Growing @usehercules | YouTube ads curator https://teapaw.org/t.co/xjSxDH761H | prev @usemotion @wonderlyhq
New York, NY
Joined March 2012
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Pinned Tweet
20M views on an adapted winner from a direct competitor.
Good artists copy. Great artists steal.
Can you spot the similarities in these two YouTube Ads???
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
This is the first time I've spoken publicly about getting acquired by AWS, why we're building Hercules, and my journey as an entrepreneur.
Honored to do it with my friend, @moritzplassnig (CEO @CloudBees) as he relaunches the @codeship brand!
Timestamps:
- 0:00 Intro
- 3:52 How Fig started
- 9:00 Betting on autocomplete
- 10:55 Getting acquired by AWS
- 16:30 Navigating the idea maze
- 19:26 Zeus: Palantir-like enterprise AI transformations
- 22:42 Hercules: The best AI app builder for business
- 26:41 Reaching 10s of millions of revenue with 7 people
- 37:41 Our emphasis on customer support
- 40:46 The SaaS-pocalypse
- 45:19 Closing thoughts
Transcript: codeship.com/articles/founde…
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
Turns out we can predict the future
excited for what comes next
Our prediction for this Prime Day comes from Mimi, our newest prediction model at Social Intelligence Labs.
Mimi simulates 60 million people using census data and enriched persona data from other public sources and social media. We have been building Mimi over the past few months and are excited to test it publicly for the first time.
Overall, here are our thoughts:
A smaller event than Prime Day. About $109 per household, roughly a quarter below June's $143, with orders around $47 (June: $48). About half of households place two or more orders (June: 63%).
Awareness high, enthusiasm modest. 91% knew about the event, but only about one in three (32%) shopped mainly because of it, and 56% are very or extremely satisfied with the deals.
Careful shoppers. About one in three (32%) are more cautious because of the economy, and 54% compare prices across
retailers.
Early holiday shopping, light AI use. About one in four (23%) buy holiday gifts; about one in five (21%) use AI shopping tools
We will report back when Numerator's data comes out in a couple of weeks.
“This is gonna be a BANGER”
*fails in testing*
“This is objectively stupid”
*crushes and scales*
One thing that's always sucked to me with running "ads" on Meta is you can make the most clever, fun ads that you spend a lot of time and effort on.
And yet, the ads that seemingly always win are the lowest budgeted junk ads.
It's gotten even more transparent with the AI slop.
You can actually feel the consumer getting dumber, lazier and it kinda is depressing.
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
bam's doing great. he's in finance now.
The website is fun too tonystockprotrader.com
we've been joking about working with @tonyhawk for years. he loves ramps. we love ramp.
it's finally happening 🛹
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
We opened 10 jobs yesterday evening and now have 9k new applicants. The current job market is crazy
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
Smart people are the worst marketers on earth
You see the countdown timer, the "3 spots left", the "$26,000 of value for $997" and think this would never work on me
Correct, and that is exactly the problem
It was written for the 99% who dont spend all day studying why it works, and there are a lot more of them than there are of you
Thats how an empty company with no product does $1,000,000 a month while a brilliant product with a clever founder dies quietly
If an ad makes you cringe, run it
The ones that impress you only ever sell to other marketers
-Pampa
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
Almost five years after starting Rye, I’m excited to share that we’re joining Jolly!
We started Rye in 2021 with a pretty ambitious idea: make commerce on the internet programmable. Give developers a set of APIs that could connect any experience to any product and actually complete the transaction.
The five years since have been a crazy journey. We built a lot, changed direction a lot, worked with companies ranging from tiny startups to some of the largest companies in the world, and had an incredible team figure out how to build things that, at the time, mostly didn’t exist.
If you’ve followed Rye recently, you’ve probably noticed I’ve been quieter publicly. For the last few months, a lot of my time has gone into figuring out what the right next leg looks like for Rye and for the technology we’ve spent years building.
Agentic commerce is going to be a huge part of how people buy things. The last year for us has been a series of learnings on where that usage is and where it will be moving forward.
What's been clear is that the true 10X here is applying this technology to industries that are already solving problems for people at scale. We’ve spent a lot of the last year in rewards and loyalty, and Jolly is probably the best example of why. They already support hundreds of thousands of frontline workers through their platform. Adding what we built at Rye gives them a completely new set of ways to turn those rewards and incentives into things people actually want and can use.
That’s what got me excited about working with Dean and the Jolly team. They’re an amazing team, move incredibly fast, and already have the scale. Rye gives them a full commerce layer to build off of and Jolly gives our technology a place where it can actually reach a lot of people.
Some of the Rye team will be joining Jolly, and I’m excited to see them take what we built and supercharge it from here.
After almost five years building Rye, I’m going to take a little time before figuring out what I want to build next (with how exciting it is to build right now, I doubt that break will last long :P).
There are far too many people to thank in one post: every person who chose to join our crazy company, our customers who trusted a startup to power important parts of their businesses, our investors who backed us, and all of the friends and founders who helped us through every version of the company.
Building Rye has been one of the hardest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. I’m incredibly proud of the team, what we built, and that a big part of that work gets to keep growing from here.
Let’s go!
Today, we’re excited to share that Rye is joining Jolly.
We started Rye almost five years ago with a simple idea: commerce on the internet should be programmable. Developers should be able to connect their users to products from anywhere and build purchasing directly into whatever experience they were creating.
Since then, Rye has powered millions of commerce transactions across marketplaces, rewards programs, gifting platforms, AI applications, and entirely new shopping experiences.
Over the past year, we’ve seen agentic commerce move from an idea into something increasingly real. Some of the most exciting applications are the ones where this technology touches real-world behavior: people earning rewards, redeeming benefits, receiving incentives, and purchasing things they actually want.
That’s also where we’ve spent more and more of our time, and it’s a big reason why we’re so excited to be joining Jolly.
We’ve worked closely with Dean and the Jolly team and have been incredibly impressed by the company they’re building, their growth, and the way they think about the connection between incentives and commerce.
As part of this next chapter, members of the Rye team will be joining Jolly and the technology we’ve spent years building will become part of a much larger platform.
To everyone who built with us, worked with us, invested in us, and believed in what we were building: thank you.
We’re incredibly excited for this next leg and for what Rye + Jolly can build together.
More from Jolly
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
a long weekend means more time for smut, sandwiches, and sending zero e-mails
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
As a father who’s already taught his 7 year old to build games, research and leverage AI, I applaud this initiative.
It’ll make it easier for my son to absolutely mog these other kids.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and other city officials announced a sweeping new policy Wednesday imposing a one-year ban on student use of generative artificial intelligence in New York City public schools from 2-K through 8th grade, while limiting screen time for younger students and launching AI literacy lessons for high schoolers. More: abc7ny.com/post/new-york-cit… 7ny.tv/Ywj5FU
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
We are huge fans of @pierrecomputer and code.storage.
They've literally had 0 downtime. It's unbelievable
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
Meta and Google are not optimized for B2B SaaS usage-based products.
They go nuts when you tell them one person could be a $50,000 annual contract and another is $50. Huge variance. A single person can be a high user and the algorithm has no idea what to do with that.
And each platform's algorithm does what you tell it. So let's say we have poor conversion tracking that doesn't track when someone subscribes and it's like a 50/50 match. If I optimize for that subscription, Meta will give me more of those people. Bad tracking and Meta doesn't know who those people are.
The main thing you optimize for is the most important event to you as a business. So SaaS, it's the subscription or the start trial.
At enrichment we put a predicted cash payback on the creative. We have been working with Meta on long journey optimization so that number can train. The bar for us is predicted payback under six months.
Another day of hotkeying "Please tell me again in simple language with no em dashes" so I can stop typing it manually after every claude response
Is HBO trying to retcon us into thinking the GoT final seasons weren’t terrible???
Seeing TONS of reels and TikTok’s over the last few weeks that try really hard to make clips seem awesome when we were incredibly underwhelmed watching it live.
Attached an example
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
$400M at $5.4 B.
Strip the AI label and Higgsfield is a DTC brand.
Timed giveaways, daily drops, paid creator reach, fine-print "unlimited" plans.
People call the tactics sleazy.
eComm operators call them Tuesday.
Higgsfield just raised $400M at a $5.4B valuation.
CEO @alexmashrabov on what this actually represents:
“Historically a lot of innovation was just focused straight to Silicon Valley… Now we can see that Higgsfield can build from Asia, and Lovable and Eleven Labs can build successfully from Europe.”
“The whole point of AI is to drive further democratisation around the world.”
Brian Wool ⚡️ retweeted
"You probably need at least 400 to 500 new creatives a month. Otherwise, you're going to get outcompeted.
Once they do that, they create three to four videos a week, and we have a couple hundred of them. We work with five agencies.
E-commerce has been doing this for over a decade. UGC, creator programs, hundreds of thousands of variations of creative." @MattSwulinski
Single biggest advice to founders on how to crush UGC at scale @roman_khaves @im_roy_lee @zach_yadegari
I have interviewed 100 of the best growth leaders in the world.
@MattSwulinski is easily top 3. (alongside @alexschultz and Brian Hale)
He scaled Wispr Flow to over $100M in ARR and built a UGC machine.
He scaled Superhuman from founder personally onboarding every customer to a growth machine with $50M ARR.
If you are an early stage founder or growth leader, this will be the best episode you will listen to this year!
I condensed my biggest lessons from the discussion below:
1. The E-Commerce Playbook Is the Right Playbook for SaaS
The e-commerce playbook, where every dollar spent ties directly to a purchase or conversion, is the right model for modern SaaS. With distribution becoming a critical moat in a crowded AI market, SaaS companies should deploy UGC creators, constantly test new creative, and diversify channels to build their brand.
2. Paid Acquisition Is the Fastest Way to Validate PLG
Relying solely on organic content and word-of-mouth takes too long to validate product-market fit. Paid acquisition creates the fastest feedback loop for proving a PLG funnel works, allowing teams to test positioning, refine messaging, and optimize conversion within a single week.
3. You Only Need Three Core Channels to Scale to $10M ARR
Startups often ruin their acquisition engines by trying to run ten channels poorly at once. Reaching the first $10M in ARR only requires mastering three core channels: video intent on Meta, search intent on Google, and lifecycle retention through email and SMS.
4. Scaling Paid Ads Requires 500 New Creatives Every Single Month
On platforms like Meta, creative increasingly acts as the targeting algorithm. Scaling spend without hitting audience fatigue requires 400 to 500 new creative assets every month, produced through UGC revenue-share programs, specialized agencies, and internal teams.
5. How the Best Growth Leaders Test for True Spend Incrementally
Blindly increasing ad spend wastes money on conversions that may have happened organically. The best growth leaders measure spend elasticity against ARR growth and run strict holdout tests to determine whether each additional dollar generates genuinely incremental revenue.
6. In Three Years, Companies Will Operate Like a Board of Directors
Tech organizations are shifting away from manual execution. Within three years, lean human teams could operate more like boards of directors, spending 20% of their time on strategy while autonomous AI agents handle 80% of operational execution.
7. Fire Your Marketing Team if They Aren’t Systems Thinkers
Marketers focused on repetitive manual tasks are becoming increasingly replaceable. High-performing teams need systems thinkers who can break their work into inputs and outputs, then build self-improving AI workflows that multiply their personal leverage by 10x.
(links in comments)