DTC Podcast

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pilothouse.co

Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the through-line hasn't changed: brands sprint through summer, look up at the end of October, and realize the Halloween sale and Black Friday are on top of them with none of the groundwork done.

If you run meaningful spend on Meta, this is the checklist to work through before the CPM doubling kicks in.

What you get:
Stocking the pond. Low-cost lead gen and engagement campaigns at 5% of budget (or less), optimized to engagement instead of purchase, so Meta buys you cheap eyeballs now that become warm retargeting audiences in November.
The giveaway playbook, start to finish: partner bundle (the beer brand and the beef jerky brand), a $750 prize, a squeeze page, leads firing on signup, and an October 15 end date. The FOMO purchases from non-winners are typically what push the giveaway spend into the green before the dripping even starts.
The audience-window answer: engagement audiences hold up to 180 days, purchaser lists now build to roughly 720. Engage someone in August and you can still recall them for Black Friday.
Warming the algorithm: start ramping spend two months out, 10 to 15% a week, instead of a 500% budget jump on November 1.
Value-based lookalikes in the Andromeda era. Export your top 500 purchasers by lifetime spend, upload, build the 1% lookalike. Less central than it used to be, still working.
The CAPI audit: if your events manager shows a 5 or 6 out of 10, you're not sending enough parameters back. Click IDs, event IDs, name, email, phone. Target an 8 or 9.
The invoicing trap. Meta has moved brands to monthly invoicing, and an unpaid invoice can pause your account until it's resolved. Check your payment settings and your spend limit now, and set the limit way above what you plan to spend.
Offer architecture: why tariff-squeezed brands can finally offer again, sitewide vs. tiered thresholds, which catalog shapes suit which structure, and why you test at 5 or 10% off in an end-of-summer sale instead of guessing at 40 in November.
Creative as the gift guide: "perfect gift for your wife" hooks, unboxing reels, catalog frames with Christmas theming, and countdown urgency tied to real shipping cutoffs. No smoke and mirrors.
ASC structure: one broad Advantage Plus campaign with the full catalog, plus manual bottom-funnel catalog campaigns per collection so you have levers to pull during peak windows.
And Lennying a campaign. Eric's Of Mice and Men metaphor for over-managing an account to death, plus Jacob on why human interventions during volatile weeks add to the volatility.

Who this is for: media buyers, retention leads, and founders who want their November spend converting instead of prospecting.

What to steal: the 5% engagement budget, the giveaway structure with a pre-BFCM end date, the CAPI parameter audit, and the payment-settings check you should do today.

Timestamps:
00:00 Pre-Warming Your Q4 Audience
05:00 Building Leads Before Black Friday
11:00 How to Warm Up Meta’s Algorithm
18:00 Testing Your Q4 Offers Early
28:00 Managing Meta Performance Volatility

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Fifteen videos in a shoot day. A writer's room where creators cross-edit each other's scripts. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe walkthroughs before anyone hits record. This is what organic content looks like at Kiyoko Beauty (kiyoko.ca), the curated Asian beauty retailer that hit 8 figures in 5 years, bootstrapped, while all three co-founders kept their full-time jobs.

Gillian Liu walks through the whole machine, from a part-time student's 3M-view TikTok to a production calendar planned a month out.

If you run content, growth, or a retail business on thin margins, this episode is worth a notebook.

What's inside:
The full production process: concepts and formats planned a month ahead, scripting against a reference hook library, a writer's room because "sometimes you're in it too much by yourself," script read-throughs with talent, then batch shoot days. "It's not vibes at all."
Her comparison for why the pros post consistently: comedians who have joke-writing down to a science.
The hiring filter for content roles: "What's your screen time? Show me." Her most recent hire clocks 8 hours a day. Gillian's reaction: "That's it?"
Where it started: a student with 1,000 followers, found via Instagram DM, told to post three times a week with no direction. Three months in, one video hit 3M views on a niche product only Kiyoko carried, and site sessions 10x'd overnight.
Platform roles: TikTok reaches strangers, Instagram converts them through stories and community, YouTube Shorts reposts overperform, and Red Note gets Gillian recognized on the street by the Chinese Canadian community.
The math forcing all of this: retailer margins. A Meta top-of-funnel ad runs ~$10 CPM; organic works out to under a dollar. Paid has been bottom-of-funnel Google only for five years.
The curation model itself: pay brand premium on COGS, then harvest demand created by other people's marketing budgets.
Merchandising by data: Amazon US/Canada volume, Korea's top sellers, brand heads-ups on strategic SKUs, and Shopify's "search queries with no results" report.
Brands as partners: one runs a 50/50 ad split with Kiyoko, others commission content monthly and pay in inventory value.
The early jank: a $2,000 first order, a free Shopify theme, shipping from a co-founder's basement, and buying out-of-stock items from the Asian grocery store down the street.
Why three co-founders kept their 9 to 5s (cash flow first, risk second), plus two warehouse moves in five months and the new California fulfillment center.

Who this is for: content leads and founders doing organic at scale, and any operator whose margins can't support paid top of funnel.

What to steal: her writer's room. Have creators cross-edit each other's scripts before anything gets shot.

Visit the brand: kiyoko.ca

Timestamps:
00:00 Building an Eight-Figure Brand While Working Full-Time
06:10 The Organic Content Strategy That Changed Everything
10:02 How Kiyoko Produces Viral Content at Scale
17:07 Merchandising and Choosing Winning Products
28:03 Why Organic Beats Paid for Customer Acquisition

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pilothouse.co

Meta has been up and down since the outage a few weeks back, and the timeline is full of advertisers feeling it. So Eric pulled three of Pilothouse's most senior people onto the after-hours couch: Abby and Aves from the creative and strategy side, and Taylor from the Meta side, for a live conversation about what to do when the platform wobbles.

If you buy media on Meta, or you're a founder whose revenue leans on it, this is the difference between a bad two weeks and a bad quarter.

What you get:
The tactical spin cycle. Performance dips, panic sets in, and buyers ship 15 more ads built off the ones already dying. That amplifies poor delivery and raises CPMs. "Amplification of what's not working is never the route forward."
The full list of panic moves to skip: un-strategic ad volume, rushed channel expansion, rescue promos that train customers (and Meta) to expect discounts, account rebuilds, the "fresh pixel" request, and firing your agency.
The diagnosis question: Meta crumbled, so what part of the business fell through? No new customers points one direction. No conversions points at email and retention first. The gap picks the channel.
Stocking the pond. Why every brand should already know its next channel, and how to tell a reach problem (Pinterest) from a conversion problem (TikTok Shop) before you spend a dollar.
The iOS 14.5 precedent: partial blindness, no drastic changes, better measurement on the other side.
Pausing ads without tanking the account. Fractional touchpoints, checking median customer-journey length in your MTA before making the swing, and why Meta usually has a reason for pushing spend where it does.
Creative is the targeting. Millennial moms who look identical on paper but speak completely different visual languages by region. Butter yellow instead of white. A luxury brand that sells milestone moments instead of USPs.
"This is an ad and it's so stupid." Why absurdist, self-aware ads are out-earning earnest millennial branding with marketing-aware customers.
Where AI belongs (reporting, automation, surfacing phrases from your own data) and where it doesn't (creative direction, insights, your next steps). Plus the term for what happens when you outsource the thinking: cognitive debt.

Who this is for: media buyers, creative strategists, and founders running meaningful spend on Meta right now.

What to steal: the diagnosis question, the pause-decision checklist, and the competitor-review mining tactic for finding customer language.

Timestamps:
00:00 Meta Volatility and Common Mistakes
08:56 Building a More Resilient Growth Strategy
17:45 Should You Pause Underperforming Ads?
21:53 How to Research Customers Better with AI
35:40 AI, Creative Strategy & Content Volume

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Bar Bruhis spent ten years building SaaS for Shopify brands. He helped start one of the first email capture tools in 2015, then co-founded KnoCommerce, the post-purchase survey tool 6,500 brands use. In December he finally took his own leap: Boostcous (boostcous.com), the first protein couscous. Six months later he's about to cross 10,000 orders, bootstrapped, with a team of two.

Try it: boostcous.com. The tagline says it all: "Finally a carb that pulls its weight." (An AI copywriting agent wrote that. More on this below.)

If you're sitting on a product idea you haven't launched, or you're a CPG founder trying to turn DTC numbers into retail meetings, this episode is the working playbook.

What's inside:
Why couscous: protein pasta has Banza, Brami, and Goodles. Couscous had nobody. Chickpea, lentil, and pea flour, gluten free, protein and fiber naturally derived from the legumes themselves.
The launch: a front-page story in the local Carbondale paper and free pickup from his garage. The first 400 to 500 orders were handed over face to face, and he asked every customer why they bought.
First-order profitable on Meta with a product almost nobody has ever bought online. "That doesn't really happen" in CPG.
The KnoCommerce lessons applied to his own brand: "what almost prevented you from buying today" for CRO, and "which retail stores would you like to see Boostcous in" as ammo for buyer meetings. The pitch: in the last 30 days, this many of our customers asked for your store by name.
The first one-star review, after 155 five-stars. He emailed her, got on a call, learned she was cooking it wrong, and updated the packaging. She rewrote the review herself as a five-star essay.
Where AI actually helps a two-person brand (product seeding draft orders, static ads, most of the website photos, sell sheets built from survey and review data) and his warning: "we swung the pendulum a little too far at first." Calling customers stays human.
Expo West on a $0 badge. He got the ticket by pitching his podcast, and the Gelson's deal came from walking the floor.
His read on the protein trend: protein soda and protein sprinkles exist now. Naturally derived protein in foods you already eat is the part that lasts.

Who this is for: founders sitting on a long-gestating idea, CPG operators heading into retail, and SaaS people wondering what their skills are worth on the brand side.

What to steal: add two questions to your post-purchase survey today. "What almost prevented you from buying?" fixes your site. "Which retail stores would you like to see us in?" fills your retail pipeline with proof buyers can't ignore.

Try Boostcous: boostcous.com

Timestamps:
00:00 Building a First-Order Profitable CPG Brand
07:24 Launch Strategy That Validated Product-Market Fit
11:50 Using Post-Purchase Surveys to Drive Growth
18:08 Turning DTC Success Into Retail Expansion
31:12 Advice for Launching Your First Ecommerce Brand

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Liam Robinson and Nate Vankoughnet were two of Pilothouse's first employees and spent years scaling some of its biggest accounts on Meta. Now they've spun out Marlbank Digital (website coming soon), a Meta-only agency built for the brands Pilothouse moved past as it went upmarket: pre-launch up to $100K/month.

Want them in your ad account? Email nate@marlbank.co or liam@marlbank.co. No website yet. They've been busy in client accounts.

If you're a founder running your own Meta ads, or the one marketer at a brand doing under $100K a month, this episode is a working session on why your account structure is probably answering the wrong question.

What's inside:
The Meta hierarchy of needs: unit economics at the base ("you'd be surprised how many people need a 3.5 ROAS to barely break even"), marketing strategy in the middle, creative at the top. Most brands skip the middle.
Circumstance testing, their replacement for jumping straight to creative: articulate your product's real distinction, find the cultural currents it's relevant to, then map the specific moments it fits into someone's life. Each moment becomes a campaign.
A full anonymized case study: the ceramic to-go cup brand that couldn't scale on pretty product shots or the eco angle, and unlocked the account with one question: "Would you use a metal mug at home?" Selling an upgrade to existing to-go cup users beat converting the single-use crowd, and the commute became the winning niche.
What this looks like in the account: open audiences, existing customers excluded, CBO single ad set, 4 to 6 ads per set, creative held constant so circumstance is the variable.
Why one ad usually takes 80% of an ad set's spend, and how to structure launches around that.
The four foundations they ask for before a brand spends a dollar: a decent website, email flows, some social presence, and Meta.
Plus the origin story: the agency is named after the small Ontario town where they spent a summer hand-building tree stands for a bow-hunting brand.

Who this is for: ecom founders and marketers between pre-launch and $100K/month, and anyone whose Meta account is a graveyard of creative tests that never compounded.

What to steal: before your next creative batch, write down your product's distinctions, then list every circumstance where it slots into a customer's day. Test those against each other first.

Work with Liam and Nate: nate@marlbank.co / liam@marlbank.co | marlbank.co

Timestamps:
00:00 Why Meta Marketing Has Changed
02:01 The Story Behind Marlbank Digital
08:14 Why Foundational Marketing Beats Meta Tactics
13:15 The Ceramic Cup Case Study
20:10 How to Structure Circumstance Testing on Meta

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