One month ago we launched an experiment.

Win or lose, we’re giving you a front-row seat. Today, we share three ways it could fail:

1️⃣ Wrong audience
2️⃣ Wrong product
3️⃣ Wrong economics

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

How to Build a Steady Supply of Creator Ads for Meta

During our 2026 sweepstakes, our partnership and affiliate ads grew from about 3% of Meta spend to nearly 40% YoY.

They also converted at a higher ROAS than ads from our baseline account. More spend at higher efficiency.

Yeah, we had Tony Hawk. But that wasn’t the unlock.

The key was incentivizing creative with a single goal …

If you’ve struggled to build an in-house creator program at our scale, that’s where SARAL comes in.

It helps brands assemble an army of creators.

They try your products, post to their audiences, and earn commissions on sales. Their posts bring in affiliate revenue before you put ad spend behind them.

Then, with the creator’s permission, you can whitelist the strongest creative as partnership ads on Meta or TikTok.

We don’t use SARAL at Ridge.

But Grüns, Obvi, Proactiv and 200+ other brands do. Including the Operators’ new brand, Winks.

Our audience get a 30-day free trial.

Matt Bertulli CEO, Pela + Lomi

Three Ways Our New Supplement Brand Could Fail

Go-to-market is the scariest moment in a founder’s life. That’s when you find out if anyone actually wants what you’ve spent so long building.

Two months ago, we were getting ready to launch Winks.

• 18 months of work
• >$100k already invested
• 5,000 units ordered

The big question on everyone’s mind: can we get people to buy this stuff (and keep buying it) at a cost that makes sense?

We all know this could crash and burn.

We’d built multiple nine-figure businesses. We had experience, capital, and a product we felt good about.

The only thing missing? Customers.

Before launch, we sat down and talked through everything that could go wrong.

The way we see it, there are three ways this business can fail.

1. Will We Find Product-Market Fit?

We launched Winks with families in mind.

Kids, moms, the whole household. That’s why the brand has a fun monster mascot. We wanted it to feel playful and approachable.

Then we narrowed our focus to moms. If we wanted to reach families, it made sense to speak to the person buying for the household.

Early customer data isn’t lining up with our plan. Right now, our buyers are roughly 60% male and 40% female.

We don’t know what that means yet.

Maybe our audience is skewed because we have a male-heavy DTC following on Twitter; a bunch of ecom bros buying to support the launch. Or maybe those numbers are telling us something about who wants Winks.

That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

In the meantime, Cody reworked the entire website to look less like a site for kids and put more attention on ingredient quality, science, and the clinical backing behind the product.

The original site is on the left. The new site is on the right.

To be clear, we’re not going full biohacker. However, Cody wants to get rid of the monster completely. So we might do a rebrand once we have a clearer picture of our customer.

The upside is that better sleep isn’t just a problem for families with kids. Everyone needs it. Bigger TAM is good.

We can’t declare product-market fit yet. We need to learn who’s buying, why they’re buying, and whether they come back.

Sean also brought up “powder fatigue.”

Think about what we’re asking someone to do. They already have their morning greens. Maybe a protein shake. Electrolytes during the day. Now we want them to mix a drink before bed.

Meanwhile, other brands are simplifying:

• Gummies
• Strips
• Sprays
• Pouches

Sean launched another powder product, Gut Culture, at the beginning of this year (while we were still working on Winks).

He is seeing how hard the category is.

In fact, the opportunity cost at Ridge was too high and they’ve shelved the brand for now.

Why did we choose powder?

It was a bet on quality. In a powder format, we can accommodate ingredients and quantities that make the formula actually effective. We invested in testing.

Our hope is that if someone tries Winks, they will like it and want to keep taking it.

There’s a real possibility that the market has moved on.

Do people want Winks? Do they want to take it as a powder?

If yes, we can build from there and possibly expand into other formats. If no, we will have to pivot hard.

2. Is the Product Ready For Launch?

We each tried Winks over and over again and went through multiple iterations. My wife and I. Mike. Curtis’ kid.

The finished product was not perfect.

Some packets were difficult to open. The powder needed proper mixing. Sediment at the bottom of the glass.

I kept coming back to how much we were asking someone to drink right before bed.

Would people prefer a smaller, more concentrated serving?

Every little annoyance gives someone a reason to skip it. Skipped nights breaks the habit … which breaks our unit economics.

You can drive yourself crazy with these questions.

We made the product as good as we could. Now our customers get to decide what they think.

Product development follows the law of diminishing returns. The longer you spend trying to optimize a product before launch, the higher the chance that you’ll make wrong assumptions about what your customers do or don’t want.

You can spend months optimizing the formula, the packaging, the instructions. Iterate too much without real feedback and you run the risk of making your product worse, not better.

Until customers get their hands on it, you don’t know s*** about how it fits into their actual lives.

3. Can We Survive a $200 CAC?

Sean thought our first month would come in at an $800 CAC.

Cody was aiming for $200 with a goal of $100 after that.

We have been throwing everything at the ad account.

Cody and I shot ads. Cody even signed up for Cut30 to improve his yapper game.

We’re running plenty of AI slop. These are actually some of our best performers right now. We are leaning in hard.

For small creators, we’re using Trybe along with weekly coaching calls. We’re also working with a few influencers + sourcing through SARAL to get whitelisted partner ads out the door.

Cody was more right than Sean.

We hit $160 CAC and recently got our first real winner in the account at $31 CPA.

It was a partnership ad.

Exciting stuff.

But we don’t know what reorders will be like. For the math to hold, people have to like it. They have to use it consistently.

That was one motivation for going after families.

If multiple people in a household use Winks regularly, one acquired customer could represent much more ongoing demand. We might be able to pay more to acquire that household and still build a healthy business.

We need ~14,000 families who love Winks to make this a $100M business.

We are betting on repeat purchases.

Big potential if we get it right.

 But We Probably Won’t … 

To be honest, I’m more confident in the team than I am in our product. That’s the way it should be.

I know how hard these guys work.

We are obsessing over the ads, the offer, and we are bringing that same obsession to listening.

• Reading reviews
• Talking to customers
• Evaluating churn

We spent a long time making decisions with zero customer information. Now we have to be willing to change our minds.

If the product needs work, we’ll pivot. If our positioning isn’t landing, we’ll test another angle.

5,000 units. The goal is to learn as much as possible from them.

We don’t even care about making money at this point.

We care about new-customer acquisition cost, retention, and product feedback. Those signals will help us decide when to reorder and what to change.

FULL EPISODE

​Everything’s Ready, Now Comes the Hard Part​

With thanks and anticipation,
Aaron Orendorff
🤓 Chief Executive Officer

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

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