Co-Founder @ Stan | building a $BN company 🚀

Hi, I’m Vitalii 👋🏻

Over the past 3 years, I’ve built a $30M ARR business with 30 people.

A $1M/employee company.

Now, we’re building a category-defining brand—with $100M ARR in sight.

To do that, I focus on Culture, People, and Product.

Everything that got me here is self-taught.

Born and raised in Russia, I started working at 13—packing parachutes and skydiving. 🪂
By 18, I had 800+ jumps and enough saved to pay for my first year of college.

Jumping out of planes redefined my relationship with fear.
Once you commit, you act. Without hesitation.

I learned English in one year to study abroad—still the hardest thing I’ve done.
That brought me to Canada, where I earned a degree in Chemical Engineering.

I never used it.

My side projects opened doors for me—first to Deloitte, then to eBay.
But the real work happened outside the job.

I made time to build:
9–5 for the paycheck,
5–9 (both morning and night) for what I actually cared about.

That’s where I proved to myself—nothing is impossible.

In 2021, I met my cofounder. We went all-in and started building Stan.

On my LinkedIn, I write about:

→ Founder war stories (unfiltered)
→ Building a $1M/employee startup
→ Creating top 1% culture

🎧 Follow me here if you're building—or want to build—something great.

People I work with would describe me as:

→ I make things happen
→ Zero tolerance for mediocrity
→ I build and run top 1% talent-density teams

🫂 DM me on LinkedIn if you'd like to work at Stan.

But know—it’s likely to be the hardest thing you’ve ever done.
And worth it. For the right person.

—

On LinkedIn, I share stories for founders building what’s next—
The ones who care about People, Culture, and Redefining what's possible.

If that’s you,
Follow me. Drop a comment. Or just say hi 👋🏻

Vitalii Dodonov

I spent $204,000 to take the whole team to Costa Rica.

→ Travel (Flights & Bus): $103,000 
→ Hotel & Food: $89,000 
→ Offsite Planner: $12,000

Total Investment: $204,000 
($4,163 per person)

That’s a lot of money to spend on "vibes" and gallop tours 🇨🇷

But here’s why we do it:
I treat offsite trips as a productivity accelerator.

By spending $204K to build deep trust and clear 6 months of roadmap debt in 4 days,
I'm catalyzing our execution speed.

If this offsite increased our efficiency by even 10% over the next year for every individual team member, our team-ROI is easily 10x+.

Offsites is one of the many vehicles we use to invest in our most valuable asset:
People.

I give Credit Cards to my team on Day 1.

"Isn't that risky?”

It’s risky. And frankly very expensive…
But here’s what’s more expensive:

→ An engineer losing flow state because they are hungry
→ A designer missing details because their screen is low-res
→ A PM waiting 48 hours for a $50 software license approval
→ A team member waiting for a bus in the snow after a late night grind

I remember working out of a shared WeWork.

Uncomfortable chairs. Fighting for meeting rooms. Fast food.

Scrappy and frugal is in our DNA.

Now:
✅ Standing desks (Health)
✅ Free lunch & dinner (Focus)
✅ Unlimited Bubbly & protein bars (Fuel)
✅ Discretionary spending (Autonomy)

We don't do this to be "cool."

We do this because top 1% performance requires top 1% support.

You can't expect Ferrari speed if you provide Corolla maintenance.

Invest in your team.

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Alina Antoniuk

I just gotta share this... I mean... Jonathan, what are you doing!?? And why is building security calling us… and you asked for 30 extra seconds? 🤦‍♂️

$20,000. 60 hackers. We hired 4 of them on the spot, and filmed the whole thing! LIVE 🟢 on YouTube:

https://lnkd.in/dtMd7sys

We went from $5M in the bank to under $1M in two years.

On purpose.

Every entrepreneur needs to get extremely comfortable with losing money.

For us, the lesson came after raising venture capital.

We made an uncompromising commitment to hire the top 1% and build a category-defining brand.

This meant watching our bank account shrink over a year and a half.

I still remember the day I pinged John: 

V: "Guess what - we're at $827K and didn't lose any cash this month!" 
J: "Years in the making. Upwards from here."

It takes a lot of belief and conviction to invest this way, as opposed to optimizing for safety.

The reality is, for you to have a disproportionate upside, you need to create disproportional value.

And that's expensive: technology, R&D, talent. 
80% of our costs were purely talent.

Losing money before you make money is the price of being in the game.

Having done it once, I have a lot more appreciation for the process. 
And significantly fewer worries.

What's the biggest bet you've made on your company?

Hanging out with Liz Nucci today who got us our beautiful office 🏡. If you’re looking for office space in Toronto, call Liz! 

Just saying 👀

No alternative text description for this image

I’m having a wonderful time at BrainStation tonight!

I waited 3 years for a top 1% mobile engineer.

Not because we couldn’t hire.

Because I refused to hire a “maybe” and call it progress.

For 3 years, we could’ve “just shipped something” on mobile. 

We passed on several candidates who were good on paper… but weren’t a clear yes.

I kept coming back to one filter:
If this person can’t take what we built and make it 10x better, they’re not going to change the company.

So we waited.

Then we met Johan.

He built the entire mobile app solo.

When we launched, we got 500 five-star reviews in 2 weeks.

That’s the part people see.

What they don’t see is what we avoided: months of “management work” disguised as building—

Rewriting specs, re-scoping tickets, adding layers of process so a hire can keep up.

That’s how teams get slow. 

Not from lack of effort—standards quietly dropping.

Lesson I keep relearning: talent density isn’t a vibe. It’s a strategy.

Where in your org are you accepting a “maybe” (role, project, decision) just to feel progress?

Yesterday, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang made it free for any company to build AI agents. Here’s what that actually means:

He announced NemoClaw — the enterprise version of OpenClaw, the open-source operating system for AI agents.

He also named what’s coming: ASAAS. Agentic Software As A Service. OpenClaw won’t kill SaaS — it’ll create a new category.

The “A” in ASAAS is the hard part.

At Stan, we’ve been working on AI agents for over a year. The technology was never the bottleneck. Teaching the AI what “good” looks like in your business — that was the bottleneck.

NVIDIA just commoditized the easy part. The hard part is still hard.

The companies winning at ASAAS in 2027 won’t be the ones with the best plumbing.

They’ll be the ones who spent 2025-2026 doing the boring work of encoding domain expertise into their agents.

What was the first thing your company successfully taught AI? (or planning to?)

⚠️ ⚠️ If you're an engineer, now is the worst time to quit your job.

I know. Everyone's saying the opposite.

AI makes it so easy to build. Ship an app in a weekend. Be your own founder.

But here's what the "go build your own thing" crowd isn't thinking about:

Yes, you'll see success stories. 

But for every one that works, there are hundreds who shipped the same weekend. 

The barrier to entry dropped for everyone at the same time. 

More builders, more competition, lower odds for all of them.

And the question is still the same question it's always been: who has distribution?

Distribution, customer trust, brand — these are built over years of compounding. 

They live in the human relationship world that AI hasn't touched. 

Companies hold that. Your side project doesn't.

Sure, your app might launch well. 

Maybe you make a few thousand dollars. 

Then it gets duplicated by your friend over the weekend, and you're left without the job and without the revenue.

If you've been thinking about going out on your own — do it. 

Just not right now.

Don't be impulsive in the middle of a revolution.

"I'm sorry, I f*cked up" 

This was my opening line at our leadership offsite last March.

Standing in front of all 8 leaders at Stan, 

everyone paid attention.

If I was to rate my relationship with everyone in the room, 

these would be my scores:

🟢🟡🟠🔴🔴🟠🔴🟡
(relationship health check: you get the picture)

6 months earlier...

I took on 2x more responsibilities at the company. 

As a result of this crushing workload, I had to prioritize and remove everything that wasn't mission critical.

One of the things I sacrificed was weekly 1:1s with my direct reports,

delegating them to my Chiefs of Staff.

I reasoned that most people I'd been working with for years and we'd manage.

What a mistake it was.

What I failed to see at the time was that the company ran on shared context established in those 1:1s.

Leadership runs on two things:
• Trust
• Shared context

Remove either one, and it's a matter of time before everything breaks.

That's what happened to me.

It took me the following 1-3 months to rebuild what I'd lost — to rebuild the relationships and rescope my work.

Some scars are still itching.

If you're a leader at your busiest time, I'm sharing this story to remind you:

Your company is a group of people working toward a shared objective.

Prioritize people so they can prioritize the shared objective. 

It doesn’t work the other way around.

We took an AI product from $0 to $10,000 MRR in 14 days 📈

I documented our process in full, from the initial build to the specific growth tactics we used to hit that $10k milestone in two weeks.

Sharing the 19-page Playbook today.

Follow + comment “PLAYBOOK” below and I’ll DM you the complete breakdown.

You're probably working on the wrong things right now.

Does this sound like you?

100 emails sent.
5 meetings run.
1 new initiative started.

Every day feels full, but every week you go:
"What did I do?"

What's the difference between moving forward and running in circles?
Well — direction.

Motion without direction is just expensive wandering.

To help with that, I've adopted this habit:

Every morning, before opening Slack, I ask myself:

"What would I do if I could only work 2 hours today?"

"What moves us closer to $100M ARR?"

"Is this urgent, or just loud?"

I'm serious - I tend to ignore 8/10 of the inbound I get, (even from my teams).

Sorry y'all I know you're reading 😅

5 minutes of thinking saves 5 hours of wandering.

Now when I journal, it's not about what I did.

It's about whether what I did actually mattered.

Most founders act too much and think too little.

We confuse being busy with being productive.

The best talent I've hired all share this trait:
They pause before they sprint.

What would you stop doing if you could only work 2 hours?

Price isn't just revenue. 
It's a filter.

For customers. 
And for your team.

Early at Stan, we picked $29/month. 

No deep methodology. We just wanted to feel premium.

Then we had to live up to it.

That meant obsessing over the first 100 customers. 

Fixing bugs on the call. 
Shipping overnight.

Pricing sets expectations. 
Expectations force standards. 

And standards attract a certain type of person.

Builders lean into hard problems. 

Bargain hunters lean into discounts and exceptions.

Same principle applies to talent.

Last month, I ran a hackathon with a $20,000 grand prize. 

It got the top 1% of builders out of the house.

4 hires. 2 days. No resumes.

We don't price based on cost. 
We price based on value.

What's one thing you'd price differently today?

Headcount doesn't fix slow execution. 

Clarity does.

When execution slows, the reflex is: 
"We need to hire."

Most of the time, you don't have a people problem. 

You have a clarity problem.

Here's what I did:

I used to take meetings all day. Felt productive. Wasn't.

Now I auto-decline everything before lunch. 

7 hours of deep work. Zero interruptions.

One calendar rule deleted dozens of daily decisions.

Speed is subtraction.

List your recurring weekly decisions. 
For each one, choose:

→ Delete it. 
→ Delegate it. 
→ Automate it. 
→ Assign a DRI (directly responsible individual).

We used to debate tool purchases in Slack. 

Now everyone gets a $5K card. Decision deleted 🤷‍♂️

Less flexibility upfront. 
More speed downstream.

What decision could you delete this week?

In 1846, astronomers had a problem.

Uranus was wobbling in space.
And nobody could explain why.

Every calculation said it should move one way.
But it moved another.

Most scientists thought Newton's laws were breaking down at that distance.

But Urbain Le Verrier, a French mathematician, had a different idea:
"What if there's another planet pulling on it?"

He spent months calculating where this invisible planet would need to be.

Then wrote to Berlin Observatory:
"Point your telescope here. You'll find a new planet."

They thought he lost it...
But they looked 🔭

Neptune was sitting there.
Exactly where the math said it would be.

Le Verrier discovered a planet using only pencil and paper.
2.7 billion miles away.

I think about this whenever we're stuck at Stan.

When something doesn't make sense, we work backwards.
There's always a hidden force.

We just have to calculate where to look.

What's wobbling in your business that you can't explain?

Scaling Meta advertisers with our Creative Data System | $26M+ in Tracked Meta Sales | Founder at Media Engineered

I'm the founder at Media Engineered, we work with DTC brands to help them scale their ad spend and slash CPA with our performance ad creatives and Meta ads. 

Our system takes a data driven approach to improving your creatives with strategic tests, iterating and optimising with each new batch of ads we make. 

I make posts about the steps you can take to improve your ad creatives, without the fluff. 

If you'd like to find out how we can scale your DTC brand with ad creatives, book a call or give me a message. 

Find me on other platforms:
→ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@adamtaylorl
→ Website: https://www.mediaengineered.com
→ Twitter: https://x.com/adamtaylorl

Adam Taylor

If a creative strategist can't read your ad account data, they're useless to you.
Strong opinion but I fully stand by it.

I see this everywhere.

Agency produces creative. Client uploads it. Agency has no idea what happens next.

That's not creative strategy. That's a production service with a markup.

The brands I've seen break through $300K/month share one pattern: their creative team knows what's happening inside the account.

Not just CTR and ROAS. The full picture.

→ Which angles have been exhausted at which frequency levels 
→ What awareness stage the current winning ads are targeting 
→ Where CPM is climbing because the algorithm is showing the same message to the same pool of people

Some of our best angle discoveries came directly from reading frequency data.

An ad at frequency 4.2 with declining CTR isn't a failing creative – it's a saturated angle. The question isn't "what new hook should we write?" It's "who haven't we spoken to yet?"

You can only answer that if you're inside the data.

Creative strategists who sit outside the account and hand over concepts are guessing.

The ones who scale brands treat the ad account as a feedback loop – not a content dump.

There's a reason our first-ads-delivered timeline is 14 days from onboarding.

We're not moving fast because we're guessing. We're moving fast because we've already read the account.

Scaling Meta advertisers with our Creative Data System | $57M+ in Tracked Meta Sales | Founder at Media Engineered

At 16 I was working in a factory.

At 24 my ads spend $3M/month on Meta.

The gap between those two things isn't talent. It's one shift in how I thought about problems.

When I started running Meta ads, I did what everyone does.

Made more creative. Tested more audiences. Increased budgets.

Results were random. Wins felt lucky. Losses felt personal.

I was guessing with someone else's money.

The shift happened when I stopped asking "what should we make next?" and started asking "why did that actually work?"

One question produces content. The other produces a system.

We started reverse engineering every winning ad. What angle. What hook. What specific customer belief it tapped into. Then we built a process to find those angles before spending – not after.

That's the Creative Data System.

The brands we work with don't run more ads than their competitors. They run the right ones.

$235K to $750K/month in 120 days. $90K to $2.1M/month in 7 months. $500K to $1M/month in 60 days. Same system. Different brands.

I went from a factory floor to building a system that runs $3M/month in Meta spend.

The factory taught me something advertising schools won't.

Every output has a process behind it. Find the process, control the output.

Most people in this industry never learn that lesson.

More ad creative is not a strategy.

It's a panic response dressed as productivity.

And the brands treating it as a strategy right now are about to hit a wall they won't see coming.

When performance drops, the reflex is always the same. 

New hooks. New formats. New creators. 

The team looks busy. The brief gets written. And three months later, nothing has fundamentally changed.

Because performance creative doesn't fail because of production volume.

It fails because the angle is exhausted.

Most people collapse this into "creative fatigue" – the idea that an ad wears out because the same person has seen it too many times.

Creative fatigue is a frequency problem. You fix it with production: new hook, new face, new edit.

Angle exhaustion is a strategy problem. The underlying message has run out of people to convince. Producing more ads built on the same angle doesn't solve that. It accelerates it.

The brands I've watched break through $500K/month – across $57M+ in managed Meta spend – don't produce more when performance drops.

They ask one question: what specific belief in the customer's head made the last winner work?

That answer exists. 

It's inside your best ads. 

In your customer reviews. 

In the comment sections and Reddit threads your buyers are writing in right now.

Most brands never go looking for it. They just brief the next creative.

The ones scaling past $1M/month built a system to find it before they spend money not after.

Volume doesn't fix a clarity problem.

The most dangerous metric in Meta advertising right now isn't ROAS.

It's frequency.

Specifically: how often your best creative is reaching the same person.

Here's why it matters more than most brands realise:

When Andromeda launched, most teams panicked about losing audience targeting control.

What actually happened was subtler.

Targeting power shifted from audience settings to creative signal.

Your creative now tells the algorithm who to find. Which means frequency – how often that signal reaches the same pool is now a direct consequence of creative diversity.

Low creative diversity → the algorithm keeps showing the same signal to the same people.

Frequency climbs. CPMs climb. ROAS drops. Teams blame the platform.

The brands I've seen break through $300K/month in the last 12 months all share the same pattern:

They deliberately designed creative that signals across multiple audience segments simultaneously.

➡️ One ad for the 'frustrated and sceptical' buyer 
➡️ One ad for the 'curious but not yet convinced' buyer 
➡️ One ad for the 'ready to buy, just needs a push' buyer

Each speaks to a different mental state. The algorithm reads each signal differently. Impressions spread across different people. Frequency stays manageable. CPMs hold. ROAS stabilises.

This is what 'creative diversity' actually means post-Andromeda.

Not different colours. Different conversations.

Across $57M+ in managed revenue, the brands that break through $500K/month aren't running bigger budgets.

They're having more conversations.

Your winning ads aren't dying because of creative fatigue.

They're dying because you never identified what made them work in the first place.
When a brand's best ad starts declining, the instinct is always the same.

Make more creative. New hooks. New formats. New creators.

But that's the wrong question.

One brand I worked with had a single ad running $8K/day at 2.5 ROAS. Their best-performing creative in over a year.

Then it started fading.

CTR dropped from 2.42% to 1.8%. ROAS followed it down to 1.8.

The team's response: test 15 new concepts.

3 months and $40K in production costs later, nothing had taken meaningful spend.

Why?

Because nobody had asked what made the original work.

When we audited the account, the answer was specific.

The winning ad opened with the customer's most embarrassing moment – before any mention of the product, the brand, or the benefit.

Every new concept they'd tested was product-first.

Same angle. Different executions. The ‘well was dry’ and they kept digging in the same spot.

Here's what changed when we rebuilt around the insight:

→ Mapped every historical winner by the specific customer belief it activated 
→ Found 3 angles they'd never tested 
→ New ad taking meaningful spend within 10 days

ROAS back to 2.4 in under 3 weeks.

Creative fatigue is a symptom.

The real problem is having no system to identify why your ads work before they stop working.

More creative doesn't fix that.

Understanding your customer does.

From a bedroom in the UK to generating $57M+ in Meta revenue.

The biggest lesson has nothing to do with ad strategy.

It's this: the 'why' that gets you started won't carry you to the next level.

When I started, it was simple. Prove it can work. Make some money. Make it through the first year.

That worked. Until it didn't.

There's a point in every business where the original motivation runs out, because you've already achieved the version of the goal you first imagined.

If you don't replace it with something bigger, you plateau.

Not because of a strategic failure. Because of a motivational one.

The brands I've worked with that hit ceilings they can't break through – often, the creative isn't the problem. The founder's energy is.

They built something meaningful, then kept running the same engine past its useful life.

The standards that got you here need to be raised if you want what's next.

Higher standards. New reasons. Bigger architecture.

That's the real work between £100K/month and £1M/month.

Not just the creative system – though that matters too.

The internal infrastructure. The decision to genuinely want more and mean it.

Does the version of the business you're building right now still excite you? Or are you maintaining something rather than building it?

Everyone tells you to test more creatives.

No one tells you why that advice is mostly wrong.

Here's what actually happens when brands 'test more creative':

They launch 10 new ads. One gets 80% of budget by Wednesday. The other 9 share the remaining scraps.

The team labels the winner a 'winning creative' and asks for more like it.

Three weeks later, it's dead. They make more. The cycle repeats.

This isn't testing. It's churning.

Real testing has a hypothesis. A question the test is designed to answer.

'Does a fear-based angle outperform a transformation angle for cold traffic?'

'Does founder-led content hold attention longer than UGC for this persona?'

'Does our product perform better when we lead with the problem or the mechanism?'

Each of those questions has a real answer, if you structure the test correctly.

Post-Andromeda, structure matters more than ever.

The algorithm groups ads by concept and visual signal. If you launch 10 ads that all look and feel the same, they compete against each other. Budget gets spread thin. Learning slows down.

The fix isn't more budget. It's a more intentional testing framework:

➡️ One ad per angle 
➡️ Different formats across angles 
➡️ Clear hypothesis per test 
➡️ Structured tracking by angle, not ad ID

That's how you get real insight, not just a winner you can't explain and can't reproduce.

The brands scaling past $500K/month aren't running more ads. They're asking better questions.

What's the last creative test you ran that had a clear hypothesis before you launched it?

A DTC brand came to us at $235K/month.

Every time they pushed past $8K/day, CPA spiked from $35 to $65+ and they had to pull back.

4 months stuck at this revenue. Good product. Strong margins. 

The founder's theory: audience saturation.

When I pulled the account, frequency was 2.1.

It wasn't audience saturation. It was angle saturation.

They had dozens of active ads. Different creators, different formats, different hooks.

But when I mapped them by message, every single one was built on the same core angle:

"Easy grooming. Happy dog."

Different executions of the same promise – for 6 straight months.

Meta had shown it to everyone who cared. The ‘well’ was dry.

Here's what we did:

Paused all new creative production. Went deep into customer data.

→ Post-purchase surveys 
→ Support tickets 
→ Reddit communities for their exact target demo

Found angles they'd never tested:

1. The embarrassment angle – the moment your dog shakes water all over the bathroom
2. The avoidance angle – why most dogs hate bath time and what actually fixes it
3. The breed-specific angle – Golden Retrievers and Huskies had completely different grooming frustrations
4. The bonding angle – bath time as something you do together, not something you survive

Tested all four across UGC and static formats.

Three of them took meaningful spend within 2 weeks.

$235K to $750K/month in 120 days.

Post-Andromeda. While everyone else was blaming the algorithm.

The algorithm wasn't the problem.

New angles beat new creatives. Every time.

I jumped on a call with a DTC founder last month. Brand doing $312K/month in revenue.

The call started with: 'We need better hooks.'

Before I agreed, I asked to see the account.

CTR was 2.1%. Solid. Above average for the niche.

Conversion rate: 1.3%. Half of what it should be for that traffic quality.

The hooks weren't the problem. The hooks were working.

People were clicking. Then landing. Then leaving.

The gap was message match.

Their top ad – a problem-focused hook about a specific customer frustration – sent traffic to a landing page that opened with product features and a countdown timer.

The emotional momentum the creative built – the 'yes, this is exactly my problem' state – dissolved the second they hit the page.

No acknowledgment of the frustration. No continuation of the story. Just: 'Order now. Sale ends today.'

We rebuilt the page around the angle.

➡️ Opened with the same frustration the hook surfaced 
➡️ Validated why previous solutions had failed (the customer's real objection) 
➡️ Introduced the mechanism as the direct answer to that specific frustration 
➡️ Social proof from customers who came from the same starting point 
➡️ Offer at the bottom not the top

Conversion rate moved from 1.3% to 2.9% in 4 weeks.

Same ad budget. Same traffic. +123% in revenue.

The ad wasn't the issue. The system around the ad was.

Ads are the loudest part of the funnel. They're not the only part.

If you're spending $50K+/month on Meta and your conversion rate is under 2.5% – your creative probably isn't the bottleneck. Your page is.

Want us to audit your full creative-to-landing-page flow? Book a free
Creative Audit – link in bio.

I scaled a pet care brand from $235K to $750K/month post-Andromeda.

I documented the process. I’m giving it away free for 48 hours.

Most brands treat angle discovery like a lottery.

Ship 10 concepts. See what sticks. Scale the winner.

The problem: by the time you've found it, you've spent $30K and 6 weeks getting there.

Then the winner dies. Repeat.

The brands breaking $100K/day have a different relationship with their ad account. They read the data to know what to make next – before the current winner dies.

After managing $57M+ in Meta spend across 100+ brands, we put the exact process into a single document:

✅ How to read your ad account to identify which angles have been exhausted 
✅ How to extract new angles from customer data (the exact sources we use) 
✅ How to brief creative that tells the algorithm who to find 
✅ The angle framework we used on the $235K → $750K brand post-Andromeda

We use this internally for every client. First time we're sharing it outside the agency.

To get it free:

1. Connect with me, Adam Taylor [MAKE SURE THE ADAM TAYLOR IS LINKED TO PROFILE]
2. Comment "ANGLE" below

I'll send it straight to your DMs – no email sign-up.

PS. Repost this and I'll also send our winning 7-9 figure hooks document – the winning hooks from the biggest DTC brands in the space to help you find your next winning ad.

I audited an account this week. Brand doing $220K/month. Founder working 12-hour days.

First thing I noticed: 58 active ads.

Second thing: 3 angles. Repeated across all 58.

➡️ 'Look better' 
➡️ 'Feel better' 
➡️ 'Perform better'

I asked: 'Who writes the briefs for these?'

The answer: 'The founder writes the angle. The team executes.'

Classic bottleneck.

The founder's intuition – however sharp – becomes the ceiling of the entire creative system.

Every ad gets filtered through one person's gut. That person has a full business to run. Briefs get rushed. Research doesn't happen. Angles never get challenged.

Result: a well-staffed team waiting for one person to tell them what to say.

Here's what we replaced it with – the Angle OS:

Step 1: Extract 15–20 distinct angles from reviews, surveys, and community data. Real customer language, not brainstorm output.

Step 2: Map each angle to a funnel stage and customer persona.

Step 3: Founder signs off on the matrix – once.

Step 4: Creative team runs within those guardrails. No approval needed per ad.

The founder went from approving every creative to reviewing results weekly.

Monthly ad spend moved from $75K to $140K in 8 weeks.

CPA held.

The irony: giving up control produced better creative. Because the team finally had the context to make real decisions.

Delegation isn't loss of control. It's the transfer of clarity.

If your team is waiting for you before every creative decision, that's not a loyalty problem. It's a system problem.

Does your creative team have a written brief they can execute without you?

DTC brands doing $100K/day are already running AI creatives profitably.

After generating $1M+ with AI ads across 12 brands post-Andromeda, I've broken down the exact production process we use.

It's free for the next 48 hours.

Here's what's actually happening in the accounts we manage – not what the guys selling the tools want you to believe:

Post-Andromeda, creative diversity isn't optional. Accounts that over-rely on one format get punished. AI creative filled that gap for us in ways human production couldn't match for speed.

One AI dog podcast ad for a pet care client: $45K spent profitably. $35 CPA.

AI statics outperforming human-designed equivalents on three of our accounts right now – not because AI design is better, but because iteration speed is. We're testing eight angle variations in the time it used to take to brief a designer for two.

For fashion and jewellery brands specifically, AI photoshoot ads are now indistinguishable from a $10K studio shoot. The quality gap has closed. The speed advantage on top makes it a no-brainer.

But here's the thing most brands get wrong:

AI without a strategy behind it just produces expensive noise faster.

The brands scaling with it aren't using it to make more ads. They're using it to test more angles, faster. The constraint was never production. It was always clarity on what to make.

This training doc covers exactly how we use AI creative across client accounts – what's working, what isn't, and how to write briefs that AI actually executes properly.

Inside:

✅ The AI creative formats generating results right now (statics, obviously fake AI video, full photoshoot ads)
✅ The formats that aren't working yet and why
✅ How to write briefs that translate into ads – not content
✅ The production workflow we run across 12 brands

To get instant access:

1️⃣ Connect with me – Adam Taylor [MAKE SURE LINKED TO ACCOUNT]
2️⃣ Comment "AI" below

I'll send it straight over. Free for the next 48 hours.

PS – if you're spending $50K+/month on Meta and haven't tested AI creative yet, this is the clearest entry point I've built.

ROAS is not your north star.

Controversial. But stay with me.

ROAS tells you a ratio. It doesn't tell you whether you're profitable.

I've audited brands hitting 4x ROAS who were losing money:

➡️ High AOV but terrible retention 
➡️ Return rates eating margin 
➡️ Ad spend masking a broken unit economics model

And I've seen brands hitting 1.8x ROAS who were printing profit:

➡️ Lower AOV but 60% repeat purchase rate 
➡️ LTV that made the acquisition math work 
➡️ Contribution margin healthy after all costs

The metric your creative strategy should be chasing isn't ROAS.

It's new customer CPA relative to your contribution margin on the first order.

If it costs you $40 to acquire a customer and your margin on that first order is $35, you're underwater regardless of what the ROAS dashboard shows.

Agencies that optimise for ROAS are optimising for the metric that's easiest to show in a slide deck.

Not the one that keeps your business alive.

The better question to ask your creative team every week:

'At current CPA, are we profitable on the first order?'

If the answer is no, the ads aren't the problem. The business model is.

Fix the fundamentals. Then let the ads amplify what actually works.

What metric does your team actually use to make creative decisions?

My co-founder sent me a screenshot at 9am.

One ad. $713,000 in spend. Seven months running.

The next highest ad on the account? $201,000.

One ad. Carrying an entire brand.

We've seen this before. We know exactly how it ends.

Our client ran it. And ran it. And it worked.

Then it started slowing down. Same ad. Higher CPAs. Lower ROAS.

He was still testing – two or three new creatives a week. Nothing took spend. His words when we first spoke: "Spray and pray. Just spamming and hoping."

The problem wasn't the ad dying. That was always going to happen.

The problem was that nobody had ever stopped to understand why it worked in the first place. 

What angle it was. 

What the customer believed before they saw it. 

What specific moment in someone's day it had captured.

So when it started fading, there was nothing to build from.

This is the most common story we hear. Brands at $200K, $400K, $800K a month. First winner found by feel. Run until it dies. Nothing behind it.

The brands that break past $1M/month aren't the ones with the best first ad.

They're the ones who built a system to find the next one before they need it.

That's the job.

Book a free Creative Audit in my bio – we'll show you exactly what made your best ads work, and what to build from it.

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The Battle

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