This is a placeholder post. Blake will fill this in with full content.
The experiment
I ran a $500 Google Ads campaign for a D2C washing machine brand from zero — no history, no existing audiences, no conversion data. What I found validated everything I suspected about how most D2C brands waste their early ad dollars.
CRO before budget
Your landing page has to convert before you throw money at traffic. This sounds obvious. It's not practiced. I spent the first two weeks on CRO before running a single ad — and it made the campaign numbers dramatically better from day one.
Modeling before scaling
Before I launched, I modeled the unit economics: target CPA, required LTV, break-even ROAS. This gave me a clear signal function — if the campaign hits these numbers, we scale. If not, we stop and optimize. No gut feel required.