Jake Abrams

I help 7-9 figure DTC brands with revenue & CAC | I write The Process, a newsletter about modern growth marketing | Sold 100K+ personal cooling devices

Consumer Marketing & Growth Leader.  

Brands I've worked with:

Caraway
Jones Road Beauty
Skylight
Canopy
Insurify
Naked Wines
Rugiet
Sundays For Dogs
Momofuku
Sunday Lawn Care

100+ others

Book a discovery call in the featured section below 👇

Founder

The lean DTC growth marketing partner that I wish existed when I was an in-house marketing lead. 

At Odyssey, we help 7 & 8-figure DTC brands increase revenue & ROAS by finding the right combination of:

- Messaging
- Audience targeting
- Media channel allocation
- Creative

https://www.growodyssey.com/

I built a 40-slide deck about the winners & losers of paid social in 2026. 

🏆 THE NEXT ERA OF PAID SOCIAL: 40 Slides Outlining How To Actually Win At TikTok, Meta, And Creative Diversity In 2026. 

I believe it invalidates 75% of what most marketers are doing right now.

4 shifts happened:

1. Infinite good ideas
⤷ AI can scrape customer reviews, analyze signals, and generate insights in seconds. The number of good ideas you can come up with is now infinite.

2. Unlimited Distribution
⤷ There's no limit to the amount of content that can be posted. Every new video is an opportunity to generate net value for your business.

3. Aligned Incentives
⤷ Creator compensation finally matches value created. TikTok Shop ties pay to sales. CPM and view-based models tie pay to reach. Performance-based compensation is now functional & accepted. 

4. The Feed Is Everything
 ⤷ People don't go to websites for education anymore. They spend 6+ hours a day on social media. Consideration, nurture, and education all happen in the feed now.

In a world of unlimited at-bats, the brands that exercise operational willingness to hit the quality bar at volume, win. 

What this looks like:
- An aggressively intentional use of creative diversity 
- 4-tier content model from Elevated through AI-generated
- Network of 20+ owned and affiliated social accounts
- All publishing daily
- All feeding the algorithm
- All generating halo

All competing for a chance to become your best performing paid ads for zero upfront media cost. 

This 40-slide deck is every 8-9 figure brand's roadmap to reaching more accounts on Meta & TikTok and actually growing profitably. 

Want the deck?
→ Like this post 
→ Comment "SLIDES" and I'll send it over (must be following)

---

EDIT: you can just grab the deck here: https://lnkd.in/eTxSxauP

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Creative-led growth for 8-9 figure consumer brands | Writing about AI & advertising | Sold 100k+ personal cooling devices

I found a travel brand driving 15M+ views / month across 11 TikTok accounts. 

One account has 683 followers, with multiple videos over 170k views.  

Most marketers have no idea how this strategy works. Their effectiveness is decaying rapidly. They are quickly becoming dinosaurs. Don't be like them.

This travel brand has a full-on content ecosystem: the brand account, multiple employee accounts, affiliated accounts, and more.

All publishing daily. All feeding the algorithm. All generating halo. All competing for a chance to become their best performing paid ads for zero media cost. 

The old model: 
→ Budget determined creative volume 
→ Ads launched straight into paid testing 
→ Creatives competed for spend 
→ Losers generated zero value 
→ Insights came from paid data only

The new model: 
→ Every video gets posted organically first 
→ The algorithm tests everything for free 
→ Every post generates signal and net value 
→ Winners earn their way into paid 
→ Your best-performing ads are pre-validated

Do you understand that the bottleneck does not exist anymore?

It's no longer "what should we say this month?"

It's "how do we say everything, everywhere, all the f*****g time?"

What I found when I dug into this brand: 
→ 11 separate TikTok accounts, all active 
→ 1000+ videos published per month across the network 
→ Hundreds of videos with 100K+ views
→ Micro-accounts outperforming accounts 100x their size 
→ Minimal correlation between followers and views 

I recorded a full Loom breaking down: 
→ How this brand structures their multi-account strategy 
→ The content formats getting 100k+ views from tiny accounts 
→ Why this works with TikTok's algorithm 
→ How to replicate this for your brand for organic and paid

Want the full breakdown?
→ Comment "TikTok" 
→ Like this post

And I'll send it over (must be following so I can DM)

This AI agent watched 291 viral skincare TikToks and broke down the winning hooks, visual themes, and messaging.

If you're running a skincare brand in 2026, this is a cheat code to winning ads. 

Every idea does not need to be original. You can just find what's already working on organic TikTok and remake it for your brand.

That's a big part of the strategy I've used for years across 250+ brands. 

This database does the hard part for you. The agent analyzed:

- Hooks that stop the scroll
- Visual styles that perform
- Messaging that converts

And the analysis isn't generic. It's specific enough that you could take 30 of these videos, adapt them, and have a month of content ready to test.

I'm giving away the full database & analysis of these 291 videos.

To get the full Airtable database: 

1. Connect with & follow me
2. Comment "DATABASE" below 
3. I'll DM you the link to access it

---

I originally built this flow myself using N8N, Apify, Gemini, and Airtable. It works great, but it took some time to set up.

If you're not into stitching together automation tools, you should check out Snowball: it does this way easier out of the box.

https://lnkd.in/eGCw2k35

I know a growth marketer driving 3.6M views / month on TikTok.

To me, this is the #1 arbitrage opportunity in paid social in 2026. 

I almost didn't want to write this, but most people won't take action anyway. 

Here's essentially how it works:

50 TikTok accounts
3 posts per day / account
4,500 posts per month
800 average views per post
3,600,000 average views per month

The algorithm is meritocratic now. Best content wins. 

Also...
we have infinite access to intelligence now. 
which means there are infinite good ideas. 

So if you're good at AI, the advantage isn't in having good insights & ideas. 

The advantage is your distribution. 

An Attention Engine should be part of every brand's creative strategy in 2026.

Comment "ATTENTION" and I'll send you my 40-slide deck that explains exactly what I'm talking about.

In 1 slide, this is what format diversity looks like...

How to think about it:

Creative diversity is made up of 2 things:

1. Micropersona diversity 
 Who are you talking to?

2. Format diversity 
How are saying it?

Process to use:
- Go uncomfortably deep on your micro personas
- Start testing with easiest formats (statics, faceless)
- Once those land, activate winning messaging across the full spectrum (native, scripted, cinematic, elevated)

This helps you:
- Scale your ad account
- Reach new audiences
- Reduce wasted spend & creative production costs
- Turn 1 win into 100 wins

That's the systematic approach. 

One insight. Many micro personas. Every format.

I know a freelance CS who 100x'd their creative output using AI.

He's shipping 25+ unique concepts every week. 
He's writing briefs in minutes that used to take hours. 
He's making a lot of money.

How he does it: 

"I use AI to find viral TikTok's in my category, and run a system that generates infinite variations while preserving what made the original content successful."

Here's the exact process he uses:

1. Find a viral organic TikTok in your category using Snowball

Not ads. He's looking for organic content that's already proven to resonate. Snowball makes it easy to find this and extract the key elements. 

2. Bring that format into Octo

Octo has vision into your ad account. It already knows what's working and what's not for your brand.

So he uploads the reference video and provides his micro personas.

Example: If he's working on a health supplement for dogs. One of his micro personas might be "Old Dog Mom." She has a senior dog that's starting to have health issues like joint pain or less energy. She's worried.

3. Tell Octo to write the script for that persona

Let's say the TikTok he found was a staged moment video. So it's a person behind camera talking to person on camera, educating them about this supplement that's great for older dogs. 

Octo writes the script in that format, for that persona, informed by what's already working in the ad account.

4. Rewrite for different micro personas

Once the script is dialed for Old Dog Mom, he has Octo rewrite it for:
→ New Rescue Dad
→ Active Dog Mom
→ Skeptical Switcher

So he gets more ads from that one original format that already worked. 

5. Format multiplication

Now he takes that same insight and multiplies it across formats:

The staged moment becomes:

→ Podcast clip (same banter, different setting) 
→ Street interview (same objection/solution dynamic) 
→ Word wall (just the key lines, way easier to produce)

Infinite executions if you have your format system dialed in. 

6. Use Wispr Flow the entire time

He doesn't type anything. He just talks to Octo through Wispr. 

---

Here's what this really means for creative strategists in 2026:

The primary skill set is essentially this:

Creative Taste
- You have to find the references and know what to do with them.

Operational Speed
- You have to be a psycho about moving fast. Because if you want to, you can.

Communication Skills
- Other people get involved: creators shooting the content, clients approving the ideas. You have to sell the vision and protect it through execution.

---

You can operate 100X faster with this flow.
And you can make a lot of money.

i just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly....

going from $0M to $15M in DTC is basically just:

1. you start with a product that actually solves a real problem. 

2. you make sure the product(s) provides ongoing value so that you grow LTV instead of always chasing new customers.

3. you nail your foundational messaging before you make a single piece of content. build a story that spreads. 

4. you ensure your audience can easily understand the problem deeply enough to explain it to someone else. that's how ideas move through networks instead of dying on the feed.

5. you use tools like Snowball and Adology.AI to watch the top 1% of content in your niche and extract content ideas. 

6. you rip the structures of high performing creators, in your niche or not, and bring in your own powerful brand message. 

7. you create voice-of-brand content yourself. make strangers want to buy from you. 

8. you pick up your phone, start making TikTok's, and you can have 20k followers in like 2-3 months and be your own TikTok affiliate. 

9. you voice record your thoughts with Wispr Flow and have Claude turn them into scripts for videos (organic or paid)

10. you layer in reaction hook + product videos. you or someone at the company on camera for 5 seconds, then show the product for 10 seconds. 

11. you build a "hybrid" content tier: AI-assisted edits + real footage.

12. you run elevated shoots quarterly or monthly. this is your best-looking stuff, but it still needs to feel native, not like a TV commercial.

13. you build a controlled creator layer...your 5-15 core creators you tap repeatedly.

14. you build a facilitated creator layer underneath that. this is your influencer program down to TikTok Shop affiliates.

15. you align incentives with performance. small retainer + CPM tiers and/or commission on sales. if they only win when you win, quality goes up.

16. you manage all of it inside a Discord. 

17. you cultivate a community of real customers, not actors. 

18. you tap into the stay-at-home mom economy. there are thousands of them who'd love to make an extra $500- $1.5k / month making slideshows and word wall videos for brands they actually like.

19. you give them the tools, the playbook, and the incentive structure...then get out of their way.

20. you use tools like Motion (Creative Analytics)and Octo once you're running ads to turn each win into 20 new wins.

TLDR:
Story
Ops
Community
Aligned incentives
Flywheel

That's the whole machine.

22 thoughts about the next era of paid social in 2026 🎥

2026 is the best year in history to be a creative generalist.

You now have a superhuman suit for the entire creative process.

And most people aren't:
- Smart enough
- Motivated enough
- Disciplined enough

To actually use it. 

So there's this massive gap forming between the people who figure this out and everyone else.

This year belongs to the people who can see the big picture and make it happen fast.

The 4 Tier Content Matrix

In a world with unlimited at-bats, every brand should make these 4 types of content in 2026 ↓

1. Hero Content: 
High-production brand moments. Quarterly campaigns. Elevated UGC. Done with in-house team and a small roster of cinematic creators. This is your traditional stuff for brand or DR that looks nice. 

2. Controlled Creator Content: 
You have a managed roster of creators. You feed them the angles, the talking points, often the scripts. You get high quality, predictable output. But there's management overhead so it doesn't scale infinitely.

3. Facilitated Creator Content: 
This is your Discord channel, your seeding program. Community-driven and hands-off. Creators own their angles and language. Quality varies, but it's very authentic. Pay commissions or pay per million views.

4. AI / Hybrid Content: 
Slideshows, faceless videos, text-on-screen. No creators required. Infinitely scalable. Fills the feed, generates signal, and occasionally produces surprise winners for organic and paid. 

What am I missing?

There’s an uncomfortable gap forming between the top 1% of creative operators and everyone else.

Because you now have a superhuman suit for the entire creative process. And most people aren’t smart, motivated, or disciplined enough to actually use it. 

Within e-commerce and marketplaces, specifically, this shift is happening incredibly fast. 

Photoroom just released their State of GenAI in Marketplaces 2026 report, based on interviews with 10 AI experts and a survey of 2,000 consumers. 

Some findings I found interesting: 

→ 55% of consumers say poorly executed AI-generated images actually decrease trust
→ 75% of workers say AI improves their speed or quality
→ Wolt reclaimed 100+ human hours per day after automating image QA
→ 64% of organizations are still in experimentation phase of AI adoption

If you want to go deeper on this and become part of the top 1% of creative operators, you should join Photoroom’s State of GenAI in Marketplaces live event this Wednesday (1/28).

You’ll get to learn from the people who are actually building the AI infrastructure behind visual content at scale.

⚫ jeff strauss - Head of Imaging, Photoroom (ex-Wolt) 
⚫ Sonia Biddle - Chief Product Officer, Depop 
⚫ Anne-Claire BASCHET - Chief Data/AI Officer, Mirakl 
⚫ Laura McGinnis - Partner, Balderton

You can register (for free) with my link: https://luma.com/8wgjjupp

If you're a:
→ Marketplace operator
→ Creative strategist 
→ E-commerce operator 
→ Brand marketer 
→ CMO

Really anyone who works with product visuals at scale, you should show up to this.

The session is on Wednesday, January 28th at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT.

Even if you can't attend live, still worth registering for the recording.

See you there: https://luma.com/8wgjjupp

#PhotoroomPartner

Test your creative without spending $1 in your Meta ad account.

CONTEXT:

Good ideas are free now. 

AI can scrape customer reviews, TikTok, Reddit, any signal that exists.
With the right systems, a talented human with good taste can transform these ideas into native content 10x faster that before. 

NEW INSIGHT:

So the constraint isn't "what should we say test month?"
The question is: "how do we test everything, everywhere, all the time?"

Followers don't matter anymore. The algo shows your content to whoever it thinks will care. Good content finds its audience. Bad content dies. That's it.

So this is a game of executional quality & volume. 

ACTION TO TAKE:

Build the network for unlimited at-bats:

Brand Voice Accounts:
- "Josh at [brand]"
- "Maria at [brand]"
- "Marketing team at [brand]"

Verticalized Accounts:
- "Zach Travel Stories"
- "Alex Nomad Life"
- "Caleb Travel Finds"

Faceless Accounts:
- "Insane Travel Stories"
- "Your Travel Inspo"
- "Travel Deals Central"

All posting daily. All testing messaging. All letting the algorithm tell you what works.

By the time you put $1 into paid, you already have the answers. Plus a massive halo that lifts the performance of all your ads. 

The algorithm is the first test.

The best creative teams operate on 7-day cycle.

→ What got deployed 7 days ago? 
→ What's actually getting spend? 
→ What's working?
→ What's not? 
→ What are we changing for the next 7 days?

When you compound that weekly process over a long period of time, that's where the magic happens. 

But so many weekly creative strategy meetings devolve into this weird habit of staring at the same group of highest spending ads and wondering what to do about it. 

I like Motion (Creative Analytics)'s new Week over Week trends reporting because it makes the ideal weekly workflow much easier for creative teams: 

→ Automatic 7-day vs previous period comparison 
→ Spend, ROAS, and softer metrics 
→ AI that you can ask about what changed and what to do next

Creative reporting should map to this 7-day cycle.

Matthew McConaughey was right about private LLM's. Broad AI is out. Narrow AI is in. 

For performance marketing, 90% of the AI tools I've tried have been useless. Because all they do is make it faster to generate a higher volume of mediocre output. Nobody needs that.

Octo has been my best experience so far with a Performance Marketing LLM, in which the product is connected to the ad account and actually understands the ad account like a senior-level performance marketer.

3 opening slides from our 25-person team offsite in Austin this past week. 

Last year, I totally failed as a leader to provide daily purpose. 

As I was thinking through our collective "why" for this year, had a thought...

For some reason, the world's most valuable skill is creating things for the internet that gain attention from the right people. 

If you join the top 1% (or even the top 20%) of people at this skill, you get:

- Freedom & flexibility
- Money & opportunity
- Leverage & access
- Creative fulfillment

I know this is true, because it's exactly what's happened to me these last 3 years of finally creating content. 

So in 2026, Odyssey will be the best place to work for anyone hellbent on joining the top 1% of humans for the most important skill in the world. 

Oh, and we're hiring for:
- Full-time content creators
- Growth marketers
- Creative strategists

You don't understand that the bottleneck doesn't exist anymore. 

One account posting daily = 30 pieces of content per month.

An ecosystem of 20 accounts posting 3x per day = 1,800 pieces of content.

All feeding the algorithm. All generating halo. All competing for a chance to become your next best-performing paid ad for zero media cost. 

The old model treated organic as a single channel you "managed."

The new model treats organic as a testing ground you flood with volume, then promote the winners into paid.

Your brand account alone will never generate enough at-bats. You need the ecosystem, and you need operational willingness to hit a quality bar at volume.

Matthew McConaughey was right about private LLMs.

You could also call them "vertical-specific LLMs" or "professional class LLMs". 

These are going to dominate in 2026.. I'm already seeing it happen outside of marketing. Harvey is doing it for legal.

Broad AI is getting replaced by narrow, expert AI.

I'm not a technical AI expert. But here's what makes sense to me:

If something is giving you an answer in 5 seconds, it probably helps for it to have a narrower, more specialized view of the information it's pulling from. Only the validated, expert-level stuff. Not an unlimited ocean of everything.

For performance marketing, 90% of the AI tools I've tried have been useless. Because all they do is make it faster to generate a higher volume of mediocre output. Nobody needs that.

What performance marketers actually need:

- AI trained on ads that actually won, and why they won
- AI with vision into their ad account data
- Agents that analyze performance like an expert media buyer
- Micropersonas specific to the brand they're writing for
- Voice and messaging guidelines baked in

So when you ask "how do I improve this supplements ad?" The answer is actually valuable.

This is what AI looks like in 2026 for performance marketers. 

---

P.S. Octo has been my best experience so far with a Performance Marketing LLM. I'm gonna drop a link to it in the comments.

Octo

Do you understand there is zero bottleneck to good content ideas anymore?

Ask AI for ideas based on real ad account performance with Octo
Scrape TikTok and automatically watch with Snowball
Utilize god-view signal collection of Reddit and Instagram with Adology.AI
Analyze hundreds of customer reviews with an agent in Claude

Do all of it without ever typing a word by using Wispr Flow

Multiply every single good idea with format multiplication. 

I honestly get so frustrated when people struggle to come up with a high volume of good ideas based on real insights, because it's so easy to do now. 

If you're a brand in this world with unlimited good content ideas, you need to think about 2 things:

Diversification
Distribution

The brands that win in 2026 will master both, deploying a high volume of intentional creative to generate halo, signal, net value, and trackable revenue.

Mike Rome

- Cut my teeth in management consulting
- Left for tech & startups in 2012
- Been scaling growth-stage cos. since

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

- Helped many scale to 8-figs, incl. $50M+
- Acquired millions of paying customers
- Led growth for Top 100 Inc 5000 brand
- Built & led growth teams of 15+
- Managed 8-fig budgets with clear ROI
- Advised startups raising combined $250M+
- C-Suite for two 100+ person cos. (CMO, CGO)
- Taught at top MBAs (Kellogg) & accelerators (Techstars)

HOW I CAN HELP:

- Growth & Marketing Audits
- Ads Management
- Creative & Conversion Advisory

EMAIL:

- mike@moonwater.co

Fractional CMO & CGO, Startup Advisor

moonwater is a growth studio to help top tech companies scale. Companies hire me as a Fractional CMO or CGO, or Growth Advisor.

Google: Fire your entire account rep team.
Their reputation w top agencies is awful.

These emails need to stop:
- Fear-mongering subject lines
- Generic, unhelpful advice
- From people who’ve never run ads

If we don’t warn clients, it sets off fire drills.

Client: “We lost 71% of impressions??”

Us: “We don’t chase impressions. We chase profit.”

Client: “Right. Makes sense.”

In 15+ years, I’ve met with 15+ reps.
Only one said something useful.

We’re students of the game.
We don’t know it all.
But we protect our time.

So we decline meetings.
We invite recommendations by email.
Instead, we get multiple follow-ups with no substance.

Save the headcount.
Invest it in making the product better instead.

Don't do many of these, but 15.5K followers feels like the right time.

My story:
-Cut my teeth in mgmt consulting
-Left for tech & startups in 2012
-Been scaling high-growth brands since
(Bootstrapped, PE, and VC)
-Teach about marketing & growth
(Techstars, Northwestern Kellogg)

Today:
I help $5M-$100M brands turn ad spend into profit.
Our agency is the opposite of most:
-No junior employees
-No lengthy contracts
-Always flat-fee
-Profit-focus

Love the work. But trying to put it in more of a box these days.

Have three young boys and a badass wife.

Family-first all the way 👊

Thanks for being here 🙏

Portrait of the author - outside with a mountain landscape in the background.

Quit moving the damn goal posts.
 
Had dinner with a good friend.
He told me about his good friend –
 
Just sold a company for $400M.
 
Wild. Really impressive.
But it reminded me –
 
How comparison is the thief of joy.
Every time.
 
When I left management consulting,
I would’ve killed for where I landed five years later.
 
When I stayed in tech,
I would’ve killed to know I’d be CMO by 30.
 
When I left to start my own thing,
I would’ve killed for the outcome so far.
 
And yet…I rarely stop.
I rarely celebrate.
I just move goal posts.
 
This isn’t anti-ambition.
And it’s not a brag.
 
It’s just easy to forget…
how good this already is.
 
A reminder.
For me.
Maybe for you too.

Taught at Northwestern Kellogg this week.
Six lessons on business and marketing.
 
On Business
 
1. Expectations run everything.
Business is just problems.
Expect them.
Then get good at solving them.
 
2. Bias for action wins.
Stop planning. Stop debating.
Go talk to customers.
Never stop.
 
3. The problem matters most.
Forget brand. Forget polish.
Forget even great marketing.
Find a problem so painful
customers forgive the rest.
 
On Marketing
 
4. Simplicity wins.
Speed beats complexity.
Fewer campaigns and targeting.
A lean tech stack.
Learning dies in bloated systems.
 
5. Creative is the lever.
Creative is the targeting.
If it doesn’t communicate value instantly,
nothing else matters.
 
6. Ads are for learning first.
Early ads are research.
Small bets. Clear hypotheses.
Measure how fast you’re getting smarter.
Revenue follows clarity.
 
Thanks Rick Desai + Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management for having me.

Photo inside the main, expansive lobby of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

Most “Fractional CMOs” aren’t actually CMOs.
 
They’ve never sat in the seat.
Never owned the number.
Never felt the pressure when growth stalled.
 
And at the $5M–$50M stage, you can’t afford to find out the hard way.
 
At this level, every marketing dollar counts.
You need someone who’s:
- Scaled brands through your revenue range
- Built teams, not just “advised” them
- Owned P&L when the board asked tough questions
 
Before I went fractional, I’d been:
- CMO of a $50M+ brand
- CGO of another 8-figure company
 
Not saying I was the best.
Plenty more accomplished than me.
 
But I did the job.
At this scale.
With my neck on the line.
 
That’s what “fractional” should mean.
 
Real CMOs go fractional because burnout is real and the upside is better. But that’s not most.
 
Your next growth stage is too important to gamble on someone who’s never been there.

We walked away from $100K+ in fees.
 
A brand reached out.
$25M in revenue.
$500K/month in ad spend.
 
On paper? A dream client.
 
One problem:
35% gross margin.
 
Most agencies would’ve taken it.
 
Here’s what would’ve happened:
 
They burn $500K “testing.”
We hit platform benchmarks.
Everyone points to ROAS.
 
And the brand is still underwater.
 
At 35% GM, ads aren’t a growth lever.
They’re a knife fight.
 
No room to test.
No room to learn.
No room to compound.
 
So we passed.
 
The brands scaling ads profitably need more from their P&L.
 
i.e., More oxygen to experiment, absorb volatility, and actually turn performance into profit.
 
Most agencies optimize for the retainer they make. We optimize for the profit you keep.
 
If your agency hasn’t asked about gross margin, they’re selling execution--not outcomes.

Talked to two agency founders recently.
 
Both elite. High demand. A+ reputations. Scaling fast.
 
Both said the same thing:
 
“I want this sold by yesterday.”
 
That stuck with me.
 
This is the cost of big.
 
At a certain size, founders stop doing the work that made them great. And stop doing the work that made them happy.
 
Days fill up with:
- Managing people.
- Reviewing work you didn’t touch.
- Fixing problems you didn’t create.
- Selling work you can’t fully give yourself to--because now you’re running the business, not doing it.
 
The agency still “works.”
But you don’t want to be there.
 
So the goal shifts.
Not to better work.
Just to an exit.
 
--
 
Moonwater was built in reaction to that.
 
We want work we actually like.
Work that sharpens judgment.
Work where we know the numbers, the ads, and the people.
 
That’s why we stay small.
 
Some weeks are hard.
Some calls don’t go our way.
Some decisions miss.
 
But that struggle is often the price of good work--for us and for the brands we work with.
 
If the endgame is escaping what you built, something broke along the way.
 
We’re here because we still want to do the work.

15 years in marketing taught me this.
There are two kinds of agencies –
 
Some talk about strategy.
Others do the work.
 
The ones talking:
- Sell vision and frameworks
- Hide behind fluff and meeting bloat
- Optimize for optics over outcomes
- Drift from the numbers over time
 
The ones doing:
- Stay close to the ads, funnels, and data
- Do the hard parts themselves
- Make tradeoffs in real time
- Build. Ship. Learn. Repeat.
 
One wants attention.
The other wants to do the work –
because they’re hell-bent on growth,
for themselves and for the brand.
 
Choose wisely.

Our team has something most agencies don’t.
 
Every person has bet on themselves.
 
We’re small--three people. On purpose.
 
Because in a services business, people are the product. Everything else is secondary.
 
When I was building this team, I kept coming back to one question:
 
What actually separates good teams from great ones?
 
You can teach marketing.
You can teach ads.
You can teach growth strategy.
 
You can’t teach the intangibles.
 
Self-belief. Ownership. Caring when no one’s watching.
 
I’ve never said this publicly. It’ll never show up in a client update.
 
But most of what makes great teams great happens quietly--off Slack, off decks, off calls.
 
People who bet on themselves?
 
They’re the ones who’ll bet on your business too.
 
It’s the strongest leading indicator I’ve found.

The author walks on a snowy path. The picture is front-facing, so you don't see the author. Just the road.

Beware the Ecom Data Mafia.
Simple math beats fancy dashboards.
Every time.
 
At $5–50M in revenue, your problem isn’t lack of data. It’s too much of it.
 
You don’t need:
• $$$/yr attribution tools
• Dashboards with 40 metrics
• Weekly debates about “true ROAS”
 
They don’t create clarity.
They create hesitation.
 
Save the money.
Cut the fat from the stack.
Run the business on first principles:
 
Gross Profit = Net Sales – COGS
Contr. Profit = Gross Profit – MKTG
Net Profit = Cont. Profit – FIXED
 
Then make decisions:
 
If CP > Fixed, you can scale
If NP improves, you should scale
If NP drops, slow down
 
One more rule most miss:
 
Even if CP > Fixed, hunt waste
(Bloated tools, redundant SaaS, etc.)
 
You’re gunning to max scale at 15% Net Profit.
 
That’s it.
No models. No guesswork. No theater.

Good agencies are using AI.
But many are still missing the point.
 
Most are treating it like a speed tool.
Write faster. Ship faster. Do more.
 
That’s fine.
But it’s not the real shift.
 
AI doesn’t reward people who can type prompts.
It rewards people who can think clearly.
 
When you build with AI, you don’t think like a developer.
You think like a leader.
 
You stop obsessing over files and functions.
You focus on outcomes.
 
You give clear direction.
You cut aggressively.
You edit relentlessly.
 
The best agency leaders were never just “doers.”
They were editors.
 
They knew what to ask for.
What to cut.
What actually mattered.
 
If you can prioritize well and give sharp direction,
you can now build things that used to require a full team.
 
Execution just got cheap.
But judgment didn’t.
 
That’s the part most people are missing.

Somewhere along the way, brands and agencies lost the art of strategy.
 
We traded an ironclad plan for:
- Putting out fires
- Constant reactiveness
- Chaotic ops
- Duct-taped process
 
I’m not anti-speed.
Bias for action is one of our values.
 
But action without strategy is like flooring it with no map. Lots of motion. Very little progress.
 
Beyond retainers, we do one-month audits for brands.
 
The output: a crystal-clear 3–6 month roadmap.
- What to do
- What not to do
- And in what order
 
No fluff. No “everything matters.”
 
They’re not cheap--$12.5K–$15K.
I’ve tried hard to productize them.
To lower the price, go for scale.
 
But here’s what I’ve learned:
You can’t shortcut a world-class plan.
 
The kind of plan that helps a team do less.
So they can do better work.
The work of their life.
 
AI helps. Diagnostics help. Process helps.
But the hard part is still by hand.
And there’s always a struggle to make it great.
 
But great is the bar. And great things take time.

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The Battle

Jake Abrams

Mike Rome

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taplio

The Battle

Jake Abrams

Mike Rome

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Jake Abrams's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreMike Rome's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreJake Abrams's LinkedIn Performance