Obvi’s $50M Meta Ad Blueprint: What Still Works in 2025

20:38Ash Melwani:The videos that are working. If you go and see the distribution, it's quite literally like 90 % affiliates, 5 % from the brand, and then 5 % for like live videos. So it's literally a spray and pray approach of getting your product into as many hands as possible, giving them the tools to create viral content and then making sure that they're doing this over and over and over again until something hits.

21:03Loukas:Yeah, it's funny because from like knowing a bit about the US market and obviously being more deeply embedded in the UK market, lives feel bigger in UK DTC than the US, which may not be true. it may be biased because i'm seeing more of the brands doing it here but like in terms of those big success stories i've seen us versus uk like some that we've had a few of the big found big founders on the podcast that just have grown their brand entirely through tiktok and and and lives being that one of the biggest drivers of that i mean there's this i don't know if you've heard of the brand made by mitchell yeah yeah yeah like they did like over a million dollars in a day on TikTok, on a TikTok live.

21:42Loukas:It's just like wild. But like, it's not sustainable, right? That's like the pivot that a lot of the trend that I'm always seeing with these brands that are blown up on TikTok. They've then obviously had to diversify channels because it's not consistent.

21:58Ash Melwani:Yeah, I agree. I mean, I don't think live shopping is not something exploring. Like we've actually done live shopping on TV over the last couple of months. So we've been partnering with this company called Shop LC. Anke, one of our co-founders, will fly out to Texas. He'll hop on the... It's like a QVC almost. He'll hop on, talk about the product for an hour, and we'll just sell thousands of units. And it's like, this still works, right? This concept still works. I do think like to a certain degree, you do still need like awareness and like the fact that people want to tune in to like hear what you're talking about.

22:39Ash Melwani:Like as you're scrolling on TikTok and you have no idea what Nello is, right? And you see somebody on live like talking about this product, like I'm going to go scroll on, right? But like if I have like an affiliate that's like talking about like, you know, you can de-stress like overnight with this product, like that quick video I can watch and they should be done with it, right? So I agree. I think there's some level of balance here.

23:01Loukas:I think facts, like it works better if there's a face of the brand, I find. Yeah, I agree.

23:06Ash Melwani:I agree. If you have a face of a brand or you have like a celebrity partnership or like influencer partnership, I think that could do really, really well. Not to say like the brand can't do it, but if obviously you have a little bit more influence and you have a little bit more pull than 100%, I think that's smart.

23:20Loukas:So let's go back to retail um because it just be interesting to touch on your retail strategy there that's pretty wild like the the volume of stores that you guys are in now like how have you navigated that because i we've we have a few brands that we work closely with and been some horror stories there just in terms of like bidding on search terms as you mentioned we had a situation with a brand last year at black friday where the it's like a big uk drugstore they launched their offer their black friday offer for the product a week earlier than Black Friday. So they had to pull their offer forward because they were losing thousands a day.

23:57Loukas:So talk a bit about that and any advice you have for brands that are looking to get into retail.

24:01Ash Melwani:Yeah, I think when you're getting into retail, there's two things that matter most before any other like marketing strategy or whatever you want to call it. But packaging and pricing, those are the two biggest lessons, painful lessons that we learned, right? So when we launched into Walmart, our collagen protein powders, our fruity cereal and our cocoa cereal went into Walmart nationwide. And then our collagen burn went into 1800 stores. The burn started to do extremely well. It's a top seller now at Walmart. It sits next to Hydroxycut, Oxyshred, all of these top weight management products. But it's more geared towards women.

24:46Ash Melwani:So there's definitely a lot of attractiveness there. When you look at the collagen space, you have Vital Proteins, which is unflavored. And then you have us, who was priced$5 higher than the top selling brand, Vital Proteins. And we weren't unflavored. Having flavors and a cool formula and cool packaging works really well on social because you can actually talk through it. You can have eye-catching content, this and that. But when you go up against somebody on shelf, you have nothing else but your packaging and your pricing to make a distinguishable choice of, all right, I'm going to pick this up versus this, right?

25:27Ash Melwani:So right off the bat, we're outpriced, okay? And this is because our margins didn't allow us to price any lower, okay? So we're like, okay, cool. It is what it is. It'll pick up. Maybe we got to do some marketing, this and that. Whatever we tried to do didn't work. And so our buyer comes back to us and say, hey, this is underperforming. What do you guys want to do? We're like, okay, give us one more shot. Let us come out with our own unflavored. Let us come out with a packaging or packaging that at least when you put us next to Vital, we showcase why we are better. They have two types of collagen.

25:59Ash Melwani:We have five types of collagen. They have vitamin C. We have vitamin C, biotin, keratin, everything that you can think of in our formula. And we priced it$2 less than Vital Proteins. Now, you go up to the shelf, you see, all right, this product has more in this. for less, the Walmart shopper is a bargain shopper. They're looking for value. And so if you can provide that just through packaging and pricing, you're going to win. So now imagine this. We took two flavors out. We went from nationwide 4 ,500 stores to 1 ,800 stores because they just wanted to test it. Our one product now after those packaging changes and the pricing changes is selling more in a third amount of the stores than the other two were selling in 4 ,500 stores.

26:43Ash Melwani:So that's how you have to think about these things because one, the burn did really well because it's a brand new product in the category. There's no collagen infused weight management product that's meant in here. And at a price point that's$19.99 compared to hydroxy cuts,$25, she shreds$30. We're primed to win. And that's why that won. Now on the more competitive side, you have to think about packaging and pricing. So that's 100 % number one, packaging and pricing. The second thing here is when we launched into Walmart, all of our marketing was like, we're in Walmart now, we have store finder on the website.

27:20Ash Melwani:All of our emails said that we're in Walmart. Great, all of our customers started shopping there and they didn't come back to the website. So our retention revenue dropped substantially. People canceled their subscriptions, they were shopping in Walmart because they can get the product for cheaper and they can get it on a weekly basis if they need to because they're going to go to the grocery store, right? So because of that, we saw a lower conversion rate on our website because what happens is if somebody comes to the website, they're in that consideration phase, right? Day two, day three, day four, they're getting emails from us, welcome series.

27:50Ash Melwani:They're seeing ads from us. They're seeing that we're in Walmart. Where are you going to go? Are you going to go to Walmart on your next grocery trip and pick it up at the store versus waiting a week for it to come by a post, right? So once we figured out like we can't run D2C and market retail at the same time, we kind of shit everything. So if you go to our website, you won't even know that we're in Walmart, Right. We're treating it completely separately. The reason why is that if I can generate awareness and grow DTC and spend a ton on marketing, I know there's a halo effect on the retail side.

28:19Ash Melwani:So if somebody ends up going down that health and wellness aisle in Walmart, like, hey, I saw this online. All right, cool. Let me go check it out. Right. So the more I spend online, the better my halo effect is Amazon, retail, et cetera, et cetera. Now we're at this inflection point of like, okay, we're in 20 ,000 doors now, right? We're not just in Walmart. We're in Walmart, grocery stores, mom and pop shops. We're doing something with Dollar General for different line of products. So we're trying to be everywhere. Now you're at this inflection point of, is DTC the number one channel for us right now?

28:53And so now we're thinking about, okay, well, can we just turn everything to brand marketing

28:58Ash Melwani:and start running TV, connect to TV linear? Talk to influencers about promoting all the products that are in the stores and have them go to the stores and talk about the experience of the product there. Does that content look better? Can we do out-of-home advertising? Can we run Instacart ads? Can we run Facebook traffic campaigns and just make our lives easier instead of being like, I need to be first over profitable on D2C. but let me actually take that money and spend it on reaching way more people and tell them, hey, you can get us here, here, here and there which also legitimizes the brand and then see if we can grow retail.

29:35Ash Melwani:So I think we're at that point now where it's like do we go all in on DEC or go all in on retail? And I think that's what we're trying to figure out this year.

29:42Loukas:That's really interesting. Yeah, it's so difficult because there isn't a right or wrong is there in that. I think it's interesting your perspective there coming from someone that is naturally a direct response marketer to actually be thinking through a completely different lens, which probably is like a foreign language.

30:03Ash Melwani:Yeah, no, it's, and that's why like, again, this goes back to like reaching out to mentors or figuring out who to talk to, right? So like, like I'm on mentor past people will hit me up for consulting, right? But I don't know a thing about retail marketing. So I'm going to go and hit up people that have done it, right? And so can we build a team that can help us do that? Can I help take what I've learned from DTC and apply it to retail marketing? I think that's what our retail buyers want to know, right? Like that's what they crave. They want the experience from DTC and bring it to the stores, right?

30:36Ash Melwani:Whether we get end caps and designing it in a way that is direct response, right? So understanding what's worked on our landing pages and bringing that information over to end caps or just any signage that's in the stores. But also on top of that, I mean, take a look at what Gulley's doing on TikTok Shop. They're just using that channel to break even or even lose money, but their retail velocities and their Amazon velocities are skyrocketing. So can I maintain some direct to consumer, direct response, maybe on TikTok Shop? I think that's going to be my go-to and maybe to focus on there. But I don't necessarily need to worry about, all right, do I have to be first over profitable?

31:14Ash Melwani:on meta like what account structure is going to work what are my bids at like i i prefer to just invest in really good content for the brand that tells a story and distribute it in as many places as possible and just have people remember us for the cool content that we can put out there and then when they are ready to buy they remember obby when they go down that yeah interesting and what

31:38Loukas:how i guess like sticking to that trend of out of home like how are you how bullish are you on events and you know the some of these you know because i just feel like there's there's i'm seeing more and more ddc brands now putting so much more of a focus on that irl experience and building that community and connection and it's more of an ltv player i guess in many ways and developing that cohort but it's just seeing more and more like brands that are leaning into this and almost treating it as like a fixed cost on the pnl like they would with their office space

32:08Ash Melwani:what are your thoughts there yeah i mean it's something that we've always talked about right Doing a pop-up somewhere, bringing our collagen, whether it's maybe a smoothie shop or a deli or something in the city. There's so many shops out there. Can we do a pop-up and just have it like an obby day? Can we get people to try the product? Can we get people from our community that are in the area to come meet each other? I definitely think it's something that we want to test in the future. I know a few brands that are actually doing this. One, I think it's great for community and retention. right?

32:38Ash Melwani:Like if, if you have a really good experience with a brand, you're, you're most likely going to stay with them. Right. And then I think the content that comes from that is probably incredible, right? You know, being able to leverage that on organic or even in your, your paid ads or, you know, whatever it is, just having these like stories to talk about these moments to distribute. I think that that's your brand marketing, right? Like, yeah. And you can break even on these things too, right? Like it's even if you like work or partner with, like I just said, like a, like a smoothie shop, right? You can break even on this.

33:10Ash Melwani:Like your cost isn't that high. You just go in, you know, put some bottles, talk to the owner. Hey, like we want to do a pop-up here. We're going to drive a lot of traffic here.

33:18Loukas:Lab as well is another one. Doing that to penetrate someone else's audience that have a, have a similar persona to yourself is something we're seeing a lot. Yeah. On that content piece, like something like this some brands are killing it there like there's a brand we work with called pure sport that are big in terms of those like IRL activations and um they're like a running supplement brand but they create stories around the creation of the activation and they were doing a big one at the London marathon and they couldn't do it launch their new electrolyte because you know one of the one of the big brands I think it was LucasAid said that they weren't able to because it was a conflict of interest and how they got around that and it just went like mega viral so So if you've got the team around you to be able to like really storytell in a way that works, it can go really well.

34:04Loukas:But obviously it's, you know, something you can't track as easily.

34:07Ash Melwani:Yeah, no, I agree. I think also what's really interesting is that if even if you don't do meetups for like your own customers, right? If you've built out like a network of maybe influencers or affiliates and like doing days for them to, right? Going back to like building something on TikTok shop, right? If you have a bunch of creators that are posting for you, can you build these like IRL events that will allow these creators to come together, put something on for them so that, hey, like I'm being noticed, I'm being acknowledged. Like I love working with this brand. That's all you need, just consistency, right?

34:40Ash Melwani:And like just having somebody vouch for your brand, I think is very important.

34:44Loukas:Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we did our first event for my brand like a couple of months ago and it was only small, probably about 50 people, but it was 100 % repeat customer rate from people that were at that event. And obviously that's on a much smaller scale and would change if we were doing that at volume, but it showed the power of like that golden cohort and not forgetting about that. Cause there's just so much value that that cohort can provide if, you know, even in just in terms of feedback.

35:10Ash Melwani:Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think it's, um, yeah, that feedback loop is also very important, right? Like last week we actually, I think it was two weeks ago, we were invited to an event at Shopify's office in New York City, right? They wanted us to bring some product, brought some product. We're like, all right, cool. We'll just kind of place it and that'll be that. And they're like, oh, like, do you want to pass it out? Like, do you want a taste test? And I was like, you know what? This would be a good opportunity for us to just talk to people live interaction. Like, hey, what do you think about this product?

35:42Ash Melwani:How does this taste? And so like the feedback that we got from like 30, 40 people that tried it was really like, Like it was eye-opening too. Like you have a lot of people that are like, oh, this is amazing. Then you had some people that are like, I like it, but it's too sweet. Then you have some people who are like, you know, I just don't like it at all, right? And so it's like taking the negative feedback, understanding it, going and bringing it back to the drawing board when we have our meetings around product development. It's like, hey, like we should be doing more at least, right? Like just so that we can get that feedback and make the product better.

36:11Ash Melwani:I mean, you're not investing in R &D. You're not spending a ton of money at R &D, but events can be a minimal cost for you to learn how your customers are actually enjoying your product and then taking that back and implementing it into the business overall.

36:25Loukas:And it'd be rude not to touch on this for a little bit, being a creative myself, but talk to me about that diversification of creative piece since we last spoke from, you know, we had a chat around potential ideas, new avenues. For those obviously listening for context, obviously Meta Andromeda's update, It's very much shifted to this AI driven, individual level AI driven delivery, which means that diversification of content at scale is so much more important and strategic volume is more important and is more likely to work than quality, I guess. So talk to me a bit about what you're seeing working there, how that's changed since we last spoke.

37:06Ash Melwani:Yeah, so I think we've always tried to be diverse in our static ad strategy. You know, being able to leverage AI, being able to leverage lifestyle, photography, text, you know, UGC, right? We have different formats that we've tested. Video, I think, is a lot harder to achieve diversity because there's only so much you can get in terms of like, or sorry, let me rephrase that. I think there's only so much you can actually get because the cost associated with getting video is way higher, right? So now with static ads, I can have a designer in-house pump out 50 ads a week. All 50 could look completely different, okay?

37:49Ash Melwani:I can have an agency that would do the same thing, okay? Video content, one, if I want true customer-generated content, I got to reach out to customers, I got to brief them, I got to tell them, hey, like, go film something. Content that's going to come back is probably going to be shit. They're not creators. You'll get raw testimonials, which is good. which can be one set of style or ads, right? That can work. And it has worked for us in the past. Then you have like the creator generated content, right? Like sending product to creators, giving them a script, telling them to talk through certain points.

38:19Ash Melwani:Like that content can come back, right? Then you have like influencer content that people that are working with you and posting about you and talking about you, this and that. Then you have the high production style stuff, right? Like podcast style ads, which I think is like, honestly, like everybody and their mother is using right now. I think it's on its way out at some point because not everybody in the world has a podcast, right? I think people are going to understand this.

38:38Loukas:I've actually, I've just got a really funny story about this. We had the founder of Suri on the podcast, which is a toothbrush brand, and they used a load of the content from our real podcast and made founder ads out of it. And I saw one of the top comments on the ads was like, there's no way this is real. Why would they have a toothbrush salesman on a podcast?

38:59Ash Melwani:It's like the one time that a podcast ad was actually real.

39:03Loukas:Actually real. Yeah.

39:04Ash Melwani:I mean, listen, it was a great, it was a great strategy. It worked well for us. Um, at the beginning of the year it died out. I'm over it. That's fine. Street interviews, I think are here to stay because that is genuine reactions from like people. You can, you can ask questions to anybody all the time. It's, it's authentic. It's funny. We actually tested this out. We have a team that goes out to Central Park in New York and they're just like asking questions like, Hey, what is your biggest craving? Right. People are like pizza, you know, cookies, this and that. And it's like, well, here's a solution for that.

39:35Ash Melwani:Or like, hey, listen, did you know that the reason you're losing air is because you're collagen? And then people are like, oh, I didn't know. And so you're getting this real feedback and it's the type of content that people are consuming and that's doing really well. So creator, customer generated content, creator generated content, high production style stuff, direct response style stuff. And then you have AI now, right? Like you have like AI, you know, actors that are talking about your product and this and that. I think, I don't think it's great, right? I don't necessarily think it's like, it's scalable.

40:08Ash Melwani:What I do think is what it's great for is if you need certain clips and like voiceovers, then by all means use AI, right? I love the idea of using an AI to do a voiceover so when you can make mashups, you can leverage that. What I do think is going to happen is that this new shit with like VO3, right, from Google, a lot of people are creating concepts that are obviously made by AI.

40:33Loukas:I was literally going to say the exact same thing. Like, I think people are looking at it the wrong way. They need to not how can I make this not look like AI? How can I make this look so obviously AI that it's entertaining? Exactly. Exactly.

40:48Ash Melwani:And so like I've started to see these baby videos, like baby podcast videos. Now imagine you did street interviews with babies, right? Like just thinking about ways that you can be creative and entertaining because that is what's going to stop somebody from scrolling, right? I don't know if you guys have seen these videos on TikTok of like these talking gorillas.

41:08Loukas:They're unhinged, but like every single video I see.

41:11Ash Melwani:Ecstasy in the forest. And I'm like, listen, these affiliate marketers, man, they're smart. Like go and look at what these guys are doing. Like they're, they're building up accounts or generating a ton of reviews. And then I saw them marketing a hat like on the gorilla. And it's like, these videos are getting millions of views. You're telling me that these hats can't generate some type of sales. Like that is the content that's going to work. So again, there's like a go back to the original question, which is creative diversity. How do you, how do you think about it is like, you have to just go out to the wild and see every single type of format of content that's out there.

41:47Ash Melwani:and try to create something for your brand using that format. And if you can feed a ton of that to Meta, you will get in front of more people than not, right? Like some people are like, oh, like if I give Meta like 15 ads, it's going to spend on just one, right? That means the other 14 sucked. Like you have to make sure that you have enough like diversity and volume. And listen, if you have one ad that just spends, great. Put that in your scaling campaign, retest everything else, right? So I think giving Facebook as much content as possible is very important. I think that volume may not necessarily be as important right now as quality and quantity of diversity.

42:29Ash Melwani:So having, you know, instead of having 50 static ads, I'm going to do 10 statics, 10 creator generated content, 10 creator generated content, 10 AI videos, 10 street interviews, and then give that to Meta and let them do its thing.

42:43Loukas:I agree. And that's why the phrasing I use is strategic volume, because just blind volume just doesn't work. I've seen brands throwing hundreds of ads at the wall in a month and not scaling, not increasing spend. And I think that idea of being strategic about how you use that is really important. And that's, like you say, down to vehicles. Also, being intentional about labeling a creative within the performance funnel. Like I'm just seeing now unaware and problem aware ads just working way better than anything else, which wasn't something that was always the case. I was more lower funnel product aware, but like those unaware creatives not introducing the product for like 15, 20 seconds, stuff that were like the big no, no rules.

43:32Loukas:Like when we would onboard our strategists, it's like you have to introduce the product solution within two seconds or there'll be drop off. like the rules in my like i'm just seeing that completely turn on its head like we're seeing like four minute ads working stitching two best performers like back to back and just running it and then becoming like top five spenders in the account like just it's it's like the world west out there but in a in the best way possible like it's because it's you have to it's it's changed the way that we have to you know the lens we view things through and how we we have to be creative then that's kind of how I'm looking at everything right now it's the same with like podcast ads like yes podcast ads don't work like they used to but we're still ripping up with podcast ads because it's like it's like you're looking you that's almost the concept type but it's it's not the it's like the spin in the way that we create those podcast ads so as an example like there's this famous youtube series in the uk where they'll get like two football fans that are like next to each other one's one like a chelsea fan one's a man united fan and on the table they'll be like strongly agree strongly disagree and they've got a pint of beer either side and there will just be a statement like this player was the best you know striker of all time and it'll be like you know one of their team's striker and then they'll say strongly agree or strongly disagree and then they'll just debate about it so like we're doing podcast ads like that now which technically on paper is a podcast, but it's like a different format, different way of doing that, which creates more conflict and more controversy and curiosity.

45:06Loukas:Entertainment.

45:07Ash Melwani:That's all it really is. It's like, how long can you get somebody to stick around for? And people don't realize this. I mean, there's a lot of big updates with this whole Andromeda update, but one of the biggest changes now is that engagement on these ads is very crucial, right? If you have an engaging ad, they're going to prioritize engagement because they are losing users to TikTok, right? They want to have content on the platform that will keep them there. So prioritize engagement, right? Next is conversion intent. Now, somebody gets to your landing page, that landing page has to be dialed in, right?

45:41Ash Melwani:If somebody spends a lot of time on that page, they don't bounce, they check around, they go around to the website, the longer they stay on that website, the better the experience is in the mind of Meta, which helps you in the auction, right? Now, when you actually go through the conversion events, right? So you add the car, initiate checkout, and you actually purchase, that data that needs to be sent back to Meta has to be clean, like extremely clean. Like we thought like using, you know, a custom solution for our Cappy was like the bare minimum. And we've been using this solution for a long time.

46:13Ash Melwani:Making sure you're actually going in and checking, right? Like the actual health of your pixel is very, very important. I can't stress this enough. If you see an error or you may not see an error, even though your event scores are great, make sure you have somebody going in and just checking everything. Because the minute that there's some level of data that's missing, Facebook can't optimize and then it'll drop you in the auction so much quicker. That's why that's this whole update. So Facebook is quicker to respond to signals than it's ever done or ever have been able to do in the past.

46:46Loukas:so you'll see performance drop overnight because of this whereas like oh it'll take three weeks for

46:52Ash Melwani:things to kind of kick in but if there's like a negative signal facebook gets that right away and shit's gonna drop so you gotta like it's it's very finicky right now hopefully it gets better but this is why we're seeing a lot of volatility across the board because you know if you have a you have an ad that goes through a broken link by accident right like that could that could hurt your performance for a week right so those are the things that i've noticed over the last six months and we're starting to see better results because we're playing into that. But yeah, I think all creative diversity, feeding them the beast, making sure you have something that's engaging, making sure that your experience post-click is top-notch and then making sure all that event signal is getting back in a clean way back to meta so they can optimize accordingly.

47:36Loukas:100%, yeah. I think, yeah, one of the most underutilized things within ads, and I understand why because one of the hardest things to execute well is like comedy, which converts really well all you've got to do is look at brands like Oats Overnight, like just have mastered that style of tone and concept, but isn't something that you see many brands leaning into. And I think I forgot what the statistic was, but in Motion's trend report, just the success rate of ads that had satire or comedy in, in comparison to not, was massive. But yeah, I think like, yeah, one of the, for me, like YouTube, you know, if you look at YouTube creators and look at the kind of series that they produce.

48:16Loukas:Even, you know, I'm now thinking like Mr. Beast, last to leave the circle. Like how can you take that concept and apply that to an ad? And there's so many ways you could do that. The product is outside of the circle. Do you see what I mean? So like that's kind of how I'm thinking now, like using Organic as like a massive driver for inspiration to like diversify those vehicles. Because really the messaging stays the same. Like once you've nailed your messaging, depending on where it sits within the funnel and the persona you're speaking to. It's just about rinsing new vehicles and ways of telling that.

48:47Ash Melwani:No, I agree. I think you have to start thinking outside of the box. And honestly, if you're like, it's fine, go to other brands, use them as inspiration and like test it out. But like, how can you as a brand stand out? And how can you, if your goal as a brand, right? And this shouldn't be everybody's goal, but like if your goal as a brand is to be the number one product in your category or your niche, how are you going to do that? it is not by going and copying what everybody else is doing. It's forging your own way, coming up with concepts, getting the founders involved. Like Anki, again, him getting on TV and talking about the product, he knows about the products the most out of all of us.

49:24Ash Melwani:He's properly into health and wellness. He understands the ingredients. He understands the formulation properly and how certain ingredients work with others. And so having him on TV and talking about it, that's engaging. So if you are a founder of a brand, get involved. get on TikTok, get on YouTube and just like, just talk about the story and like start there and then see where things can go.

49:47Loukas:100%. Yeah, love that. What just last few questions, like I'd love just on a personal level to ask you, there's obviously been so many of these like AI SaaS platforms popping up and do different things and very quickly become redundant because, you know, the big LLMs are, you know, almost absorbing these features. I'd love to know which AI SaaS or LLM, What are you most bullish on right now or use the most?

50:14Ash Melwani:Tech-wise, honestly, because we're going pretty heavy on TikTok shop, being able to manage all those creators, having a social listing tool set up. So I love working with Refunnel. Organizes everything. I can download it, go run ads on Facebook, whitelisting, etc. So that's number one. Number two, I just set up a Discord community for all of our TikTok creators and all of our affiliates and all of our influencers so that they're all in one place. that they could talk to each other and get ideas from one another. So those are two. VO3, Google, right? I really think the team is pumping out some really cool creatives.

50:49Ash Melwani:We just did a concept. It didn't work, but I thought it was awesome, which is like the New York City, you know how they have Mickey Mouse and Elmo running around? It's like doing street interviews with these characters about obvi collagen, right? It's funny. It's interesting. It didn't convert. We'll figure out the next one. But playing around and coming up with these big ideas that nobody's really thought of, I think is very important, right? And then I do think like really leveraging and learning how to use AI for your business. So like, honestly, like shout out to Alex Cooper. He has this AI training camp going on starting tomorrow.

51:25Ash Melwani:And like, I had to sign up my whole team for that. So, you know, being able to learn this stuff, like there's so much out there that I realized I don't even know. And so how can I expect my team to know if I don't get them the tools to do that? So I mean, ChadGPT, Claude, these are all great for building GPTs. I've built out so many different GPTs per product. I'm feeding it product information. I'm feeding it reviews, testimonials, post-purchase surveys, and then using that for creative strategy and coming up with headlines and angles and scripts and stuff like that. So I think that's very important is to use these tools to learn about your business and just use it as a way to like, hey, like, give me, you know, three reviews that I can talk about in my video or give me this, give me that.

52:08Ash Melwani:So I think just, you know, utilize the tools that are out there. Another one that I really, and also going back to like engagement signals on Meta, if you're not moderating your ad comments, like you're screwed, right? The minute somebody says, oh, this is a scam, I didn't get it, like they never shipped out the product, that's going to tank results. So using something to moderate, we use brand-wise. I think that's really cool. And again, use AI to respond to comments if you wanted to. But just make sure everybody on your team has the right tools to get everything that you need done. Super bullish on.

52:41Ash Melwani:Have you seen Triple Whale's agents? I actually have a meeting with Max on Friday to just go through the whole thing. And just seeing Triple Whale from where it started to where it's at, I think is incredible, man. I mean, it's the next to Shopify. It's in fact, I open up triple one more than I open up Shopify. Right. And so being able to like have that data. So I believe one of the things you could do is like, hey, take my top existing static ads and give me iterations. And I'll just go and make you a ton of iterations.

53:11Loukas:Yeah. It's like an automated agent builder. So no matter what you ask it to do, it will go out and build the agent flow for that. If there's a problem, it will build another agent to fix and troubleshoot the problem itself. Yeah, we're using it for like reporting, building out creative roadmaps, strat reports. So yeah, it's crazy where it's going and just the potential there. And this is kind of what I think it's like a race really, because you have a few of these platforms. And the reason why someone like Triple L is going to win in this game is because of the context they have, the data they have.

53:46Loukas:It's like whoever has the most data is going to win that game. And they do.

53:50Ash Melwani:100%. I agree. I agree. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with next. And hopefully they don't ship a ton of features. I'd rather these companies slow down, ship one feature at a time, perfect it, and then move on to the next one. I don't want 20 features that are half broken. So please. 100%. Yeah.

54:10Loukas:Cool. Exit. Can you see that on the cards longer term being truthful?

54:16Ash Melwani:Yeah, I think what we're trying to do with the retail side of things is that we want to get it. We want to get obvious as many doors as possible. Right. And like I said, retail isn't our expertise. So if the conversation comes up with somebody who says like, hey, we've done all the legwork for you, we've done the hardest part of getting into every single retailer you could think of, take it and push it. I think that is where somebody that's smart enough to actually go and do that will have a lot of opportunity. So would love for that to happen at some point, maybe in the next 18 months, that would be great.

54:52Ash Melwani:And what I really want to do after is take what I've learned building Ogbi and take what I've learned what not to do and start something else and just start fresh and obviously do it with a little bit more cash infused at the beginning and then do it right. That's a nice question. Yeah, probably do something else.

55:10Loukas:If you had to, let's say you had to do that tomorrow, what would it be or what niche would you look at?

55:17Ash Melwani:I would probably look at something that obviously subscription focused or has a subscription element. Two, I would probably create a product that can provide instant results or instant gratification in some level. right? And three, being able to showcase how a product can be used, I think is very important because for a supplement, it's like, oh, this is going to take 30, 60 days for you to see results, right? I want to get out of that. I want to be like, all right, well, this product can do this right away. You'll see the effects of this and I can actually demonstrate it for you. This way, the content in itself can be really engaging and just start with the organic side.

55:57Ash Melwani:I would probably find a creator, maybe partner up with an influencer celebrity and just do something that way because that in itself was like probably the biggest sheet code and then really investing in like r &d like product is king like people say creative is king product is king if that's not dialed i mean you've seen it with david man they blew up because quite literally they are the best product on the market and it shows so something around there's a story yeah exactly so can you can you take you know i mean you see what chad did with gruns it was a white space. AG1 was the only one doing what they were doing and he turned it into gummy form.

56:34Ash Melwani:So the reason why he's worth half a billion now, right? So again, take what we learn, go start something else, start with organic and really invest in product. Nice. Love that.

56:43Loukas:Well, Ash, thank you so much for joining us today. This been, yeah, mega insightful. I feel like we could go for another hour here, but no, you're a busy man. So we'll end it here. But if you enjoyed this episode, please give this a like. You can find us on YouTube and Spotify at DTC Diaries. And yeah, we'll make sure to put all your links down below, but appreciate you coming on, man. Likewise. Thank you for having me. Cool. I'll speak to you in a bit.