Scale Meta ads without the famous founder: B-roll, testimonials and AI image ads

Ethan EthierYeah, so for us, actually, we're not relying on Jeremy at all for ads. Besides maybe a few pieces of old content that he's done, old short form content that he's done, we're really just trying to focus on how we can scale without relying on Jeremy. And in addition to our goal of just expanding our reach, we wanted to solve the bus problem where everything was reliant on Jeremy's YouTube channel for our growth.

Ethan EthierAnd by focusing on Meta and not relying on Jeremy, we're kind of building a new channel that can scale on its own. So everything we've done from that end is mainly through B-roll cell videos. We've used some testimonial content, a lot of statics now with AI. So that's kind of the approach that we've taken with Meta.

David BarnardThat's fascinating. And again, I would've expected, and I actually didn't look through your ad library in preparation for this podcast, so I should have known that coming in, but I would've guessed it would be way more Jeremy focused because he is that kind of celebrity YouTuber and there's so much opportunity to use him, but it makes a ton of sense when, and this is an interesting part too, for an influencer with an app, if the main business of …

Ethan Ethier… the Meta world was definitely new for us. And I think one of the biggest things that we needed to figure out right away was just getting more data, especially when it came to trial to paid, because like I mentioned earlier, organic, you have a certain trial to paid threshold or baseline because these users are generally a lot warmer. Whereas trial to paid, you're essentially tapping net new cold users who've never really seen the brand before.

Ethan EthierSo we knew trial to paid was going to be lower, but we just needed to get a baseline of what that number would be in order for us to calculate how much we could actually spend to acquire a customer. So that took around a month to do, and once we had a good set of numbers to work with, then it was all about testing different angles and different avatars who would resonate well with the product and how our product can uniquely solve their pain points.

Ethan EthierSo we had a lot of learnings from surveys, from past customers coming in from warm traffic, and we pretty much just doubled down on finding specific avatars that work well. And right now we're in a process of constantly iterating on what's winning while also slowly adding on new new avatars. So we're just trying to create a proper iterative and testing loop that allows this engine to keep on running.

Ethan Ethier… think that must have been on Twitter. I recently started using Twitter and I just share any thoughts that come to my mind, kind of like a personal diary. But I think my point with that was it's super easy to get obsessed with setting up the right campaigns, setting up all these different bid targeting strategies and all that. But at the end of the day, I think what will really move the needle is just creating better content. Same as on YouTube.

Ethan EthierAs long as you create content that people actually enjoy, then you're going to make a much greater improvement than tinkering around with different targeting sales, especially now with, I'm not sure if you've heard of the whole Andromeda update, but a lot of the targeting on Meta is specifically done through the creatives. So for me, that was just a reminder to focus on creating better creatives rather than tinker around and mess around with the targeting that's really out of your control.

David BarnardWe've been talking through scaling up on Meta, but one thing we haven't discussed is that you send most of your traffic to the web or all your traffic to the web, not to the app store. Why do you do that?