strikes Yet Again: The Spirits Business​

US spirits giant Sazerac acquired Au Vodka, one of the fastest-growing canned cocktail brands in the UK, for around £500M. While most spirits companies are currently laying off employees or divesting brands, Sazerac has been on a buying spree.

Their recent deals include Au Vodka, Dirty Shirley, SVEDKA Vodka, Western Son, and BuzzBallz. Au Vodka was founded in 2015 by childhood friends Charlie Morgan and Jackson Quinn.

4. Mid-Day Squares Secures Debt: LinkedIn​

Fast-growing snack brand Mid-Day Squares secured $8M of debt to significantly expand its manufacturing capacity. Co-CEO Nick Saltarelli aims to increase annual production capacity to over $250M as the brand launches at Walmart and Costco.

Since launching in 2018, Mid-Day Squares has sold around 90 million squares and the brand is carried in nearly 11,000 doors.

5. Bobbie Appoints New Growth Officer: ADWEEK​

Bobbie, one of the larger challenger brands in the infant formula category, just hired former Liquid I.V. CMO Stacey Andrade-Wells as Chief Growth Officer.

Andrade-Wells joins Bobbie after nearly 5 years at Liquid I.V. where she helped scale it into a billion-dollar brand. In 2023, Bobbie hit $100M in revenue and vertically integrated by acquiring Nature’s One, an Ohio-based infant formula producer.

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

P.S. (Disclaimer): Special thanks to Aftersell for sponsoring today’s newsletter.

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