ron | e-comm owner & operator

we have been trying Trybe for a while now.

100s of ads and they literally spends $0 when they are competing against our ads in a consolidated campaign.

when you put them in a separate campaign, they are just stealing conversions no matter how you look at it with on platform or MTA.

got a lot of work ahead of us to train them lol.

I have been hearing murmurs of partnership ads actually reduce performance and push it lower funnel (classic internet conflicting advice) so I will try that.

I think sometimes people blame rising CAC on Meta when in reality it's just that the low hanging fruits are gone and they ran out of reachable TAM.

Every brand has a natural steady state ceiling of reachable TAM based on a multitude of factors, the most fundamental variables are your product, price and positioning within the market.

At the beginning, your product is indeed novel and thus you can acquire customers easily, like a new species that just arrived on an island with no natural competitors with abundant resources.

Your CAC will be low, your population growth rate is fast.

You will scale very fast and feel like a god.

But the island will eventually run out of space, hit its carrying capacity and you will only able to acquire at the natural "resource renewal rate" of the island.

- New entrants into the category since they now suddenly need that item, often times they are aging into the category as time is the defining factor of forcing change in people's lives. This grows at the rate of population growth of the cohort.

- Repeat purchases. This is the actual place where the "brand" lives and competes.

- Switching from competitors.

- Cultural change. This can be a giant shift in theoretical TAM but not easy to shift culture obviously. Mostly luck.

Once you hit that reachable TAM ceiling, you may be able to make better ads to communicate your values better but it will be incremental at best.

You can continue to try to "just make better ads" but that's an never ending paddle that is not durable. As soon as you are out of touch with culture you are done.

Some smarter marketers will say "just reframe the positioning towards a different audience and expand the category". That is smart and will work. It gives you another "island" to go into and exploit but eventually it will run into the same problem.

Once you hit that diminishing return, if you still want to only focus on that product because theoretical TAM is large, you have to focus on category expansion via reframe, channel + geo expansion or serve the repeat purchasers/switchers from competitors better.

The mindset is very different to funnel hacking and requires longer time horizon.

From my experience, precisely because Meta is efficient at finding you customers, it will also precisely ends and marginal CAC rises rapidly once you hit that wall.

This entire S curve journey can take 1-3 years which is a life time for online discourse but it will hit you like a truck and that's how many brands die because "it came out of nowhere and we over extended" and they then blame Meta or competition but it was inevitable.

If your goal is to build something durable, the entire game is to continually spot new islands to hop to and identifying when you will hit the carrying capacity of the island you are on with no ego.

It's easy to look at the other competitor and go "oh but they are doing $1B so I should be able to do $100M".

Yes that is indeed your theoretical TAM but it's differrent to your reachable TAM.

Pretty much all discourse about brands and growth should be view through this lens first in order for it to be maximally productive.

Hope the graphs help.

AI integration into your company reveals the importance of a precise SOP to a level that is quite humbling.

In the process, it reveals how messy your thinking has been even if you thought you were rigorous. It reveals all bottlenecks and duplicative work that was patched over by your team.

But also it will just simply make your operations runs more smoothly even without AI.

i have a new brand that i just use fully automated rules for budget pacing (2 times a week 10% budget bump or 5% reduction based on L7D CPA) and max CBO.

everything about the brand is designed to be min effort and operations instead of max revenue

seeding to get content + basic volume of ads.

the positioning of the brand is designed to be simple because the prices is as low as I can possibly make it with incredible value in a fully saturated and max aware market.

you just need to say the same thing over and over again. "we are not cheap, they are expensive, this is the real price, and yes i promise it's legit, not chinese crap" so ads wise it's very straight forward.

BFCM messaging is "no discocunt since we are already max discounted, other brands are ripping you off in the rest of the year". so we don't need to run sales other than a banner change.

we cannot launch too many products because scale is needed to get low COGS which means we can only launch in the absolute core styles in a commoditized market. so there's really not a ton to do.

it definitely won't go to the moon but on a CM $ per time invested basis, it might be the best. I spend maybe 30 minutes a week max and well on track to hit $1M run-rate in 12 months profitably (still need cash support for growth tho)

with the way AI is going, we might genuinely be able to have 1% OpEx for this brand in the final steady state but it will probably never hit 8-fig haha.

it's already at maybe 5% OpEx with a fully human set up.

1% OpEx brand is okay if you aren't trying to build a community, create a "proper brand" and genuinely get to scale.

I think a lot of product categories can have something like this. I might even go as far as to say for some categories, you should only have something like this and don't even bother trying to build a "proper brand".

just consider yourself as a "public utility" selling basic infrastructure instead.

that's why head count is a pointless metric as a point of comparison in 2026. thats a legacy metric.

it should be total OpEx % of revenue which includes all software, human labor and admin

(variable human labor for COGS manufacturing or fulfillment not included)

and then from there define on/off shore + in/external as a secondary qualifier