Aazar Shad

This is true. Trybe brands try 300 videos to find one scaling winner. Agencies we have 3/10 winners. You might have the video for free but nobody accounts of wasted spend, time & resources. Don’t get me started on them copying the top ads and adding just “review” as an ad. Trybe is a support for sure, not a system to scale & find winning ads that crush with high hit rate.

Damn! I just seriously scrolled X for 10 minutes. I feel I’m 5 years behind 😅

Why are my ads getting installs but no subscribers?

Most founders who have burned through three agencies assume they are the problem. One walked me through his history on a call this summer. Agency one ran install campaigns and barely broke even. Agency two made ChatGPT statics and talked about funnel stages. Agency three spent their time warming up fresh ad accounts so he could scale faster later. Three different pitches. Same result. And every time, he ended up doing most of the work himself. I looked at the account and gave him the short version. You just need better creative. No media buying trick is going to change this account's life. He was not the problem. All three were solving a layer that wasn't broken. Before you hire a fourth, test for the layer that is: → Who writes the scripts, and have they sold in your category before → How many concepts a month, and how many would they personally defend → Can they tell you what a winner in your niche looks like before spending → Are they testing messages, or just shipping assets on a schedule The gap between agency two and a good one is not tooling or dashboards. It is whether someone has sat in your market long enough to know that in a kids product the kid goes on screen first, that a mom scrolls straight past a lovely AI render, and that the word on the ad matters more than the design around it. Ad accounts almost never fail at the buying layer. They fail at the idea layer, and nobody sends an invoice for ideas they didn't have.

Join me tomorrow? :)

I was so surprised that everyone was going after Claude edits but nobody talked about Riverside’s feature. I’ve been using it for a year. Been using these videos for my podcast to short reels. Clips, copy, thumbnails, placement. That's the tail end of every episode and the part I always rush.

An app founder told me his new agency was running top of funnel, middle of funnel and bottom of funnel for him. He was spending 10 to 15k a month and barely breaking even. So I said the thing he probably didn't want to hear from the person he was interviewing. At your spend, there is no funnel. There is direct response. Give me the number. Funnel thinking earns its place when an account stalls at 50k or 100k a month and you have genuinely used up the people who already want what you sell. Then you go upstream with storytelling, unlock new audiences, and convert them lower down. Before that point, splitting a small budget across three stages does exactly one thing. It starves every stage of data. His account also had install campaigns running, left over from an earlier agency. Install campaigns for a subscription app. Meta was happily finding him people who tap buttons and never pay. What that account actually needed: • Better ads • Not ChatGPT image ads • Purchase and subscribe campaigns only • One clean signal for the algorithm to learn from He showed me the creatives the agency made. All statics, all clearly generated, nothing special. Meta was barely delivering them. He had been told the problem was funnel architecture. The problem was that nobody had written a good ad. Funnel structure is a scaling problem. At 15k a month you do not have a scaling problem. You have a creative problem wearing a strategy costume.

Claude + Higgsfield for static generation is insane. I made all of these ads entirely with AI. I’ve created 10 Claude agents that work like a creative team with 16 skills. - Brand researcher - Customer researcher - Angle strategist - Template curator - Copywriter - Gatekeeper - Image producer - QA reviewer - Launch packager - Results reader I made 100 of these statics and tested them fast. It works with Opus too, so you don't waste credits with Fable. If you want the full breakdown, Like, RT & Comment "AI Statics".

Talking head is probably the hardest format to nail, especially when you are doing a yap. But TikTok teaches us, especially for ads, how to make it visually interesting. This is one of those examples where not only is the script great, but you actually really want to listen to it. You might think there is nothing crazy about this video, but there is actually a lot: • The creator • The visual • The delivery • The script • The idea If you are actually making ads, learn from organic. Obviously that is an old lesson, but this is a really good example you can learn from.

A founder sat down with me in August with most of his Q4 budget pointed at one week in late November. Kids product. Four month production lead time. Around 600k planned across four months. I told him to pull money out of Black Friday. Every D2C client I have struggles in that window. Every brand bids for the same person at once. CPMs spike. Buying intent drops, because shoppers are comparing offers instead of deciding. If you are not willing to discount deeply, and he wasn't, Black Friday is an expensive place to stand. Then I showed him the month nobody plans for. January. Why it works: → Big advertisers pause budgets for two weeks or more, so CPMs fall → People who forgot someone in December are still buying → People who overspent get their money back and spend again → Far fewer brands competing for the same feed That is where you actually move units. So we rebuilt the shape of his quarter. Build a waiting list through September and October. Announce to that list instead of outbidding the entire internet in the last week of November. Hold about 10% of production volume for January. The lead time made the reserve smarter again. Selling out in December with nothing to ship in January is not a win. It is a two month gap in revenue and a pile of disappointed parents. He had planned for CAC to double in Q4 and still thought he could carry it. Good. That part was realistic. The crowd piles into one week. The cheap attention shows up six weeks later.

Ad Lesson: Make ads people want to watch, not scroll away.

The best performing ad a founder showed me this year was a product photo with six words on it. "Mom, this is way cooler than the phone." That was it. No lighting setup. No designer. It beat every polished asset in his account across multiple campaigns and three countries. Meanwhile the work he had paid proper money for, the kind that looks good in a portfolio, had terrible performance. I asked whether he was comfortable with us making unpretty ads, because I ask every brand that question before we start. I don't want the shock in week three. His answer was the right one. Website, polished. Social profile, polished. Anyone who clicks through should think this brand is serious. Very high standards there. The ad is a different animal. Someone sees it for two seconds while scrolling in bed. So we run everything. → Branded ads that respect the guidelines → Unbranded ads that look like a normal person made them → Genuinely ugly ones → Whatever the account tells us to make more of He already knew the thing most brand teams resist. The ads that perform are rarely the ads you would frame. If every ad in your account looks like your homepage, you are paying premium CPMs to blend into a feed that rewards the opposite. Keep the standards where people judge you. Drop them where people only glance.

POV: You product is marketing..

A growth lead asked me if scaling would wreck her CAC. It will. That is not the problem she thought it was. Let me put real numbers on it, the same way I did on the call. She was spending 30k a month. CAC around 30. Everyone in the building was happy. Take that to 150k a month. CAC goes to 35. Now nobody is happy, and somebody schedules a meeting about it. Look at what actually happened. She is now reaching people who were completely out of reach at 30k. Revenue is five times bigger. CAC moved five dollars. That is what scaling costs. You spend the cheapest, most ready buyers first. Then you pay slightly more to reach the next ring out. There is no version where it stays flat. What to watch instead of CAC on its own: Is the business profitable on a blended level Is revenue growing faster than cost Are new angles opening audiences you were not touching before Is the hit rate on new creative holding up Her donation CAC was 30 against 30 dollars back per donor, so that side needed real work. Her testing side had run at 7x historically and had slipped to 3 or 4 because of ad fatigue. Two completely different problems hiding behind one blended number. A founder I spoke to in August had already built a doubling of CAC into his Q4 budget. He planned for the real number instead of hoping for the old one. Rising CAC at flat spend is a warning. Rising CAC at five times the spend is usually just arithmetic.

Get on AI drama ads now or let your competitors crush you with it.

The story of Maria & how she scaled her business… There’s one simple hack most marketers miss.

A founder told me last month that media buying on Meta isn't complicated anymore. You build a campaign. A few ad sets. Set the tracking up properly. Let it learn. At 30k a month, that really is most of the job. So I stopped pitching and told him what he was actually shopping for. He wasn't hiring a media buyer. He was hiring someone to decide what goes inside the ads. Buying gets genuinely hard past 100k a month. Below that, the account lives or dies on creative. Then I asked what his best ad was. It was a product shot with one line on it. "Mom, this is way cooler than the phone." He had been running that same set of creatives for 10 months. Four million in revenue, roughly 100k spent in his first presale, 13x on the second one. One ad did almost all of it. That is not a system. That is a good product carrying a lucky ad. The work he needed had nothing to do with campaign structure. Which exact words make a parent stop scrolling Kid alone on screen, or mom and kid together Product at 3 seconds, 15 seconds, or not at all What a winner in this category looks like before he spends to find out He is about to put 600k behind that account in four months. The lucky ad will not survive the jump. Uploading ads is maybe 20% of the job. Deciding what goes in them is the rest. If one creative is carrying your whole account right now, you don't have an ad account. You have a coin flip that has gone your way so far.