Mike Beckham, Matt Bertulli, Curtis Christopherson, Sean Frank + Cody Plofker are building a brand … in public.

It’s launched. It’s shipping.

Here is their most recent update.

🫣 Cody Plofker gives week one a D- and shares what’s next

🤔 Matt Bertulli explains why you should test Q4 upsells now

🤩 Mike Beckham reveals how they created the new product

Taylor Holiday

CEO, Common Thread

Have a CPG Brand You Believe Is Ready to Aggressively Scale? Read This!

Joy Sharma is crazy.

He works more hours, is willing to go further, and spends more time thinking about ecommerce than anyone else on earth.

He drives me nuts.

But that is the kind of extraordinary effort that produces extraordinary outcomes.

He has been bugging me for months about creating an offer for subscription brands that focuses on rapid scaling.

I finally gave in.

It’s extreme, but he believes he can double your spend in 90 days and handle everything needed to do it.

That means you get:

1. Hourly Scaling API

We use our private Meta API to force spend into your winning hours and bully everyone else out of the auction.

2. Offer + LP Design

We manage +$3B in spend, so we see what everyone bids. We research, build and publish offers that outbid your category. This is the closest thing to cheating an auction.

3. Branded Static Ads

For every offer and page. Made in-house. Live in days. We double down on whatever the auction likes.

4. Proven Creators

We have a partnership with Refunnel on this offer. They put their best creators in a private group, just for this program. Free to leverage, no % of spend, no % of sales.

5. Hourly Receipts

Every hour, your Slack shows the extra spend we created. Behind it are trained buyers who manage $100,000 a day in budget.

6. Forecast You Can Trust

Good to ±5%. Order inventory against it. Add a Meta credit line, cash never caps you.

Bonus: Joy Sharma is your growth strategist.

He directs this program and oversees +$1B a year in revenue. He would rather die than have this offer fail.

If you don’t grow, you get a refund on the entire retainer.

For +$5M CPG brands only.

Apply Now

Cody Plofker

Advisor, Jones Road

Winks Grade From Me, Week One: D-

Performance is actually better than expected out of the gate considering how little we launched with and the challenges of warming up a Meta account.

But I was embarrassed by our launch assets (or lack thereof). Not our best work by any means.

But we’re moving fast. Here are the changes we’ve made and what we’re working on next:

1. Website

We decided to focus on moms over family.

The goal is social proof maxxing. We shipped a new hero with some of our initial UGC that is much better than the AI slop we launched with.

We also worked on clarifying our GWPs. Would like to add some physical gifts in the future.

Plus a new video section for more social proof.

And a review section. Not loving design but working through it. Done is sometimes better than perfect.

We switched copy on the site to be less about us and more about the problems and benefits of the user.

This is basic stuff. But we missed some of it as we worked to get things up quickly.

2. Creative

Our first creative from Trybe just went live. We’re working on getting a bunch more and coaching our founding creator group.

For statics, we’re pumping them out with Runneth by Motion (or is it, Motion by Runneth).

Also securing a bunch of whitelisting folks and scientific advisory panel. Again, social proof maxxing. Considering Light Labs. Let me know if you’ve tried them before.

3. CPMs

Getting our CPMs down on Meta is a huge focus right now.

Do the math on $8 clicks. Unrealistic to have a good CPA no matter how good the rest of the funnel is. CPMs might not always matter, but when they do, they do.

My hypothesis is that this is just a tax until Meta trusts you’re a legit business, will pay your bills, and not scam or fraud people. A shockingly high % of Meta revenue is this, unfortunately.

Here’s how we are trying to reduce CPMs …

Spend Through It

Yup, I’ve heard you have to for the first $20k or so.

We’re not there yet. We are seeing trends in the right direction, so we’ll keep spending. Not a ton per day, but just enough.

Whitelist From Verified Accts

We’ve secured a bunch of partnership ads. They should start lauching in the next week or so. Testing accounts of all sizes.

Organic Instagram

We are improving our organic Instagram game with a content agency plus one freelancer. The only two people I’ve talked to that have not had CPM issues at launch took organic IG seriously before launching ads.

Upper Funnel Ads

One theory someone had is that you get dinged for aggressive claims. So I’m trying problem aware ads to a long form editorial to a quiz that doesn’t mention product until the offer page.

We are seeing some promising results so far on all of this. But it’s still early, will let you know if it holds.

Thank You + LFG

I honestly can’t believe the reception we’ve received from the community since launching.

You’re sharing
Texting me ideas
Even buying

It means the world.

I’m going to keep doing everything I can to achieve liftoff for this brand. In the meantime, please keep sharing your feedback.

Matt Bertulli

CEO, Pela + Lomi

Test Your Upsells Right Now, BEFORE Black Friday

In just six months at Pela, we generated $80k+ in incremental revenue with our post-purchase upsells using Aftersell.

That’s on traffic we already paid for …

No added CAC
No decrease to CVR
No extra ad spend

$20k came from Rokt Thanks on the thank-you page alone.

But that didn’t happen overnight. We made way more money month six than we did month one.

The difference came from testing + refining:

Offers
Sequencing
Placements

Once we cracked the code, daily revenue roughly doubled on the same amount of traffic.

My point is, don’t start testing new upsells the week of Black Friday. Turn them on now, figure out what works, and scale the winners into Q4.

Aftersell put together an entire BFCM prep hub to help.

Get Your Funnel BFCM Ready

Mike Beckham

CEO, Simple Modern

How We Created a New Supplement: Prototype to Launch

A lot of people have asked us how we came up with the idea of launching a sleep supplement and how we got it out the door.

There are three questions we had to answer. Every operator behind a new brand has to ask these same three questions.

1️⃣ What Do We Make?
2️⃣ How Much Do We Order?
3️⃣ Who Will Make it?

What Do We Make?

Curtis brought the idea about a year and a half ago. Wearables taught an entire generation to measure their sleep.

Oura
Whoop
Eight Sleep

Millions of people wake up to a number telling them they slept badly. They can measure the problem. But they don’t have an easy way to fix it. Almost every supplement company has a sleep SKU; magnesium or a recovery supplement.

Nobody has built a brand that owns sleep.

Big TAM

We intentionally chose a category that’s wide open and brutally hard at the same time. Big TAM means it’s one of the hottest categories in consumer right now. A lot of very good operators are running in this space.

But I’d rather compete in a market big enough to reward being right than hide in a small one.

Competition is a signal of demand, not a reason to stay away.

Consumable + Subscription

Durable goods have the same fundamental flaw no matter how good you are at making them: you get paid once for a transaction.

Wallets, rings, and luggage
Water bottles and bags
Phone cases and compost

The person you just sold to doesn’t need another one.

We wanted something you consume, that runs out, that you have to buy again. It’s the perfect DTC product: light, doesn’t spoil, cheap to ship, and the margins are strong.

How Much Do We Order?

When we built Trevi, an electrolyte brand, my instinct was to launch lots of variety.

More flavors
More options
More SKUs

In some sense, it was the right call. Our variety packs are somewhere between 50% and 70% of our new customer volume, consistently.

The problem is that’s really expensive. Because every flavor carries its own minimum order quantity (MOQ).

If each flavor’s MOQ is a quarter of a million sticks and I launch one flavor, I commit to a quarter million. If I launch a four-flavor variety pack, I’ve just committed to a million sticks of production before selling a single unit.

We had no idea what quantities to expect. Adoption was slower early, faster later, and we couldn’t predict how people would split between variety packs and singles. We got it wrong, and rightsizing cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars.

I don’t recommend it.

Winks is about sleep. Our flavor only has to be good enough that taste never becomes the reason someone doesn’t buy. It’s on the list of value props, but it’s near the bottom.

Plus, we don’t want it to taste too good.

At Trevi, we get notes from parents asking how many their kids are allowed to drink, because the kids keep asking for more. That’s fine for an electrolyte, but not for a sleep aid.

When it came to Winks, the call was one flavor: grape.

It’s accessible to kids, purple codes to lavender and sleep, and if you search children’s Tylenol on Amazon, you’ll see grape outsells cherry something like 5 to 1.

Still, we could be wrong. We spent $75k to order 6,000 bags and we want the market to tell us what to order next.

Who Will Make it?

Here’s what it took to go from idea to a box at someone’s home.

Co-Manufacturer

We are working with a co-manufacturer and the single most useful thing they did for us was agree to a small first run.

They gave us a minimum of 5,000 units. We ordered 6,000. We backed into that from our budget. $75k buys roughly 166,000 sticks at our cost, and at a 28-count, that’s ~6,000 bags.

Sticks, Not Powder

We wanted stick packs, not a tub of loose powder.

Sticks travel. You toss one in a bag, and sleep is the thing that gets wrecked when people are away from home.

But sticks need specific machinery, and they cost a few cents more per unit. One of our first jobs was simply making sure our manufacturer could even run sticks.

Packaging

Getting artwork synced, dimensions right, and everything print-ready is one of the most time-consuming parts of the whole launch.

It’s one more reason to launch with a single flavor. Every extra flavor is another package to get print-ready, and every package is another way to slow yourself down.

It also impacts unit economics. For example, the gusseted bag is a chunk of the per-unit cost, so the bigger our stick count, the more sticks per bag, the cheaper each unit gets.

The Goal is to Survive

We have very little certainty right now.