Optimized | Growth Marketing Agency

Founder

UPTHRUST | Growth Marketing & Digital Product Studio

Digital Marketeer

We help ambitious DTC & SaaS brands​ grow by pairing our proven growth systems with performance creative and landing page testing.

We work with 25+ 6 to 8 figure brands. Some of our success stories:
✅ Helped a subscription baby brand launch and scale to $250k/month in 12 months
✅ Reduced MER by 60% for a CPG brand in the first 90 days
✅ Helped a fashion DTC brand cut CPA by 43% through structured creative testing and UGC

Here's how we help you scale your brand:
👉 Performance creative: a consistent inflow of high-performing ad creative built around consumer psychology.
👉 Landing page testing: we design and build landing pages that match ad intent, messaging and customer pain points.
👉 Influencer & creator whitelisting: tap into trust and leveraging authentic creators that help increase brand awareness and social proof through .


If you’re a 6 to 8-figure DTC brand looking to break through a growth plateau or scale profitably, DM me “𝗚𝗥𝗢𝗪” to learn more.

Alexander Pauwelyn

Hi I’m Jim, Co-Founder of GoViral.

We create profitable ads at scale.

The 7 figure e-com brands we work with are usually struggling with:

- Poor agency performance when outsourcing ads
- Not having a consistent flow of ad creatives to test
- Ad performance goes down when they're trying to scale

So we help them by taking them through our 5-step HCAC (High Converting Ad Creative) system;

1). Research your brand and target audience
2). Set hypothesis and define angles of attack
3). Produce a consistent flow of high quality ad content each week
4). Analyze & make more of the best performing ads
5). Bingo, time to scale 📈 

Some of our recent case studies:

👉 Supplements brand: 104% revenue growth within 5 months.
👉 Beauty brand: from €115K to €205K p/m within 6 months.
👉 Health brand: Multiple ads scaling to 5 fig. in ad spend.
👉 Supplement brand: €43K+ additional sales within the first 43 days.
👉 Erotica brand: 902% sales growth within 2 months.

Is your brand struggling to grow?

🚨 Use the book an appointment link at the top of my profile 🚨

Worst case scenario, we are not a good fit.

Best case scenario?

We will make money together in the coming years 🤝

Jim Schroën

Life is crazy…

🤝 Rented a house with 2 entrepreneurial friends
🏟️ Waking up looking out at the 2010 World Cup studium
☀️ Starting the day with full sun

The routine is simple: work, train and explore and meet new people.

So if you’re in Cape Town, I’m here until February 27th.

Let’s connect. Send me a DM.

Scaling 7-8+ fig DTC brands with High Converting Ad Creatives | Paid Ads & Ad Creative agency

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This hiring mistake cost us 6 months of progress.

For 2 years, I hired for potential at key roles. I looked over people who were smart and wanted to learn, and also people who fit our culture.

But when I hire someone who needs to learn the role, I'm spending all my time teaching them: reviewing their work, correcting mistakes, explaining context…

And in a fast-paced agency working with brands that move quickly, that becomes a problem. These people couldn't take full ownership yet because they didn't have the experience.

So we stopped hiring for potential at critical roles, and we started looking for people with at least 3 years of experience in exactly what we needed.
And everything changed.

These people own their work, they know how to work with e-commerce brands, and they make decisions without needing me to check everything.

Here's how we onboard them now:
→ First 1-2 months: We schedule calls, review their work, and make sure everything aligns with how we operate.
→ After 1-2 months: We let them run. Clear direction, clear goals, minimal check-ins.
→ If quality and ownership stay consistent for 2-3 weeks, we give them more autonomy.

The result:
→ More gets done
→ Quality goes up
→ I get my time back because I'm just checking in instead of managing everything

Hiring for potential works when you have time to invest.

But if you're trying to scale fast, you need people who can hit the ground running.

I hear winning ideas from founders all the time.

But they never launch those as ads.

Why?

New things are risky. You don't know the outcome. It might flop. It might tank your ROAS.

But without risk, you don't win.

The biggest winners we've found for brands came from testing new formats.

And yes, it feels uncomfortable at first.

Same with LinkedIn. At the start I had no idea what to say or how to do it.

So I didn't. For a long time.

Then I started posting weekly. Consistently. Then I started creating posts nobody else was doing, posts that took 5+ hours.

That's when I started working with brands doing €10M+/year.

The ideas with the most potential are usually the ones that feel the hardest to execute.

And execution doesn't happen unless someone owns it.

In your team: don't just brainstorm. Assign ownership.

Because if no one's accountable, the most valuable ideas stay in the room.

If you're sitting on creative concepts that feel too risky to test, let's talk.

Sometimes you just need someone with dedicated time to make it happen.

While most brands are running the same boring UGC playbook,
Dr. Squatch has built a creative machine that's completely different…

Dr. Squatch is one of the biggest men's grooming brands in the DTC space, doing an estimated $100M+ in annual revenue, and their creative strategy is completely different from everyone else in the category.

I just spent some time breaking down their entire approach.

They had 473 ads running in the last 30 days, including 346 brand new creatives.

Here's what I walked through in the breakdown:
- Their full-funnel ad strategy and how they structure ad creatives
- The top-performing paid ad angles and concepts they keep coming back to and why they work
- Their 3 main landing pages and how each one is optimized for different traffic sources
- Their website structure that's built to maximize conversions

If you want the full breakdown, comment “Squatch” and I’ll send it over.

Make sure we're connected so I can DM you.

If I took over ads for Yolanthe Cabau's Cabau Lifestyle, here's what I'd change 👇

Cabau isn't another health & lifestyle brand. 

It has something most wellness brands don't: Yolanthe’s story.

And they're not using it to its fullest potential.

Here's what I'd do different:
1. Focus the offering
2. Lead with founder storytelling
3. Test UGC that feels real
4. Use partnership ads
5. Scale with smarter statics

Kabau has everything it needs to scale:
- Strong story
- Loyal community
- Proven products

It just needs a creative strategy that actually uses those assets.

Coen, worth exploring?

I see most agencies do "research" completely wrong.

I had a conversation with one of our Creative Strategists last week. She used to work at another agency.

She said: "They told me only to scrape competitors' ads. That was the research process. Find what's working, repackage it, call it done."

I think that's standard practice for most agencies.

But here's the thing: when you copy competitors, you're only seeing the ad that's scaling.

You're not seeing:
- The customer research that informed it
- The messaging decisions behind it
- The niche understanding that made it resonate

So you copy the surface-level stuff, without thinking about what really made it work.

And sure, that might get you a win short-term, but it doesn't scale long-term.

Real performance comes from understanding why people respond to certain messaging in the first place.

That means:
- Deep customer research
- Niche understanding
- Hypothesis-driven testing

Here's an example:

We once found a viral YouTube short. It wasn’t an ad, just organic content that was getting traction.

We looked at it and asked: "Why does this work? What's the psychological hook?"

Then we rebuilt the concept from scratch for a completely different niche.

That concept scaled to ~€70K.

The Ad Library is useful, but it only shows you WHAT’s working at that time, and it doesn’t tell you WHY it works.

And without understanding the why, you're basically guessing.

If copying competitors was the answer, everyone would be scaling profitably.

Finding the winning ads is easy, but understanding what makes them work and building that into your process… that’s the hard part.

If you're spending $5K+/m on creators but getting mediocre content… 
→ You have a system problem.

If you want the full breakdown, save this for later.

Got a specific creator challenge? Drop it in the comments.

I'll share what's worked for us in similar situations.

Working with creators

The ads I wanted to kill before launch → ended up scaling.

I've learned to trust my gut on almost everything in business.

Over the past few years, I've had that feeling: the one where something feels off, but you do it anyway. Taking on a client who seemed demanding from the first call, hiring someone despite red flags in the interview, making decisions that just didn't sit right…

And almost every time I ignored that feeling, I regretted it.

The client relationship turned toxic within months, the hire lasted two months before we had to let them go, or the decision ended up costing us way more time and money than it should have.

So I learned to listen when my gut says no.

But the interesting part is that ad creative is completely different.

We've launched ads where I genuinely thought, "This isn't good, the client probably shouldn't run this." But they launched them anyway because that's how the process works: we test, we learn, we iterate based on data.

And one time an ad a founder of the brand we were working with wanted to kill before they even launched it became the top spender in the account, scaling to €83K+ and running for months.

I see this pattern with a lot of founders who want everything to look perfect before it goes out, the creative needs to feel on-brand.

But what I’ve noticed is that in a world where AI can generate perfectly polished visuals in seconds, people are actually drawn to the imperfect stuff.

So here's what I've learned: trust your gut completely when it comes to people and business decisions, but when it comes to creative, test everything, including the stuff that makes you uncomfortable.

That discomfort usually means it doesn't look like an ad, and that's exactly why it works.

I just spent the last quarter analyzing what separated winning brands from those burning cash.

It wasn't budget. 
It wasn't targeting. 
It wasn't even the platform.

It was closing the loop on creative learnings.

Most brands test. Few actually learn from what fails.

Here's the 2026 creative playbook:

2026 creative playbook

I see 1 great creative beat 50 average ones all the time.

But most brands are doing the opposite.

They're pumping out volume. 

Dozens of UGC ads per month. 
Different creators. 
Different angles. 
Different scripts.

And they think more is the answer.

It's not.

Here's what we've learned after working on 100+ ad accounts:

At €10K/month spent, volume can work.

You're testing broad. 
The algorithm forgives mediocre creative because the spend is low and the audience is fresh.

But at €100K/month? Volume becomes a liability.

You need ads built on:
- Real research (not competitor scraping)
- Clear messaging 
- A-tier execution 

The problem with "volume UGC factories":

They compensate for weak strategy with high output.

Because the bottleneck was never how many ads you're making.

It was how good they are.

Start with a hypothesis based on research. 
Understand the niche. 
Know the audience. 
Build messaging that resonates.

Then execute at a high level.

One creative like that will outperform 50 mediocre ones. Every time.

So, stop chasing volume. Start chasing quality.

Because at scale, quality is what compounds. Volume just burns budget.

I see that the fastest scaling brands have one thing in common:
→ real creative strategy.

I’ve seen brands/ agencies that confuse content production with creative strategy. This is a big mistake, because in this way, you will never understand why certain ads work and build a system around that.

This is how a real creative strategy should look:

1. Research
→ Pull insights from customer reviews, Reddit comments.
→ Competitor analysis: study what's performing organically in your niche, find the gaps.
→ Understand your audience before you create anything: tone of voice, pain points

2. Concepts
Choose what angles to test based on the research and what's already working in your ad account. Every ad should have a reason behind it.

3. Analyze the data
→ Track what's performing and why
→ Isolate the elements that drive results so you can iterate them.

4. Gut feeling
Data tells you where to look, but your gut feeling tells you what to test.

A strong creative strategist can double your business.
Without one, you're making content and hoping it works.

This The Foldie travel bag creative has been running for 3+ years.

I broke down exactly why it works.

Every element has a purpose: 
→ The hook creates cognitive dissonance to stop the scroll 
→ The angle positions the creator as authentic
→ The script ties every feature to a specific customer problem 
→ The visuals demonstrate the product in action (show, don't tell) 
→ The offer comes AFTER value is established, not before

Watch the full breakdown below.

5 lessons working with brands doing €10M+ taught me.

1. They can't rely on gut feeling

At small scale, you can guess. Test random ideas. Hope something sticks. 
At €10M+? They need to know why something might work, before they test it.

2. They win with fewer ideas, not more

One great creative beats 100 mediocre ones. 
Big brands don't pump out volume. They cut. They focus. They commit. More output usually means less direction.

3. They think in hypotheses, not formats

Small brands ask: "What format is trending?". 
Big brands ask: "What hypothesis are we testing, and why? E very idea has to be defendable. Research-backed.

4. They don't chase trends, they build on principles

Trends are temporary. Principles are timeless. 
Big brands study what's always worked. Not just what's working right now. They look at old ads. Print campaigns. TV spots. Because the fundamentals don't change.

5. They accept uncertainty, but they organize it

Big brands don't try to eliminate risk. They manage it. They test aggressively. 
Take bigger swings. But every swing is intentional. Because at scale, there's no room for guessing.

5 lessons of working with 10M+ brands

Most brands think their in-house creative team is enough.

And for a while, it works.

But what I’ve noticed working with brands that have internal teams is that they start using the same thing over and over again.

They iterate a lot, using the same creators, same angles, same concepts.

This is exactly what happens when you work with only one brand: you only see it from one perspective.

The brands I've seen scale fastest bring in external perspectives.

When you work with an agency, you get access to what's working across multiple brands and niches.

When we see an concept crushing it for a supplement brand and test a version of it for a health brand. We spot a hook format working in beauty and adapt it for a perfume brand.

Here's the difference:

Your in-house team keeps the performance consistent.

An agency pushes new angles and tests ideas your team wouldn't naturally reach.

And when the agency finds a winner, your internal team learns from it.

That mix is what I see pushig creativity forward.

This brand ran over 1 000 ads in the last 30 days.
IM8 Health is pulling serious revenue and their creative strategy actually stands out.

They use a lot of UGC, but they also mix in doctors breaking down the science, medical professionals giving recommendations, and athletes or celebrities backing the products.

I did a breakdown, extracting:
- Their top performing landing pages
- The account they run ads from
- Their entire creative strategy

If you want the full breakdown, comment "IM8" and I'll send it over. 
Make sure we're connected so I can DM you.

"Static ads are for retargeting only.”
Tell that to this brand that went from €178K to €286K using them for cold traffic.

This brand came to us stuck.

They were running the same style of ads on repeat. Strong performance initially, then the account just stopped scaling.

First, we tested classic UGC frameworks (unboxing, surprising the boyfriend), but also empowering messaging with creators talking to the camera.

Then, we found out that these video ads we are running, are not doing too much. So, what does this brand actually offer that sets it apart from others?

Well, 2 things:
- a killer offer
- a lot of social proof

This way, we started to insert these into static ads.

But our research didn’t stop. We looked at their winning video ads.

The ones that performed best were simple: showing the lingerie sets from multiple angles, without voice over, just visual proof.

So we added this concept to our static ads too. We built collage ads.
It delivered the story of a video but in a format that could stop the scroll faster.

This is how the revenue jumped from €178K to €286K per month.

Now we run 70/30: 
→ 70% iterating on winners (collages with one model, multiple models, sets only) 
→ 30% testing fresh angles

If you can tell the story of a video in a static ad and do it right, it can scale even harder than some video formats.

We run this exact process for every brand we work with at GoViral.

If you want to see how it applies to your account, DM me or book a call through my profile.

Your supplement ads won't work for fashion. 
And your beauty frameworks will tank in health.

Most brands treat ad creative like it's universal. 
They find a winning framework in one niche, then copy-paste it everywhere.

But here's the thing: people don't buy a serum the same way they buy a supplement. And they definitely don't buy a jacket the same way they buy skincare. Each niche has different psychological triggers.

You need to speak the right language for your audience:
→ What do they need to hear to buy?
→ What emotion are we tapping into?
→ What pain point do we apply?

That changes by niche every time.

Check the carousel for what works in supplements, beauty, and fashion.
What niches should we explore next?

Top 3 niches creative playbook

This ad we ran for a client is the perfect example of what’s really working in 2026.

A few months ago, having a good UGC production setup was enough to win.

Now, everyone has access to creator platforms, using AI to write scripts, and the playbooks are all public.

In this case, how do we stand out from the rest?

This ad is the perfect example.

It's just two people talking about a perfume on the street. But the concept is what makes it work:
- Real social proof (not manufactured)
- The "everyone in Canada is wearing this" line
- The casual warning: "Buy at your own risk."

It feels organic because the concept is simple and relatable.

Most brands are stuck testing variations of the same 5 angles everyone else is running. What we're seeing work now is testing different concepts.

The creative thinking is what’s hard to replicate, not the production. Your competitors can hire the same creators and use the same AI tools. So your best weapon is your brain if you actually invest time into thinking differently.

Here’s my challenge:
The concepts that you never tested but keep coming back to you, try them.
That's where the next winners are hiding.

taplio

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Alexander Pauwelyn

Jim Schroën

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