Buying a $10-$100m Brand 🛒 or $1m- $10m SaaS biz this year.

I'm on the hunt for great Ecommerce brands and Apps. In the next year I'm going to Buy A Biz! 

After a decade of scaling the fastest-growing Shopify Plus Brands and Apps, it's time for me to run one. I'm acquiring Brands @ $10m - $100m and SaaS apps @ $1m - $10m Topline.


When I'm not living the Ecom lifestyle I'm learning Mandarin, and exploring the flavors of my kitchen.


I write a weekly Public Brand Teardown newsletter and share my journey 👉: 
https://letsbuyabiz.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Jeremy Horowitz'

There are ~3.6m Shopify stores (+24% YoY).
~ 125k do $1m+/yr (+26%)
~ 69k are on Plus (+81%).
~ 400 of those are >$100m+/yr

The important insights:
- Shopify is massive but only 3% are real bizs
- Only 50% of $1m+ brands are on Plus.
- Plus adoption is growing faster than everything else.


Reading through the tea leaves.

Plus is growing faster than everything else for 2 reasons:
1) Reps are more heavily compensated here.
2) Shopify is signing up more Omni-brands.

Retail features are nested inside of Plus.

Which will go down as Shopify’s smartest product move.

Ever.

The future for Ecommerce + Shopify.

Is Omni.

Acquired: CocoAI - Increase Rev +15% w/ WhatsApp. Still looking for a $10-$100m Brand 🛒 .

7k+ Shopify stores that do $10m+/yr. The Breakdown:
1) US: 82%
2) UK: 5%
3) India: 3%
4) Canada: 2%
5) Australia: 2%

Germany, France, Italy, Hong Kong + the Netherlands all trail with 1%.


The US is still the only real Shopify market. 

With a meaningful scale of big brands.

Yotpo will IPO in the next 24 months.

How do I know this? Because you don’t:
- Shut down an 8-fig product line.
- Layoff 40% of the team.
- Completely Rebrand

Unless you are preparing for a major exit.

After raising $400m+
Doing north of $150m in ARR (I’m speculating).
Leading 2 of the biggest categories in Retail (Reviews + Loyalty)

The only exit you can afford: IPO.

I don’t have any insider info. 
Just reading the tea leaves.

It’ll be amazing to see # 4 from the Shopify IPO class public.

What do you think they’ll IPO for?

New Year. Finally a new Profile photo.

For 3 years everyone meeting me must have been so confused.

Seeing a prof pic of me with hair.

To meet me in person.

Literally balder than the day I was born.

So finally I have an updated profile picture.

Thanks to my incredible sister for the headshot.
+ ChatGPT for the post effects.

For everyone in NYC today...

I'm going to be hanging around NRF meeting people.

Let's meet up!

Five $100m brands that need to be on your 2026 radar.
1) YoungLA (Gen Z Gymshark)
2) Bogg Bag (Crocs for Bags)
3) Little Sleepies (Family PJ sets)
4) Comft (True Classic for Athleisure)
5) FORTÉ (JRB for men)


Everyone is going to Grüns themselves over these brands next year.

My bet: Bogg Bag is the first to go public.

After talking about a Youtube channel for 3 yrs.
Now you can finally see + hear me break down my crazy takes.

We’ll cover:
- Stocks + Turnaround stories of major brands.
- Special tactics of what the best brands are doing.
- Deep dives into WhatsApp and AI.

It’s time to finally get back on camera.

Big goal for the year 0 -> 1k subscribers 

Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/euxx2e5G

5 Insights from reading 25 pgs of Loop’s 2026 Benchmark report:
1) 65% of brands charge a return fee (~$9)
2) Accessories Return Fraud = ~$341 (3x the avg)
3) 55% of Cosmetic/skincare brands offer Exchanges?
4) Lowest hanging fruit: Variant exchanges.
5) You want to add friction to your Returns program.


5 is my favorite.

There’s some great game theory you can work through.

Have fees + strategically remove them 

To incentivize certain actions. Like 
- VIPs
- Pushing to Exchanges
- Buying more in the exchange.

*The data is across 23m Returns from 4k Shopify brands using Loop returns.

Apple ($3.8T) needs to raid its $125B of cash + acquire Perplexity. 

To stop the Siri bleeding 
Make it not suck 
+ stop paying Google $1B/yr.

Meta/Open AI should have 0 chance at creating the next AI device.

Apple already has it: Airpods + iPhone

- Airpods: Speaking/Listening device to 
- iPhone: Interactive screen to visualize outputs

To really crush it, they should take $20m and clone Whspr flow too.

They already have all the users/data/devices.

They just need Siri to be usable.

In 2020, Tupperware was a $1.5B biz. 

Now it's worth $930k (-99.9%).

1 of America’s most iconic brands.

Is worth less than the Public biz compliance fees.

This should have never happened.

The signs were there for years to adjust course.

Poor management and refusing the adapt with the times.
Lead an American legend into irrelevance.

My 5 goals for 2026
1) 2x CoCo AI again this year.
2) Get back to monthly Therapy Sessions by March
3) Build up a 6 mo cash reserve again
4) Start taking a short vacation 1x/quarter
5) Do a 3-day fast 1x/quarter.

The hardest goal not to have this year

Is blank in the Philanthropy bucket.

I need to be real with myself.

And admit that I need to go all in on Coco AI.

Before I can meaningful commit to helping others.

This is a season of focus in my life.

And that focus will require me to be more selfish that I'd hoped.

“DTC has better margins” is a lie.

Omni-brands are 8x more profitable than Pure DTC.

Real Omnichannel brands have much higher margins than DTC.

The chart below is Drivepoint’s DTC index.



The takeaway.

Your only job:

Sell your product in every channel customers buy.


Stop letting Meta suck your biz dry.

Find the right times to expand into the right channels.

This Tech stack 2x’d Coco in only 10 months (20 tools):
1) ChatGPT
2) Lovable
3) Lindy
4) JIRA
5) GitHub
6) Meow
7) Google Cloud 
8) Google Workspace
9) LinkedIn
10) Crisp
11) Vercel
12) Sentry
13) Twilio
14) Notion
15) Zapier *
16) Deel*
17) Hubspot*
18) Docusign*
19) Inngest
20) Webflow

Even though we use tools 15–20.
I would not recommend.

I'm actively looking for alternatives.

What is your favorite tool that you’ve been using?

What are some good alternatives to my list?

Laird Superfood ($35m) is making the worst acquisition of 2026.

Raising $50m in debt to acquire Navitas Organics for $38.5m.

Today in the newsletter I’m breaking down the full shenanigans.

Of how this is the worst M&A of the year.

IN THE FIRST MONTH.

🧠 Takeaways: Today, I’m breaking down Laird Superfood’s comically awful acquisition of Navitas + why Laird is the worst run biz of 2025. Laird Superf

Open article: The Stupidest Deal of All Time (by Laird) by Jeremy Horowitz' • 6 min read

The Stupidest Deal of All Time (by Laird)

If you're still only using email + Meta ads to grow your eCom brand...

You're leaving $100k+ in Rev on the table.

At CoCo AI, we've helped 665+ Shopify brands implement WhatsApp.

Here's what we're seeing:
→ 80–90% open rates (vs email's 20–30%)
→ 15–20% conversion rates from WhatsApp chats
→ 90x ROI on ab cart recovery
→ European brands recovering 45–60% of abandoned carts

Meanwhile, most eCom brands are still:
- Fighting rising Meta ad costs.
- Watching email deliverability tank.
- Seeing messages buried in overcrowded inboxes.

So I just recorded a video breaking down exactly how to use WhatsApp.

To add 15–20% in extra revenue to your store.

I cover:
1) Why WhatsApp is outperforming email + SMS right now
2) How to set up WhatsApp marketing for your Shopify store
3) The 3 methods to build your WhatsApp list fast
4) The abandoned cart automation driving 90x ROI
5) How AI agents handle customer conversations 24/7 (no support team needed)

Watch the full video here: https://lnkd.in/ej697eEx

Who wants to make $100k for <10 hrs/wk?

Sell my Media sponsorships (6m Views/yr) to Top .01% bizs and you will.

This isn’t some 2-bit operation. We have:
- Fully built out sales process w/ playbooks (HubSpot)
- List of Potential partners
- Aggressive Compensation

What you’ll do:
- Talk with the leading Shopify apps in the space.
- Find the right media package fits.
- Close Sponsorship deals.

I’m looking for an experienced BD person.

Week 1 you’re working the pipeline.
Week 2 work with me to deliver great ads.
Week 4 collecting those sweet commissions.

+ we’re adding new channels (AKA new sponsorship opps) this year.

I’m looking to bring someone on by EOM.

If this sounds like a good fit for you, send me a DM.

Let’s talk.

How OpenAI will own Paramount by EOY 2027:
1) OpenAI rug pulls on their Oracle commit.
2) Oracle’s stock plummets, triggering margins loans.
3) Cascade of defaults forces Paramount into bankruptcy.


The Ellison empire is pretty fragile:
- OpenAI promised to pay Oracle Cloud $60B/yr for 5 yrs
- Oracle borrowed $35B to fund data center build-outs.
- Paramount had $14B in debt post-exit.


OpenAI is 78% of ORACLE’s est rev.

FOR THE NEXT 5 yrs!

Oracle has $125B in total outstanding debt.
The family's other assets are funded by Margin loans/debt.

If Oracle’s Rev doesn’t grow fast enough, the debt collapses.
Forcing the Ellisons to abandon Media to protect the core.

Then...

OpenAI swoops in to buy Paramount out of bankruptcy.
And if things get really ugly for Oracle.
OpenAI buys them as well.

I have 5 major goals for 2026:
1) 2x Coco’s ARR. Again.
2) Start taking small vacations 1x/quarter.
3) Get back to monthly therapy sessions.
4) Build up a 6 month Nest egg.
5) 4 Fasts of at least 3-days.


Every year I have to trim down my goals.

I only hit 3/7 last year.

It hurts.

But that’s the cost of success.

🧠 Takeaways: How did I do against my 2025 + 2026 goals: Hits and misses. Major focuses for this year. Greatest lesson from missing most of my 2025 go

Open article: My #1 Career/Life Unlock: Thoughtful Goals by Jeremy Horowitz' • 3 min read

My #1 Career/Life Unlock: Thoughtful Goals

I 2x'd CoCo AI ARR in 2025. I acquired it today here's what I'd do differently
Sales: +318% (YoY) 🤤
Gross Profits: +225% 👍
OPEX: +210% 👍
Net Income: +2,159% 😍
ARR Run Rate: +118% 💪


Key P&L Takeaways:
1) Rev growth was exactly where it needed to be.
2) COGS is growing too fast, dragging down Margins.
3) OPEX was really tight leading to good Operating profits.


My 3 step Growth strategy to 50x the value in 5 years:
1) Be more AI native.
2) Invest more in Success.
3) Triple down on what’s already growing the pipeline.


If you want the full LBAB! Style breakdown.


Check out the full newsletter below.

🧠 Takeaways: Today, we’re running through the gameplan of what we’d do with my biz Coco AI if I acquired it today. Be more AI native. Invest more in 

Open article: 50xing value of MY company: Coco AI by Jeremy Horowitz' • 6 min read

My 3 Predictions for 2026:
1) Everyone will spend more of their ad budget on Meta.
2) More Bigger Exits + Bankruptcies. Nothing in the middle.
3) Consumer will keep struggling and spending.

Plus how accurate were my 2025 predictions.

2026 is going to be more of the same. The Struggle is real, but at the same time there will be opportunities abound. 🧠 Takeaways: Major ‘26 predictio

Open article: My 3 Predictions for 2026 by Jeremy Horowitz' • 5 min read

If you're running an ecom brand + you're not using WhatsApp marketing…

You're leaving a MILLIONS on the table.

This is what WhatsApp can bring:
→ 80% ORs (vs email's 20%)
→ 30x higher ROI on abandoned cart flows
→ Millions in extra revenue this year

But if you don't have a list of numbers.

You can't actually start WhatsApp marketing yet. 

So I just recorded a video breaking down the 7 best strategies to grow your list.

These are the most effective ways to get customers’ phone numbers.

Based on helping 100s of brands crush it with Whatsapp.

Check out the full video here: https://lnkd.in/epjfGCd3

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

undefined undefined

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.

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.

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

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.

taplio

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