Met a 22-year-old whose only goal for 18 months was to make $1 online. Profitably. He'd moved to the US from Armenia about four and a half years earlier, dropped out of college, and spent a year and a half failing at other online ventures. His first store went live in May 2019. That year: $550K in sales and about $110K profit. The next year he set a goal of $300K profit. He did $3.8M in sales and just over $1M profit. The year after: $7.4M at better than 25% margins. One full-time employee. Everyone else was a contractor. Then he sold the company for seven figures. What made it click was one of my videos, where $30K in ad spend brought in $120K. His words after watching it: "It's not the product, it's not the website. It's the ad." So he went to the source for his ads. He sent his customers a survey asking why they bought, then made ads hitting exactly those reasons. In his words, "everything just blew up." And he tested like a maniac. Over 1,000 ads. Four ads to an ad set, $100 per ad set. He told me if you find one winner out of 50, that's good. He never looked at revenue. Only profit. He got his UGC from customers, paid for with buy-one-get-one-free. And he reads a business book every two weeks. Why this works: Most founders write ads about what they think matters: ingredients, features, the founder story. Customers buy for reasons you'd never guess, and they'll tell you exactly what those are if you ask. The survey hands you the angle and the words in one go. You're not guessing the hook anymore. You're reading it back to the next customer. And the testing math is the part people skip. One winner in 50 means you need 50 ads in the pipe to find it. He tested over 1,000. That's 20 rounds of it. How to steal it this week: 1. Email your last 500 customers one question: "What made you buy?" 2. Put the answers in a sheet and group them. The top 3 reasons are your next 3 angles. 3. Write 4 ads per angle using their exact words, not yours. 4. One ad set per angle, 4 ads each, $100 per ad set. Kill and replace until one hits. Your customers already wrote your best ad. Ask them.

Got on a call with a guy who had just done a $2.85M month. He runs it out of a garage. His words: "It's dark." He doesn't own a car. Not even a watch. He grew up in a village of under 1,000 people, built on old lava outside Barcelona. He backpacked Australia for four years, came home, decided to become a professional poker player, and quit after three weeks. Then he started selling with a group of friends. One of them had worked in a factory for 7 or 8 years. Their very first stock order burned up when the truck caught fire. They got to $300K months on organic content alone. No ads. When he joined my program he had about $30K in the bank and paid in installments. Then a gaming product took off. On March 31, 2025 it did $61K in one day. They turned the whole thing off. That summer they launched a new brand, and one move took it to 10 straight $100K days. He took an ad style that was going viral everywhere else and moved it into his niche. He edited one of those ads himself, by hand. That one ad spent more than $1M. Peak day so far: $150K. Your competitors are all copying each other. That's why every ad in your niche looks the same. Why this works: Every niche has its own look. Supplement ads look like supplement ads, skincare looks like skincare. Your viewer has seen your competitors' ads a hundred times, and their thumb scrolls past yours on instinct. Bring in a format from a completely different niche and it doesn't look like an ad for your category. That's the pattern interrupt. And the format already proved it holds attention somewhere else, so you're not guessing. How to steal it this week: 1. Open GetHookd and pull the longest-running video ads from 3 niches that have nothing to do with yours. 2. Ignore the product. Write down the format: the first 3 seconds, the setting, who's talking, how it's cut. 3. Rebuild the best 2 formats around your product. Same structure, your offer. 4. Edit at least one yourself. Marc's $1M ad was cut by hand. Stop copying your competitors. Steal from other niches.

Got on a call with a guy who still lives at his family's house in Turkey. The month before we talked, he did over $3.4M. That July, his best month ever had been $400K. He had a very high GPA at the best university in Turkey and stopped going to class to do this. He started in April 2019 with about $2K and a $150 course, and tutored high-school kids in maths and English on the side. The story that got me: he was on exchange in Switzerland, living on a scholarship. He put $100 into ads and made $1.5K in sales and $400 in profit. Then Stripe banned him and held the money for three months. He lost about $1K, which was all of his living money. For years after that he did everything himself and cleared $10–30K profit a month. He told me straight up that being a one-man business was the main thing limiting his growth. So he made one full-time hire. An assistant to publish his ads. With that one person, profit went to $100K a month. That assistant now runs his people. Then he went after unit cost. He cut $6–8 off every unit, then went back to his old supplier and got them to match the new price. And when he scales, 90–95% of the time it's on Advantage+. Most guys stuck at $400K a month go looking for a better ad. He hired a person and fixed his margin. Why this works: When you're the only person in the business, every hour you spend uploading ads is an hour you're not spending on product, suppliers or the next offer. That's why he sat at $10–30K profit for years. The ads were fine. He was the bottleneck. The first hire doesn't need to be a genius. His was an assistant whose job was publishing ads. That freed him to fix the things only he could fix, like his unit cost. And $6–8 a unit is not small. On a product that sells every day, it lands on every single order before you touch your ads. How to steal it this week: 1. Write down every task you did last week and how many hours each one took. 2. Circle the ones someone else could do with a 2-page SOP: publishing ads, uploading creatives, customer emails. 3. Hire one full-time person for those. Not a freelancer you have to chase. 4. Spend the hours you get back on unit cost. Get a quote from a second supplier, then take it to your current one. If you still publish your own ads, you've found your ceiling.

Got on a call with a guy who did $1.7M in August and was annoyed about it. He said it could have been $2.5M. The ads weren't the problem. They worked too well. His factory couldn't make the product fast enough to keep up. He's 29. Former pro rugby player. Twelve surgeries. Never went to university. He moved around playing rugby and had a couple of kids along the way. He'd started a few supplement brands before and, in his words, "done okay." This brand is 19 months old. Not long ago it was doing $250K a month. He makes the product in his own factory in Scotland. His sister, a former cruise-ship performer, runs it. And she calls him every single day with the same question: "Can you scale back that ad budget?" The ad that broke it open wasn't a studio shoot. He was on holiday in Portugal, sitting by the pool with the product in his hand, just talking about it. In his words, "it just popped off." Now he hasn't made an ad himself in four or five weeks. He runs pods instead: two strategists, each with 3 editors and a designer. Every single bit of traffic goes to one product page. It converts at about 6%. All of that was UK only. His US stock was about six weeks out when we talked. Most founders at $250K a month are hunting for one more winning ad. At $1.7M, his whole fight was keeping product on the shelf. Why this matters: Every founder thinks the ceiling is creative. Under $1M a month, it is. Past that, the ceiling moves to the stuff nobody posts about: factory capacity, stock, cash tied up in inventory, shipping. Adam is the proof. The demand for $2.5M was already there. What capped it was how many units came off the line. And look at the order he did it in. He found the winning ad himself, by a pool, with the product in his hand. Only after that did he build pods to make more of them. Most founders hire the team first and hope it finds the angle. How to steal it this week: 1. Shoot one ad yourself: phone in one hand, product in the other, talking about why you made it. No script, no studio. 2. Send every bit of cold traffic to one product page and get its conversion rate up before you test anything else. His is about 6%. 3. Work out your supply ceiling. How many units can you make or get per day, and what revenue does that cap you at? If your ads doubled tomorrow, would your stock hold? 4. Once the founder ad works, build a pod around it: one strategist, three editors, one designer. Ecom is a marketing business until $1M a month. After that it's a supply chain business. Got on a call with a guy who did $1.7M in August and was annoyed about it. He said it could have been $2.5M. The ads weren't the problem. They worked too well. His factory couldn't make the product fast enough to keep up. He's 29. Former pro rugby player. Twelve surgeries. Never went to university. He moved around playing rugby and had a couple of kids along the way. He'd started a few supplement brands before and, in his words, "done okay." This brand is 19 months old. Not long ago it was doing $250K a month. He makes the product in his own factory in Scotland. His sister, a former cruise-ship performer, runs it. And she calls him every single day with the same question: "Can you scale back that ad budget?" The ad that broke it open wasn't a studio shoot. He was on holiday in Portugal, sitting by the pool with the product in his hand, just talking about it. In his words, "it just popped off." Now he hasn't made an ad himself in four or five weeks. He runs pods instead: two strategists, each with 3 editors and a designer. Every single bit of traffic goes to one product page. It converts at about 6%. All of that was UK only. His US stock was about six weeks out when we talked. Most founders at $250K a month are hunting for one more winning ad. At $1.7M, his whole fight was keeping product on the shelf. Why this matters: Every founder thinks the ceiling is creative. Under $1M a month, it is. Past that, the ceiling moves to the stuff nobody posts about: factory capacity, stock, cash tied up in inventory, shipping. Adam is the proof. The demand for $2.5M was already there. What capped it was how many units came off the line. And look at the order he did it in. He found the winning ad himself, by a pool, with the product in his hand. Only after that did he build pods to make more of them. Most founders hire the team first and hope it finds the angle. How to steal it this week: 1. Shoot one ad yourself: phone in one hand, product in the other, talking about why you made it. No script, no studio. 2. Send every bit of cold traffic to one product page and get its conversion rate up before you test anything else. His is about 6%. 3. Work out your supply ceiling. How many units can you make or get per day, and what revenue does that cap you at? If your ads doubled tomorrow, would your stock hold? 4. Once the founder ad works, build a pod around it: one strategist, three editors, one designer. Ecom is a marketing business until $1M a month. After that it's a supply chain business.

Got on a call with a guy who hasn't sent a single ad to a store in 3 years. His words: "it's a waste of ad spend." When we talked, he was doing $30–50K a day. He's 32 and calls himself a dinosaur. He started in CPA marketing in 2016 selling Teespring t-shirts, learned on the Stack That Money forum, then built a brand in Sweden, where his parents had moved with one goal: put food on the table. Then 2020 hit him. Right before the US election, Facebook locked him out for six wholemonths. No agency accounts, no backup profiles, no connections. The brand started bleeding money in what he called a negative spiral. So he walked away from it, took one month off, and came back with 5 new offers. Every one of them runs the same way: ad, then an advertorial or a long sales page, then an order form. Never a product page. He builds the advertorials in Webflow. How he builds them: 3 weeks of research before he writes a word, and 3 advertorial angles per offer He writes the headline last He never launches an advertorial without an image ad Klarna one-click upsells, which he calls his edge And the one that broke my brain. If 40–50% of readers click through from his advertorial, he's not happy. He says it's not filtering enough. His sweet spot is 25–35%. Most people would kill for a 50% click-through. He wants the page to scare off everyone who was never going to buy. Early on, a $600-a-day profit made him comfortable. Two months later, in his words, it just died. And while he writes copy, he keeps a printed photo of his customer next to him. Her name is Susan. Why this works: A product page shows the product to someone who didn't wake up wanting it. An advertorial sells the problem first, then the mechanism, then the product. By the time someone hits the order form, they've already decided. That's also why he wants a lower click-through. A click from someone who isn't sold yet turns into an abandoned checkout. 30% of people who already decided beats 50% of people who are just curious. How to steal it this week: 1. Pull the 10 longest-running advertorials in your niche. Anything live for 90+ days is printing, or the brand would have killed it. I use GetHookd for this. 2. Write down the order of each one: hook, story, problem, mechanism, product, offer. You'll see the same skeleton over and over. 3. Pick 3 angles and write one advertorial per angle. Headline last. 4. Launch each one with an image ad, and track click-through to the order form. His target is 25–35%. Your product page is not a landing page.