Treat each ad channel separately and grow its spend 10-20% a week

David Barnard… me before the podcast that you're on track to spend over $100 million in paid ads by the end of the year. How do you think about where to deploy that money with this fire hose of creative? Because one approach and what a lot of people are doing is like, "Okay, AI is now helping us create so much more creative. Let's just throw money behind it and just see what sticks." Is that what you're doing with 100 million or how are you approaching that?

Luke HarriesNot quite, no. So, the way we view about money and spend on channels is we actually view, yes, we have the top down view, but we're mainly thinking bottoms up. And so, we treat each channel as its own growth engine, and actually our biggest one still is Google and Google search. And so, what we're doing is like that, we're obsessed of, okay, how do we make really great ad copy? How do we localize it to all the GOs? How do we have really high converging landing pages? And then it's like, okay, week over week, how do you scale it 10%, 20%.

Luke HarriesFor Meta, it's a similar one where yes, you want great amount of creative, but you also want really high quality. And then when I think about scaling creative in order to unlock, what you actually want to do is more segmentation. So, you are maybe using AI to help before maybe if you just had a general like, here's how to make images and videos with AI, but now you can go that one level deeper, like here's how podcasters or here's how people …

Luke Harries… and that's where we've really lent into AI. As a side note, we initially went down the route of you pay an expensive SaaS app for localization, you pay for an agency to then who have people to localize it. But I kept on having our team just sending screenshots of ChatGPT being like, "Oh, we should use this phrasing instead is way better." And I was like, "Well, if the LLMs are way better at translation than these agencies and expensive tooling."

Luke HarriesSo, we actually ripped out all the localization infrastructure. We built our own GitHub action and there's a thin library which just extracts the strings or wraps all the strings. And then each time we make a PR to our repo, it just sends it with a prompt per language about the localization guide, and that means we're able to localize way cheaper and much faster. And then once we've also localized the apps, you're then able to localize all the ads. There's stuff like our dubbing model, or again, just passing the copy with good prompts gets fantastic results. We think bottom's up, what's that next bottleneck for us to scale another 20% week on week, month on month? And then you start going through, okay, first of all, it's like funnel optimization, then it's probably starting to think about stuff like localization and so forth.

David BarnardAnd how do you think about measurement? And are you mixing in brand and other things that are harder to measure? I mean, with $100 million to spend, there's a lot more room to experiment and potentially put money into things that will pay off more in the long run. But are you looking at dollar for dollar ROI? Are you looking at for some channels, but not others? How do you think about measurement and effectively spending that?