CMO @ Heatmap.com

Building the future of creative operations @ CreativeOS. Using this machine to make the world a more creative place through less busy work and more time to create!

Chase Mohseni

I've seen brands spend $30K on a video shoot and get beaten by a product shot with three arrows on it.

That's basically what happened here.

Hiya's kids sunscreen ad is two hands holding a tin and three callouts. Headline says "Fits Any Routine." 

There's nothing impressive about it creatively.

But it's doing exactly one job at exactly the right moment - answering the three questions a parent has right before they buy:

Is it messy? No. 
Can I carry it? Yes. 
Does it work for real life? Beach, park, school days - yes.

No desire creation. No lifestyle fantasy. Just objections killed cleanly.

This is what I think about every time a brand asks me why their retargeting isn't converting. 

Nine times out of ten they're running inspiration ads to people who already want the product. 

Those people don't need a mood board. They need one last question answered.

Know what job your ad is doing. 

Everything else follows from that.

Founder/CEO @ CreativeOS - streamlining your creative process.

Tomorrow I am jamming with Sarah Levinger and Matthew Gattozzi
 about all things ads and creative strategy on Creative Playbook from CreativeOS

If you want to get better at turning those impressions into conversions - come join us. (Sign up in the comments)

I keep seeing the same ad creative mistake everywhere.

Broad creative → collection page → zero conversions.

No focus = no conversion.

Here are 3 insights that came up during Creative Playbook this week with Sarah Levinger & Matthew Gattozzi:

1. The fatal mismatch

Everyone is making broad ads with no angle and sending them to the broadest page possible (collections, best-sellers).

Then wondering why nothing converts.

No focus = no conversion.

The fix: Match your creative to your page type. Static ads need deep landing pages. Video ads can work with simpler pages. And collection pages only work when people already know your brand.

2. Sell to the buyer, not the user

This came up on the STEM kit breakdown and it's the mistake most kids product brands make.

Parents don't buy STEM kits because their kids need physics lessons. They buy them to feel like good parents investing in their child's confidence.

Show the kid's face when they crack the code. Show "my kids are asleep—look at what they built tonight."

The parent is the buyer. The kid is the experience. Sell emotional ROI.

3. Category psychology matters more than you think

Jewelry ≠ kids products ≠ supplements. Different products need completely different approaches.

Example: Jewelry is one of the only categories where consumers want it to be expensive. Don't sell attainability—sell exclusivity and craftsmanship. And for the love of god, use harsh lighting to make stones sparkle. Soft lighting kills jewelry ads.

If you’ve made it this far and want to do deeper - get your full breakdown here.

I've been thinking about how all marketing strategy looks the same now.

Same playbooks. Same hooks. Same templates. Same "proven frameworks."

Then I read about Hermes - they've been in business for 186 years.
Worth $220 billion.

No marketing department. No ads. No discounts. Ever.

One sentence from a former CEO explains why:

"We don't have a policy of image. We have a policy of product."

Here's what that means for you today...

In 1837, Thierry Hermès opened a harness workshop in Paris.

He wasn't building a fashion brand.

He was solving a problem: horses' movements were hampered by poorly-sized equipment.

His solution was the saddle stitch — two needles, two waxed threads, tensile opposition. Only done by hand.

One stitch became the foundation of a $220B company.

Not a logo. Not a slogan. A stitch.

By 1919, the automobile was killing the horse industry.

Most equestrian businesses panicked. Pivoted. Chased trends.

Hermès asked one question:

"What can we make with our hands here that will interest our clients today?"

Not: what's trending? Not: what are competitors doing? Not: what does market research say?

What can we make with our hands?

The most iconic bags in luxury fashion history were never designed as fashion.

The Haut à Courroies (1892) — designed to carry saddles.

The Bolide (1923) — first bag with a zipper. Designed so things wouldn't fall out during travel.

The Kelly — designed in 1935 as a "ladies' bag with straps."

No campaign brief. No focus group. No influencer strategy.

They made functional things beautifully. Fashion came later.

Here's what kills me:

Hermès made the Kelly bag for 20+ years before it became famous.

It wasn't even called the Kelly until 1956.

They didn't need the world to validate the product.

They trusted the craft.

While everyone optimizes for speed, Hermès built the opposite model.

One craftsman makes each bag. Start to finish.

A Kelly takes 18-20 hours of handwork.

New artisans don't touch a product for sale until they've apprenticed for 18 months to 4 years.

Slowness wasn't a bug.

It was the brand.

By 1935, Hermès had survived an entire industry dying.

They did it without:

→ A marketing department 
→ A single advertisement 
→ A discount, ever 
→ A product designed by committee

They only asked one question: "How do we make this better?"

The selling took care of itself.

Here's what this means for you today:

Everyone's asking "how do I market this?"

The better question: "Is this good enough that marketing becomes irrelevant?"

In a world of AI-generated everything, craft is the last moat.

Speed is the default. Slowness is the differentiator.

Make things no one asked for — but everyone needs.

Trust the work before the market validates it.

Hermès spent 20 years making bags nobody cared about.

Then they became the most valuable brand on earth.

Patience isn't a weakness. It's the whole strategy.

I recently looked at a funnel from Caraway Home (love them) for their airtight food storage containers.

At first glance, everything feels polished. The brand aesthetic is strong, the product photography is beautiful, and the experience feels premium.

But when you look at the ad → landing page transition, there’s a subtle breakdown that many eCommerce brands make.

The Ad

The creative leads with authority:
“Trusted by the Experts” + Good Housekeeping Award Winner.

It’s a powerful trust signal. The image reinforces the message too - the containers are shown in a real pantry environment, communicating organization, freshness, and everyday usefulness.

So the click motivation is clear:

This is a trusted, expert-approved storage solution.

The Landing Page:

After clicking, the user lands on a standard “Shop Food Storage” category page.

Instead of reinforcing the authority message, the experience immediately shifts to:
• filters
• product grids
• quick shop buttons

The funnel goes from persuasion → browsing.

That’s where the coherence drops.

What Works Well

• The product visuals match the ad perfectly
• The brand aesthetic is consistent (clean, premium, minimal)
• Users can quickly see product options, pricing, and ratings

So visually, the experience is cohesive.

Where the Opportunity Is: The landing page doesn’t continue the story that drove the click.

A few small changes could dramatically strengthen the funnel:

- Carry the authority message forward
- A hero section like “Award-Winning Airtight Storage” with the Good - Housekeeping badge would reinforce the click motivation.
- Introduce the category before the product grid
- A short benefit section explaining freshness, non-toxic materials, and pantry organization would turn the page into persuasion - so it's not not just browsing.
- Highlight a starter set or best-seller first

This reduces decision scroll fatigue and gives users a clear starting point.
The takeaway

This is a common pattern in DTC:

Great ad → solid product page → missing persuasion layer.

The funnel looks coherent, but the message continuity breaks after the click.
Often, the fastest conversion wins come from fixing that moment.

Curious how others handle this:

Do you usually send paid traffic to product pages, bundles, or category pages?

Money printing websites is the goal.

How you do that: Come to Creative Playbook with me, Shaun Brandt, and Taylor Davies from Oddit & CreativeOS.

Learn what makes website great or not so great. There will be plenty of both. 

See you there tomorrow at 11am PST.

Link to sign up in comments.

I used to work in manufacturing during college. Traveled to China. And at the time, the pace of innovation felt genuinely wild.

You could video call a factory in Shenzhen, hold up a camera to show them what you were looking at, share files back and forth in real time, and they’d be prototyping on the floor within hours. 

That felt like magic in 2007, 2008.

Today at CreativeOS , we have our version of that. A customer drops async video feedback. It hits our team channel. 

We jump into a voice room, talk it through, get aligned. 

Someone pulls the specs together, APIs get connected, a design gets rendered, code gets pulled. All of it lands in staging for testing.


Start to finish: a few hours.

What blew my mind two decades ago now feels like table stakes. And I think that’s actually a beautiful thing.

Innovation isn’t a threat when you’re in service of people trying to build something real. (Pls read this again)

It’s just the game moving forward.

Happy Friday.

The brands overthinking creative are losing.

But so are the ones pumping out AI slop.

And somehow nobody's talking about the middle.

Here's what I see running CreativeOS - there are two types of brands getting absolutely crushed right now:

Brand A spends 3 weeks on a single ad. Endless revisions. Pixel-perfect. They launch 1 concept, pray it works, and wonder why CAC keeps climbing.

Brand B discovered AI and now they're shipping 50 ads a week that all look like they were made by a microwave. Same generic hooks. Same stock-looking visuals. Zero brand. Zero soul.

Both are losing to Brand C.

Brand C gets it. They move fast AND they give a damn. They start with proven structures - not a blank canvas, not a ChatGPT fever dream. 

They put their brand into it. Real voice. Real angles. Real creative decisions made by a human who understands their customer.

Then they test at volume.

The difference is massive:

1) speed without slop
2) volume without looking like everyone else
3) templates as a starting point, not a final product
4) AI as a tool, not a replacement for taste

(Hot take: the brands that use AI to SKIP the thinking are going to get wrecked by the brands that use AI to do MORE thinking, faster.)

The bar for creative is about to split in two. The slop merchants will race to the bottom. The brands with real taste and real speed will pull away from everyone.

One more thing.

If your AI slop ads are "working" right now - don't get comfortable. That's arbitrage. You found a window where the bar is low. That window always closes.

The brands building real creative muscle right now are going to eat you alive when it does.

Where are you seeing the most AI slop right now? I have thoughts 👇

Aaron Orendorff

VP of Growth at FERMÀT | Previously Shopify Plus (Editor in Chief) & VP of Marketing at Common Thread Collective + Recart

The power of content resides not in its direct ability to sell, although it can. Truly great content — the kind that drives leads into and through your funnel — galvanizes an audience through a consistent story … well told. One with people, not products, at its core.

Every piece of content has to answer two questions:

(1) What hell does it save its audience from?

(2) What heaven does it deliver unto?

That might sound a bit theological, but it’s the most visceral way to make your content about your audience instead of you. Why? Because …

Self-centeredness is a plague — branded content that screams branded. 

At the opposite extreme is content for the sake of content. Feeding the beast for no greater purpose than, “We’re supposed to make content, right?”

Business results come from content that above all rescues its audience from their fears, struggles, and pains. Moreover, it must do so prior to and independent of a purchase.

Together, let’s save your business, your audience, and the world … from bad content.

———

Aaron’s work has appeared on The New York Times, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Lifehacker, Inc., Success Magazine, Content Marketing Institute, and more.

Founder

The five people you surround yourself with don’t equate to business growth.

- More ads make your business grow
- More products make your business grow
- More reps make your business grow

There’s no shortcut. 

No “I’m around elite people, so I perform better.”

But when s*** hits the fan?
When you’re on the brink of throwing in the towel?

That’s when your five f****** matter.

Because it’s so sanity-producing to realize you’re not the only one who just got laid out.

One of them has been there.
One of them is in it right now.

That’s the 99th percentile outcome vs the 50th.

The safety net under it. Not the grind.

Chief Content Officer, Operators | Fmr. Editor in Chief Shopify, VP Common Thread Collective, VP FERMÀT

No alternative text description for this image

Simple Modern crossed the 10-year mark. 60M units sold. Between $2B and $1T in lifetime retail sales across Amazon, retail, and DTC.

Bryan Porter, co-founder, shared 30 lessons to mark the occasion. And most of them have nothing to do with growth tactics. No vague, fancy principles.

They’re about what survives a decade – leadership trust, talent density, brand durability, cash discipline, second-purchase thinking, and delayed gratification. 

I reorganized all 30 into the six systems that compound over time:

undefined undefined

Operators Podcast

FERMÀT

Head of Marketing

Vice President Marketing

President @ Simple Ventures. Co-Founder of Simple Modern.

I spoke with a friend yesterday. Someone I admire. Who I look up to as an executive. 15 min into the call, we cried.

If I told you who it was + the brand they lead, you’d think they have it all together. Nothing but wins.

They don’t. And they aren’t.

So together, we cried.

Why? Because we both identify ourselves with results.

When the numbers are up, so are we. When they’re down, we’re crushed.

Worse, there was nothing either of us could do to fix things.

The sheer scale of what we’re up against in DTC is overwhelming. What few moments of success we experience make it feel like we’re in control.

But we aren’t.

- Market shifts
- Economic factors
- Customer confidence
- Political mayhem
- Technology mishaps
- Bugs, errors, and crashes

We pretend we can bend these forces to our will. That we can master them.

But we can’t.

We convince ourselves that our tactics, our strategies, our plans, our brilliance will save us.

But it won’t.

Failure exposes that.

The most painful part?

However high our highs …
Our lows are that much lower.

So, what can we do?

In the case of my friend, only one thing.

I couldn’t click enough ads or buy enough product to make a difference. I couldn’t turn on new offers, build new creative guaranteed to perform, or unlock new acquisition channels.

All I could do was be there with them and cry.

The beautiful thing is that’s exactly what they needed.

For me, though, you can do more.

You see, I don’t mass market to a consumer audience. In fact, if you’re reading this …

You are my audience.

On Mar 18th, I’m leading the Operators next online event. I don’t need millions to sign up. Just a few thousand.

When you see a Meta ad for the event, sign up. When you receive an email about it, sign up. When you get served an organic post by one of the hosts that I may or may not (but definitely will have) forced them to publish, sign up.

This is the link: https://9ops.co/pqifag

It’s going to be about growing your business through paid media — which (ironically) is the very topic that sparked my friend’s call in the first place.

So when I really think about it, maybe I could have done more to help.

I could have shared the link. I could have said: Sign up for the event to demolish …

- Every struggle
- Every fear
- Every insecurity
- Every doubt

Or, at the very least, we can cry together on Mar 18th: https://9ops.co/pqifag

PS, the lineup of 25+ ecommerce heavyweights is cracked. I hope you enjoyed this melodrama!

No one remembers anything you write or say online ... (unless you get canceled).

Say the same damn things in a slightly different way, over and over again. 

Repetition isn’t lazy. 

It’s kindness.

AI is not the advantage you think it is ...

Anything you multiply by zero is still zero.

Multiply below baseline?
You get worse. Faster.

Multiply mediocrity? 
Industrial-scale mediocrity.

Multiply low-quality output? 
Five times the volume nobody wants.

Multiply bulls***?
The stench gets overwhelming.

AI is a multiplier. Not addition. And most people have not reckoned with what that means.

Two things AI cannot replace:

1. Taste

Pacing, balance, the right turn of phrase, a piercing question. 

How you create empathy with your audience.

2. Subject matter knowledge

How the people you’re trying to reach actually talk about and experience the problems they’re facing. 

Without that, they sense it immediately. 

AI just accelerates detection.

High agency is disgustingly rare. 

And once you’ve worked with someone who has it, every task-completer after them feels like a downgrade you can’t unsee.

The first bar (on the “you must be this tall to ride the agency” scale) is almost insulting. 

Three ingredients:

1️⃣ Do the thing you said you’d do.
2️⃣ Do it when you said you’d do it. 
3️⃣ If it’s going to take longer, tell me before I have to ask. 

Clear those, and you beat 95% of everybody else out there. Maybe even more. Straight up. It’s embarrassing how few people clear it.

But the ones who change how a team operates don’t just finish what’s assigned. They focus on the outcome you really need and find better ways to get there.

- They understand the goal, not just the task assigned
- When they hit a wall, they source solutions before escalating
- They bring you things you didn’t ask for that make the work better
- They treat the constraint as a starting point, not an excuse

Recently, I handed a video editor one job: cut every podcast ad read to 45 seconds or less. Listeners were complaining ... Fair enough.

First version came back technically correct – 45 seconds – but choppy as hell. Hands jumping mid-sentence, cuts you could feel. Task completed, goal missed.

Sent it back with one note: Figure out how to make this smooth. Two iterations later, a 3-minute ad read came back at 43 seconds ... butter. They'd found AI tools I didn’t even know existed – sourced the solution without being told what the solution was.

Tools, tasks, and timelessness can be taught. 

The instinct to figure out and solve what wasn't assigned is rare.

Do I still get nervous on our big event days? Of course. More than nerves, fear. Questions haunt me.

- Will attendees show up?
- Will the speakers make it?
- Will all the tech work?
- Will I embarrass myself?

Here’s the only antidote I know ↓

Be of service.
Add value.

Honor the people who give us the one thing they can’t get more of — time.

The truth is that there are concentric circles within the @9operators x @M__Operators networks. Every level gets tighter and smaller.

Podcast watchers
Newsletter subscribers
Event signups
People who show up

THEN THE FOLKS WHO GO TO ONE OF OUR THREE BREAKOUT SESSIONS ↓

1️⃣ Executive Leadership
2️⃣ Marketing & Growth
3️⃣ Finance & Operations

For the hosts:

- Sean Frank
- Jason Panzer
- Mike Beckham
- Matthew Bertulli
- Connor MacDonald
- Connor Rolain
- Cody Plofker
- Mehtab S. Bhogal
- Katy Mimari
- Kristin Jerry-Swarek
- Jeff Hannam

Whether it’s 10 or 100 or 1,000 who join your sessions, those are the people who support us, who devour your words, who are coming to connect with you, to get value from you, who are bringing their struggles and challenges with them … to get your help.

Keep it loose + have fun.
Push people to ask questions.
Stay responsive to the chat.

I’ll say it again …

Be of service.
Add value.

Honor the people who give us the one thing they can’t get more of — time.

Let’s f****** smash this 😍

CEO of Ridge.com

President at Hexclad Cookware

Co-Founder and CEO of Simple Modern

CEO @ Lomi & Pela Case - Follow me as I talk about building my brands.

cmo @ ridge.com

Marketer // Head of Global Growth Marketing @ HexClad

Investing In & Operating Consumer Brands - We welcome complex opportunities others are unwilling or unable to tackle.

CEO & Founder at Caden Lane

CFO & COO - Caden Lane

NOBODY WANTS TO READ ANYTHING YOU EVER WRITE. They also don’t have time for it.

Plus, people are mean and stupid. Your audience will never give you the benefit of the doubt. If you make them think too hard, they’ll move on to something that doesn’t.

So, here’s 15 ways to earn and keep your audience’s attention in a world where attention is dying ...

1. Pique curiosity
2. Ask a question
3. Keep it simple
4. Varied sentence lengths
5. Varied paragraph lengths
6. Be provocative
7. Start with the “nod”
(what they already believe)
8. Or go for the hard disagree 
(confrontational)
9. Lots of line breaks
10. Even more line breaks
11. One line of text for big ideas
12. Explain in words
13. Then illustrate with examples
14. Group in 3s or 5s
15. Odd numbers past 20


Earn the scroll.

You’re not a better marketer than human nature. 

No tactic overrides that.

The best marketers build around what people already believe and purchase patterns that already exist.

HOW DO YOU SPEND MORE, PROFITABLY?

That’s the #1 question we get. 

On Mar 18, +25 ecommerce leaders with a combined media budget bigger than any European nation’s GDP are revealing their answers.

https://9ops.co/gnt9ao

Spoiler: Most of it ain’t in your ad account.

↓ Here’s the lineup

★ Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge
★ Mike Beckham, Simple Modern
★ Jason Panzer, HexClad
★ Matthew Bertulli, Pela x Lomi
★ Cody Plofker, Jones Road
★ Connor MacDonald, Ridge
★ Connor Rolain, HexClad
★ Mehtab S. Bhogal, Karta Ventures
★ Katy Mimari, Caden Lane
★ Cherene Aubert, Growth Capital
★ Bryan Cano, True Classic
★ Miranda P., GLAMNETIC
★ Jerel Blades, Growth at Tushy
★ Yingying Kuang, Kitsch
★ Olivia Kory, Haus Analytics
★ MacCoy Merkley, Portland Leather
★ Sam A., AppLovin
★ Russell Breuer, Spot and Tango
★ Sarah Carusona, BA Commerce
★ Jenna Habayeb, Posh Peanut
★ Perry Coneybeer, Axon by AppLovin
★ Andrew Faris, AJF Growth
★ Rico Mirabelli, DUDE Wipes
★ Steve Rekuc, Common Thread Collective

Executive keynotes. Lightning panelists. Live MOperators hotline. Plus, our step-by-step playbook to channel expansion.

I can’t wait to see you there!

CEO @ Growth Capital | SVP of Digital & Ecommerce @ ILIA | VP of Growth @ Bobbie

Head of Marketing, True Classic

Head of Growth @ TUSHY - hellotushy.com

VP of Marketing

Chief Strategy Officer @ Haus

Haus

100 Million Dollar CMO - Portland Leather Since 18 👜 | Scaled from $1M to $100M+ in Annual Revenue 📈 | Top 💯 Fastest Growing Digital Companies 22 & 23 🏆

Business Development @ AppLovin

AppLovin

CEO & Founder at Spot & Tango (We're hiring!)

CEO @BA-Commerce | Scaling 8 Figure Brands to Profitable +100% YOY Growth | Former Brand & Agency | Over $250M Media Managed

President at Posh Peanut (ex Ruggable, IPSY, Ogilvy, VF Corp) | Forbes Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMO | Top 100 Women in Business

Growth Marketing at AppLovin

Axon by AppLovin

I grow ecommerce brands profitably. Ask me how.

Digital Quarterback For Challenger CPGs

Director of Data | Common Thread Collective | Driving DTC Brand Growth with Data-Driven Ecommerce Marketing Strategies | Inventor & Engineering Background

Common Thread Collective

Isaac Medeiros built Mini Katana to $50M on organic content. 30B+ views across the internet.

Last month, he published an article on X arguing virality is dead. 

His thesis was fully formed. But I read it and thought ...

“F*** yeah! That’s a newsletter (almost).”

From there, I could see exactly what it would become with the right editorial layer underneath it.

Here’s what goes into turning an idea into something tens of thousands of operators can put into action.

Generated 20b+ Views & $50M+ in Sales & Now Sharing What I Learn Building Internet Native Brands

F Yeah Thats A Newsletter Almost

Want to speak alongside +25 ecommerce heavyweights in front of MILLIONS on Mar 18th? A panelist can’t make it.

- 5 minutes
- No slides
- All action

↓ Comment, DM, or email me
aaron@9operators[.]com

Also, you should sign up.
It will be very freaking good.

9operators.com

Operators Paid Growth Masterclass | Mar 18

For a long time, ecommerce operators kept their hands down. 

- They didn’t write about what’s working
- Didn’t share P&Ls on podcasts
- Didn’t host events and tell the truth

Why? Because the price of admission was vulnerability.

The work, wins, and losses were private. 

Now? Operators openly talk about how they sell things on the internet – through podcasts, newsletters, threads, and events – to the point where “talking about the work” has become a job in itself.

I’ve spent years inside this shift witnessing why this happened.

Here’s what made operator conversation valuable enough to turn into a full media layer:

Love Julia. And she’s not wrong ... for the top 5-10% of operators.

Taste and discernment are a moat for people who’ve already won the leverage game – high-level execs, ICs, and masters of their craft.

But if you’re trying to scale in consumer products? 

Adopting this viewpoint will not help you grow.

The fight right now is ...

“How do we get more creative that hits in the ad account to find more winners so we can spend more money and make more money?” That’s it.

And in B2B, it’s nearly identical.

Just replace creative with more and better:

- Outreach
- Prospecting
- Emails
- Organic social
- Landers

Content. Content. More content.

So we’re ripping at whatever the most acceptable-but-not-getting-canceled rate we can.

You know who really wins the game?

People who are mastering AI not at the expense of becoming less human, but using it to amplify the output of their humanity.

Debt used right is fuel. 
Debt used wrong is a Molotov.

Ecommerce debt — the version nobody writes because it requires really understanding how lenders behave when things break.

In this version, you ...

- Learn the difference between 15 weeks of runway and 3

- Find out that interest rate is the least important number on the term sheet

- Discover your lender’s litigation history tells you more than their pitch deck ever will

Five steps and a confession that makes a lot of sense once you get to the end ↓

5 Steps To Credit

Grüns is now beating “greens powder” in Google Trends search interest.

A brand name outranking the category it belongs to.

- Categories capture need 
- Brands capture preference 
- And preference keeps compounding even when the category gets crowded

Derek Lauermann — Director of Paid Media at Grüns — broke down the system behind it in the Operators Newsletter.

He calls it a “compounding demand stack.”

- Three layers 
- Each one feeds the next 
- Skip one, the whole thing stalls

1. Promos — capture existing demand. 

- Discounts
- Subscribe-and-save
- Offer testing
- Lander iteration

Promos are the commerce. They keep the register ringing. 

But commerce without anything above it is just a transaction engine running on fumes — all storefront, no catalog worth remembering.

2. Product Expansion — create new demand. 

A category term is one door. New products create new use cases, new habits, new entry points. 

Grüns’ shift to Ü Snacks is not a line extension — it’s expanding the daily routine. Immün, Nütrops, Jüced. 

Each new SKU is a new job to be done. 

Not new flavors. New reasons to buy.

3. Brand Memory — retain demand. 

The part most brands skip because it’s hard to measure. 

But it shows up in:

- Search interest
- Word of mouth
- Branded queries
- Habit formation

Grüns invests heavily in IRL events like Health Haüs — turning wellness into a brand-centered community. 

That community feeds organic content. 

Memory becomes searches. 

Searches become cheaper conversions.

The system: capture existing demand, create new demand, retain demand. 

When all three compound, a brand name starts outranking its own category.

Brand Name Outranking The Category It Belongs To

Your dashboard is lying to you.

It can’t tell the difference between a bot click and a human.

Give every metric a haircut before you report it. The trust you build by under-promising is worth more than any inflated number.

If you run an ecommerce brand, you’re somewhere in this cycle:

Progress → Regression to the mean → Progress

The job is to know where you are in the cycle. Not to be the exception.

Tomorrow. 25+ ecommerce leaders. Ads masterclass. Free. Online. By operators, for operators

🏆 Growth keynotes
⚡️ 10 lightning panelists
🤔 Live MOperators “hotline”

Comment with your questions for the hotline! I’ll get em answered.

Sneak peek of what you’ll learn how to …

- Launch new accounts efficiently
- Unlock content & creative pipelines
- Craft new-customer vs LTV offers
- 3x your ad spend like a mf’ng boss
- Create a community-led flywheel
- Unite your media with retention
- Build 1–2 “peaks” each quarter
- Demystify + deploy incrementality
- Contribution margin by channel
- Attract influencers & affiliates
- Produce a flood of partnership ads
- Add AI into your creative process

Here’s the lineup ↓

★ Connor MacDonald, Ridge
★ Cherene Aubert, Growth Capital
★ Cody Plofker, Jones Road
★ Connor Rolain, HexClad
★ Mike Beckham, Simple Modern
★ Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge
★ Jason Panzer, HexClad
★ Matthew Bertulli, Pela x Lomi
★ Mehtab S. Bhogal, Karta Ventures
★ Bryan Cano, True Classic
★ Miranda Pettinger, GLAMNETIC
★ Jerel Blades, Growth at Tushy
★ Steve Rekuc, Dir. of Data CTC
★ Yingying Kuang, VP Mkt. at Kitsch
★ Olivia Kory, CSO at Haus
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★ Chase Mohseni, CreativeOS
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Open article: Operators Paid Growth Masterclass | Mar 18 by 9ops.co

Let me tell you my deepest, darkest secret. I run the newsletter behind this tweet. The one on the right with that handsome gentleman.

10,000s of subscribers. 60%+ open rate every single week. Often higher. With a CTR that would make you swoon.

And there is absolutely zero market research going into what I publish.

- No list of planned topics
- No deep research sprints
- No brainstorming sessions

Here’s my real editorial strategy:

I have access to seven operators who are constantly ripping content into the world – podcasts, tweets, threads, long-form breakdowns.

My only filter is which of those pieces is already at least 25% of the way to a full newsletter.

That’s it. 

That’s the entire editorial strategy behind the preeminent ecommerce newsletter.

Well, that and when they do a really good podcast with structure and tactical insights.

Speed over strategy.

Path of least resistance from an arsenal of people who are already producing fire.

And if I didn’t have access to them? I’d still be doing the same thing – just with a list of 10 ecommerce hitters I’m following on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Maybe sprinkle in a little Google Trends + some keyword research on long-tail terms associated with our niche.

I’m not whiteboarding or brainstorming. Just paying attention to what already works and making it better. 

Then, it turns into this.

taplio

The Battle

Chase Mohseni

Aaron Orendorff

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreChase Mohseni's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAaron Orendorff's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Chase Mohseni

Aaron Orendorff

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

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);}Chase Mohseni's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreAaron Orendorff's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreChase Mohseni's LinkedIn Performance