Hi Reader In 2013, I was running user acquisition for a mobile app called Bingo Bash. Our monthly ad budget? $1.75 million. When I’d just joined, I honestly couldn’t believe it was humanly possible for a single product to spend that much. I thought Bingo was for a tiny niche of middle-aged women. But this was the wild west of mobile growth: when platforms were exploding ...and anything was possible. So we spent. Scaled up. And one ad quietly started hogging a huge chunk of that budget. This...
16 days ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader After I sent that last email about building on winning ads… I got hit with some replies that all sounded kinda like this: “Okay… but what about new ideas?” “What about new formats? New audiences?” And look: I get it. Most marketers hear “optimize what’s working” ….and just assume you’ve stopped trying to grow. But here’s the truth: that is a false dichotomy.... The smartest marketers dont pick... between optimizing what's working and what's new. They build off what works AND go...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Hi Reader The account was tanking. ROAS cratered. CPAs spiked. We’d tested everything we thought would work… Soo we fell back on what we believed was our edge: ideation. After all, we’d managed over $100M in ad spend. Of course we could come up with new ideas. We had a TON of experience ideating. ..and winning w/ new concepts. We said to ourselves: “Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable. Let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader I recorded one episode of The Mobile User Acquisition Show in 2018 sitting cross-legged in a shack in a mango orchard in Ratnagiri, on the west coast of India, swatting away mosquitoes, editing on GarageBand while tethered to a dying phone signal. Another from the town of Bhopal, in a house with a pet cow roaming freely. One from Indore, just after I let a street vendor light a paan on fire and push it into my mouth: yes, while it was still burning(because, why not?). Yet another...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hi Reader After 16 years in performance marketing, I’ve learned something most people don’t want to admit: Nobody actually knows what the algorithm wants. Not Meta. Not the gurus. Not the guy posting “7 hacks to scale your ROAS.” (Not even the guy who is writing this email to you all.) We all have pieces of the truth. Which reminds me of that old parable: A group of blind men each touches one part of an elephant. One says it’s a rope. Another says a tree. Another says a wall. All of them are...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
hi Reader - Many moons ago, I studied improv theater in New York City. If you arent familiar with it, here’s how it works: You walk onstage with four or five people. The audience gives you one word. And from that, your job is to build a full 10-minute theatrical production. No script. No props. No plan. In one of my first classes, I took the word “cabbage”… “Hey, I’m a talking cabbage at a job interview. “Hi hiring manager, you are a carrot talking to me.” “Oh hey, there is ranch dressing in...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader I thought it was the best thing after sliced bread. When I first wrote the code for Brute Force AI, I was fired up. The plan was simple: ✅ Take your top-performing ads. ✅ Take your worst performers. ✅ Use AI to analyze 'em. ✅ Extract exactly what separates the high-performers vs. the rest. 🤑 Profit I thought it was genius. I obsessed over the code to fine-tune it. And then I ran the analysis on actual ads. ...and waited with bated breath to see the results.... And it just… sucked....
2 months ago • 2 min read
Hi {FirstName}, I see the same loop on LinkedIn all the time. One guru yells: “Run more Reels. Get the younger users. Waittt. Go after feeds. Older users.” Another whispers: “Talk to your users. Tap into their psyche. Message is everything.” They both sound smart. But here’s what actually happens: You chase the hot format… and performance tanks. You do deep research… and your ads still crash like a ton of bricks. If I had a dollar for every deeply researched ad that completely bombed in an ad...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hi [FULL_NAME GOES HERE], ZERO. That was the number I wrote on the whiteboard. A month into my new role as Director of Growth, I stood in front of our five-person company, grabbed a marker… and said: “We need to shut off all ad spend.” Not cut. Not reduce. Zero. Cold turkey. It was one of the most emotionally difficult decisions I’ve ever made. Because let’s be real: I wasn’t just pausing ad spend. I was shutting down my own function. I was saying: “The thing I was hired to do? The thing I’ve...
4 months ago • 2 min read
