← The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
635: The Meta Ads System Working in 2026 | Nick Shackelford
00:52:08
Nick Shackelford has spent hundreds of millions of dollars profitably on Meta ads and grown Structured from zero to $76 million in revenue in under three years. And he's here to tell you this clearly: Meta isn't broken. Most founders are just reading the wrong signals.
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- [00:02]
A
Hey, founder fam. I want to talk to you about something super exciting. We're officially partnered with Omnisend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e commerce founders. We've been recommending Omnisend to founder students for a while now because it just works. Whether you're launching your first store or you're scaling to seven figures, it really helps you automate your marketing and get real results. Did you know on average, OMNISEND customers make $68 for every $1 they spend, which is an insanely good return. And because you're part of the founder community, you get 50% off your first three months with the code. Founder 50 just head to omnisend.com founder without the e to get started. All right, now let's jump back into the show. Meta ads don't work anymore. You've probably thought it, said it or heard another founder say it after one bad month of performance. Today's guest is Nick Shackelford. He's the co founder of Structured agency, partner at Brez, and one of the most respected meta ads operators in the world. He scaled hundreds of ad accounts through iOS changes, rising CPAs, platform volatility, and multiple algorithm shifts. And he's here to say this clearly, meta isn't broken. Most founders are just reading the wrong signals. After the growth at all cost era of 2021, 2022, the playbook has fundamentally changed. Creative volume is up, complexity is up, but performance is down. And many founders are just flying blind. And in this episode, Nick is going to break down what actually matters right now. You'll lear which metrics are actively misleading founders in 2026. Why testing more ads is often making performance worse, not better. And the exact point where meta advertising stops being a media buying problem and becomes a business model problem. This is the 2026 Operators Playbook for meta ads from someone who's managing millions and millions and millions of dollars in spend in accounts, real accounts. Right now, let's get into it.
- [02:04]
B
Hear the stories, learn the proven method, accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [02:18]
A
Nick Shackleford. Welcome to Melbourne.
- [02:22]
B
It's very nice. Feels very much like America, if I'm being honest.
- [02:25]
A
It's been really cool hanging out. We'll talk about why you're here for a multitude of reasons in Melbourne. This is your first time in Australia, but I want to talk with you. Facebook ads so the game has changed?
- [02:41]
B
I think so. I kind of been like yelling about this for a while. I know. I think this is Gonna be a controversial take. I think most of these people are gonna feel probably they've been doing stuff 2019, 2020, 2021. Because it's like tried and true. You want to do the same for like, I'm gonna curse, like, same shit that got you to where you are. It's just not that way. I've just seen too much stuff nowadays. Yeah.
- [03:03]
A
And so I really want to unpack that and I also want to talk about as well, what we're working on. And some really cool stuff is going to be game changing. But first and foremost, like, I've known you for now, Geez. Coming close to eight years. You taught a program for us. We launched that in 2020 when. Absolutely gangbusters. And a lot has changed with Facebook ads. And you've spent profitably. We talked about last night. Yesterday, you pretty much lost count. But it's in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Profitably yourself. You yourself managed, like, looked at. And you've grown, Brezz from zero. We talked about it. You've, you know, you're a partner at Brez. You've been behind the scenes growing that business from 0. 70 million gross in two years.
- [03:59]
B
Yeah. Do you want me to be. I'll be specific. Yes. It was 76 million. Two years, nine months. And today it would be eight days.
- [04:06]
A
Okay, there you go. You can't get much better than that.
- [04:08]
B
Like, I don't know the hours. I'm sorry.
- [04:10]
A
Yeah. Now, we would show the receipts, but there's no point. Right. Because it's literally, it's literally on the hour. So, you know, you've been behind the scenes. You've been growing brands for over the past decade using paid advertising, using performance. You're running behind the scenes. Like, you know, we've been hanging out. You shared like five or six, seven other brands that you're deep within in the DTC space. Like, you are the guy when it comes to ads. So talk us through. Like, what has changed and what do people need to be thinking about when it comes to paid advertising? Facebook ads, meta 2026 so I'm going
- [04:42]
B
to take you a little bit further back just because I was. I was known as just a Facebook guy. And so you kept asking yesterday, like, what is. Like, how much have you have you spent? You kept going like, nick, what are you spending? You spending? And I go, I was responsible. Hands on keys. Like, I call hands on keys. The actual media buyer, the person that's like slinging clicks like, they are the click slinger trying to get the conversions and over time, like if you, if you want to evolve into the space, like, I'm not, I'm not a visionary, I'm not a dude that's gonna like, I didn't start Breeze, I didn't start the brands I'm supporting and being a part of, but I'm really fucking good at running it. I'm really, really good at being in the, in the, in the right places at the right time and managing the team because like, I know what it should look like when it works really well and when it looks really bad. I know exactly like, okay, we shouldn't be doing this. Here's how we kind of recorrect it. Operating to a degree right. At some level. And so over, over the growth of it, it's all revolved around meta and it's all evolved around how to spend ads. Like what is the correct way to spend ad, what is the correct way to create ads? What is the system that you have to do all these things around? Because before it was when we made our original course, right. That was, it was incredible. But what was even better about it is like the things inside of it would still be relevant today if the dashboards were still the same.
- [05:58]
A
Yes.
- [05:58]
B
If the way that creative was presented, if some of the audience targeting was dissimilar. And so I was really proud of that. I've been proud of that for a very long time. And even to this day we get a ton of comments and people speaking on it. But it's had to change and evolve because A, you have AI coming in the space, you have Meta, who, who bought an incredible AI tool suited that I was, opened my eyes to Manus, which you opened my eyes to this. And obviously in the market, if you see these big tech giants evolving, changing, updating, the way we use the tools have to change and update. It's just a non negotiable. And so you have Andromeda, you have Lattice, you have gem, you have a couple of these like internal judging scores of how ads are ran, judged, categorized. And honestly for us as on the ad side or on the growth side, we have to adapt to that. And I think that's something that I want more and more founders to have an idea around and not even just the founders, but the person that's in charge of like generating revenue. You have to be aware of it. And so for the breeze side of things, when I was, I wasn't the one that knew how to run that type of growth because we play in a restricted space like there's a certain funnel that you have to run. There's a certain way you have to position these ads to the right landing page. But what taught me is like I had to go run retention or how to go understand how email plays in this or how subscription plays into this. And so I was able to like kind of round out what was necessary. And it was, it was a lot, dude. Like you, you. We just finished a phone call with my team today and you're, you're like it was after it. We just exhaled because it was intense. I think that's the levels that has to be at right now. And Meta as a core piece, it was a negotiation. Like how much money do I have to spend? Was what was the un. He goes, give me the unlimited number that I can spend. And but that's not an ads question. That's like what can the business maintain? What is a margin? What is the product? What is the cash on hand? And I think that's it's more holistic now, man. It's not. It's not light it up. Get a couple ads that you ripped from somebody else and turn it on
- [07:58]
A
and like you've played at the highest levels. What's. What's the most you spend in a day? 200.
- [08:04]
B
I would say I was 275. 300.
- [08:07]
A
$300,000.
- [08:08]
B
That's a profitable day. That's a profitable day. We have a great mutual friend, Jordan Menard.
- [08:13]
A
Yeah.
- [08:14]
B
As an incredible brand. Instant hydration up there. And he talks about this term of natural cac. What, what, what is this is a little. I'll go woo woo. But I'll try to anchor you. Okay. So there's like this level of we believe the all knowing mighty Zuck has an idea of what a customer costs to everybody in your. In everybody in your niche that you're selling against for use. Me, I'm a beverage. He knows how much all the other beverage companies are spending to acquire a customer based on all the information fed back to him. You think about Cappy, you think about even a raw or term postbacks. How much information we're giving back to Meta. We believe he'll know based upon how much information we give back to them. Are they subscribing how much AOV that he's going to basically just bucket us and charge US$100 or $200.
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A
I believe that too.
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B
How could you not? They have so much information.
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A
Yeah.
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B
How could it not be that way?
- [09:09]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [09:10]
B
And that the most advanced one. So you look at Maybe Snap doesn't have this, but maybe Google has this but they're more of a demand gen so maybe they don't have it. But I've thought, I've thought so deeply about this. So the idea on natural hack is to, to be able to spend 200, 300amillion a day. Let's talk about like I know, not me but I know within my range people are spending a million day major moments like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, when the offer is right, when the, when the, the demand is pent up, when the season makes sense, you can get up some, some crazy proper numbers I would say across the immediate portfolio that I can go and like go slack by slack probably between 500 to $1 million a day across these seven, eight brands.
- [09:50]
A
Yeah.
- [09:50]
B
So that's, that's real. And as you know we hourly updates. So it's not, it's not fake crazy, it's real. And so when we, when we look at this stuff we go. The difference between what has to happen now at those higher levels is the diversification of how many ads you have in the account and how many different types of AOVs you're able to present. What we call in the front end, the first touch point. Because that's going to define the different type of customer and how long they're going to be with you and how much they're going to buy from you. But it's funny, that's not an ads question. Ads are driving it. Ads are the first touch point or second touch point or third touch or whatever and that start the steamroll of that customer coming into you. But it's not necessarily what type of ass ads do you have to do? It's more encompassing.
- [10:36]
A
Yeah. And that's one thing I've noticed now and I want to talk more about this more than ever. It's this holistic ecosystem approach 2026. It's about the offer. It's about what do we do on the creative side. Media buying isn't as much, nowhere near like I heard you say yesterday, Facebook ads, it's 70% creative. But at the same time the offer trumps all right.
- [11:02]
B
I think so.
- [11:03]
A
Yeah.
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B
Truly do.
- [11:03]
A
And more than ever you are playing around with the offer stacking ov free shipping, like, like playing with all of these variables pages. That's a big part of your, your playbook as well has to.
- [11:15]
B
And I'll tell you why. Because, and I, I wasn't, I had to get sold on this. I was not, I didn't believe this. I was in the camp of like I'm going to media by my way out of the situation that was I defaulted there. People would make fun of me because I'm more of like technical in the accounts. I really default like that's my normal status of like just do some optimization within the account. But you actually, you have to think about levers of influence like doors. We'll call it doors of influence. If you're in the ad account, the easiest thing you can do today to make a change, whether it's working well or it's not working well is to make a campaign optimization. Small door, small swing. The next level up to that is like okay, maybe we can do new creative a little bit more. It's a, it's a heavier lift to bigger door to harder to push. Hopefully a bigger outcome. The next you go into this is maybe the different avatar. Maybe you're going to go speak to a higher quality customer that will spend more to you. Okay. But that's still going to be in the creative realm. The biggest lever, the biggest movement is building a website, building a landing page with a unique offer to attract an individual consumer. It's most amount of time you have to be conscious of it. You have to think about the margins, you have to think about the product, you have to be thoughtful of the bundle, you have to be thoughtful of the incentive. That is the biggest incentive. It all that starts and then gets everything else that you have to do below it. You have to make the creative, you have to do the target, you have to set it off correctly. And so that all, all that system you have to really pay attention to. And it's not as easy to do it just if you're just by yourself on a founder on an island going like my ads aren't working. The amount of times I've gone into these accounts and talk about it. I'm like it's not working because you're not going to make enough money to spend over here. Or it's not working because people are just not converting on this area. It's not an ad issue. It's like the way that the business is being positioned and ran. So I do, I do truly believe in this especially if your, your goal is not to spend a thousand or I'll go even for that. If you're, if you're at $300 to $500, I think that you're probably in the creative issue. Maybe some creative, maybe some. We can get some conversion elements change on the pdp. But really it's, it's I'm like in the thousand a day. Maybe I'm going to 3,000 day. That's a. That's a good amount of money to be spent. The thoughtfulness is like, how many different types of entry points can we get these consumers into? For instance, we have February coming up. What happens in February in America? Super Bowl, Huge, huge day.
- [13:35]
A
I thought you can say Valentine's day,
- [13:39]
B
man. The Mrs. Get out. When does this go live? We get so much trouble for that. So the most important thing to me, it's going to be Super Bowl. Of course. Yeah. Big football guy. Not at all. I'm actually not a football guy at all. But we actually don't. What we should do. Sidebar. What we should do is we should probably make like a lover boy, lover girl, lover boy campaign. And it's like a buy a pack, get a pack kind of thing. So you both can just absolutely bliss. Anyways, the incentive is we have so business needs for us right now. I'll be a little vulnerable about this. We are in a turnaround situation where we are needing to buy our way into subscriber base growth.
- [14:23]
A
Yeah. Okay.
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B
How do we do that? Well, we want the highest quality customer. For me, what I've learned and being in this is a customer that starts on an eight pack. The faster I can get them to order a 12 pack, the longer they will stay with us. I don't know how many times you can ask a consumer, like, what is their best product that they can sell that equals the longest they'll be with them. It's a very important question. Hard to get there. But once you understand that the 8 to 12, then I can understand the. The higher essentially what it is in the simple sentence, the higher the quality that they're willing to spend with me at the beginning and we can meet up. We could make good on the promise of the money they gave. We've earned that respect and they're going to stick with us, most likely. So we've flipped it on head and so now we're selling like 160 cans. Support the party. Sell for the party. So that's like the position, the angle that you want to go to, but that's only going to get me a couple of customers. That conversion rates can be pretty low, but that customer is going to be very high and very worth it for me. So I want the lowest entry point. You can come with me. 40 bucks, 30 bucks, all the way up to this one. $6,200. And then it's up to us to Kind of measure the value that these customers are. That's, that's not an ad issue, that's not an ad thing. That's a, a business structure, positioning play and the economics.
- [15:41]
A
Right. Like, you know, we're working on this, this incredible, incredible membership, which we'll talk about a little more, called founder operators. And Nick pulled out like six different spreadsheets around, like how you're tracking everything and like it's, it's, it's a system in of itself, but a lot more numbers than I would have even thought.
- [16:04]
B
Yeah, it's frustrating. Yeah, it is. Because on one hand you're like, on one hand I'm like screenshotting cohorts from a dashboard into cloud or GPT and going like, give me my LTV to cac and it gives you this analysis, hopefully has more information. But then to get to those numbers, there's like four or five different spreadsheets we're going through. Again, we'll go back to the call that we just had. We were scenario planning around AOVs contribution margin, different ROAs, different conversion rates, returning customer revenue to customer revenue, and all that would spit out to us like two numbers that we have to look at. That's, that's, that's all like aggregated data and sitting there. And so there, there are a lot of things you got to kind of piece together. But if, dude, if you're by yourself, that call was nine people. Smart dudes working through it. Like, you don't, you don't get that. That's, that's the problem with what I see is going on right now. It's like, you don't have access to these people, or you get short clips on YouTube or you get short clips from a call like this or an interview like this, and you just can't build it yourself. Some people can connect the dots, but if you don't have that area to just be like, yo, can you just check the way I'm thinking about this? So important now.
- [17:13]
A
So if somebody's got a brand right now, let's just say they've got product market fit, right? It's selling. You know, you may be making 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a month. You're running ads, maybe spending a few hundred dollars, you know, let's just say $5,000 a month, you're profitable. The algorithm tells you, how do, how do you scale in this? Like 20, 26. How would you be thinking about it if an account come your way?
- [17:42]
B
I think I'll give you the raw answer then I'LL give you, like, a more fleshed out one that you want me to say, okay, first one is add more zeros.
- [17:48]
A
Yep.
- [17:49]
B
That's like. Like, if he. If you were to hand me the. If you were like, hey, it's working. You give me the. The. The laptop, I'd probably go 000 and hand it back and like, check it in two days. That's like my. That's my gut. My gut reply. But if I were to be like, all right, let's like, understand why this is working or how this should work, how I'll develop that. That scenario a little bit further to see if I can go more specific. You hand me this. You talked about 5,000 spend. It's working. And you tell me, nick, I have two really great products, but we're really only spending on one. I have one hero product. I'm like, okay, of that product, we'll probably analyze some of the assets that you have. It's selling all problem solution. This thing does that thing cool. This thing does that thing at this cost. Okay. Then you add on. You start adding on the different stacks to it. This made me feel this way based upon an emotional tie. So we'll try to expand some of the problem solution into like, problem aware into solution to see if we can expand a little bit into where you are. Because chances are, if you're spending that amount and it's working really well, you probably don't need that high of a ROAS to continue to spend more. But the big number on the ROAS side makes me feel really good. Makes me feel like it's working and it is. But no, if you don't know your numbers, which early on we talked about this, like, can I make money? The calculator we used to play with in the first one, know your numbers, which provides the confidence in which you were able to accelerate the spend to generate more customers. But if you don't know your numbers, you're not gonna feel confident doing this. So first off, we would talk about, can we expand just on the specific creative that you have in that to see if that 5,000 go to 6,000. If they're only buying one of them, is there an easy way? Does the product lends itself to buying more? Buy one, get one, buy two, get three, buy two, get one. The different types of plays, because what I'm trying to do, I want to manipulate the aov. I want to manipulate, but maybe play with the free ship, free shipping threshold. What. What is the, like, the mean across of them rather than the average. So I would look towards the AOB because give, give the founder of the team a little bit more confidence that they could spend a little bit more money without having to do major changes. Major changes meaning build a new website, go find new creators, or go find new assets like that. That takes time. It's not a today thing. And so today thing is I can make a new bundle, I can add the secondary product. Second is I would probably just ask the customers that have been buying, especially at the beginning, you don't really know why they're buying it. You're hoping for a specific reason. So I would probably shoot off a couple just from the founder emails because at that size, it's not that super, it's not that big. Customer base is probably growing a little bit. But you can get a couple that's bought multiple times from you. Can you either call them or get ask them to give you a little bit of a testimony immediately. A screenshot testimonial of a review from an email from a founder does very well as just a plain asset probably would stick there immediately. And my question would actually go to the back of like, are these people coming back and buying on their own? That repeat purchase rate is important to me because they might be, they might be buying it fit the right price point. They, they didn't have to like ask their partner to spend this dollar amount. They didn't have to think twice. They were maybe in the market already for the specific product, but if they're not coming back on their own free will to buy it, or maybe they've seen an open, an email came back. I probably think about if they're not coming back, how good really is it? You're able to fool them, once we use that term loosely, fool them to buy it. But if they're not coming back on their own, they might actually, it might not be there. Product market might actually not be there.
- [21:13]
A
It's really interesting as well. You know, there was this boom time Covid and then there was iOS 14 stuff. And then, you know, now I'm seeing like a season where, you know, we've got AI, we're in a real creative mix, you know, this ecosystem play, which I love what you're, you're going with and how you're making all these other brands that you work with just not only just like kind of scale, but really scale. But you talk about signals and I'd love to hear right, like, because I'm seeing, I seen, I, I speak to a lot of people, we talked about this like I get a lot of stuff where people write to me and all sorts of things going on. It's and, and a trend I am noticing is Facebook is back. Right? Like Facebook, it's not like it was three, four years ago, like where it was like, you know, I hear a lot of friends be like, oh my God. It's like, it's really tough. So it is back, but the Signals piece has changed. And you said to me, you know, Meta hasn't stopped working. Founders just stopped listening to the right signals. What do you mean by that?
- [22:18]
B
I think this is, I think this is actually what we're speaking about towards more Andromeda, like the Andromeda papers that came out a while ago. It's not new now. It's might be new to someone listening to this for the first time or not aware, like they knew something changed. But what really did change, I think that they will refer to Andromeda the one of the Andromeda updates. There's a couple, I implore you guys to go look into a gem lattice and there's one other one sequenced. And I believe. If I. I see between 20 to 40, if I'm really aggressive, 20 to 40 new ad accounts on a weekly basis, 20 to 40 low spend to high spend, different countries and you look at it, you go inside and you go there. Probably have one or two or three creatives that are all the same and they're really working. Like they're like, these are. You go like, what are your best attitudes? They send it to you and they'll look the same. It's a dude or it's a chick talking about the product. Here's what it is. It's the same thing. The difference might have been like she's in her kitchen versus her bathroom. It's all the same signal. The signal is a white girl, a white guy in a bathroom, in a kitchen, whatever it is, same shit the more the diverse it is. And this is where you heard me talking about the aov, the intro. The customer that we're able to speak to Meta knows what they're willing to spend on and how likely you are to spend at different levels of threshold of spend. The person that's going to buy a $30, a $45, a $200, that signal you're not listening to that, you're not listening to what they're. The frequency in which they're buying. But because we're only presenting them the same thing, one product on a product page homepage, maybe there's A collection page with a couple things into a product page. They don't have the ability to create multiple scenarios of AOV output. Probably it's probably the same thing on a day to day basis. The more diverse you are able to position different AOVs, different landing page experiences and then different ads that they see to get there is going to produce a different outcome that you need to continue to reward and tell Meta, I want more of these people, I want more 112. I don't want the $55 or I want the $55, but it needs to be much cheaper than what you can afford to. And before the, you just put it in one ad set. Like it'd be one campaign, one ad set. You have 30 to 40 ads into it. They're all buying different things. They're all going through the same experience potentially. And that's not that it's confusion, it's just more confusion to it. Because before, what do we used to do beforehand? 5 or 6 ads, you do interest based targeting, you'd stack it. You do some lookalike audiences, you'd stack it. Then you go broad, right? So you have like, that's like the normal way that people would kind of launch the accounts. There's nothing technically wrong with this, but what is the, what is the hypothesis of what this is going to produce for you and how are you making better decisions off of the signals that Meta is giving you? I think that's, I think that's the confusion part that most people have.
- [25:22]
A
Now when it comes to creative, I've, I've got, you know, friends. One particular comes to mind where he told me he took a portion of his budget. And this is something that some people don't think about. He took a portion of his budget. Let's just say he was spending a couple hundred grand a month. Instead of spending a couple hundred grand, he started spending 180 and he put like $20,000 into just like a full day shoot, creating the craziest creative and he doubled his business. What would you say to founders when it comes to creative and looking at 20, 26 paid advertising, performance, creative, how much should you be diversifying into testing and looking at creative right now, especially with AI? Like you see so many things around like, oh, I created this with AI. Like, you know what I mean?
- [26:13]
B
Yeah, I have a, is the AI. So do you want me to start with the A thing or do you want me to go like the overall viewpoint of creative? Because.
- [26:20]
A
Yeah, let's go to the last light off.
- [26:22]
B
Yeah, okay. The first off, congratulations. For him to be able to invest that much into an asset, into a campaign, into just like a test, that's scary for me. Like I think the lowering the beauty of AI, I'll tie it together. The beauty of the AI means like speed to ideation. To put initial output is way quicker and way more cost effective. Because I still believe, and I talked about this like I believe in the smoke test. I've always believed in the smoke test. I think it's the easiest way to make logical investments into where you're going. And I'm assuming your partner or your one of your founder friends got to this place. I'll explain to you how I care about this. We call it the smoke test and it starts with the ideation. Um, it's usually product. It's the concept that we care about. For this case, I'll use ours. So the product is a beverage replacing alcohol. It is what we id. So it's a beverage outside or it's beverage in a setting of a social scenario. It's just a plain image that AI can either create for us or we already have it from a basic photo shoot. The concept we will have the bold call out of what we would want on it and bold text, whether that's in the copy or it's actually on the image itself. Because I do believe Meadow makes the reads of the image for those words and then based upon the performance there. And maybe I have three of those. Core concept, okay, at a bar, at a campfire, in your house. But the same is like replace alcohol. Try something better that initial. Depending on like the cost per cpm, depending on like cost per carts, depending on the cost per click. I'm trying to get like a little bit of like is there smoke here? Is it worth investing more time and effort? The image works and performs. Then I'm gonna move into do I make a motion graphic similar to what I just shot? Maybe the can spins, maybe the girl picks it up and puts it down. That's the second level of investment. More time, maybe a little bit more money. Third goes into maybe it's full fledged UGC or what we call egc employee generated content because it's quicker and faster and cheaper. And then after that point I'm only then then it's been able to graduate. Like performance looked good at the smoke. Performance looked a little bit better at the motion graphic because it's now hitting up a different ad placement. Now I'm going to go full video investment. And then now it's like We've seen the quality of this over a period of week, three weeks, a month. I feel the confidence in investing in this overall concept. I'm going to make as much as I humanly possibly can. That's a logical investment from a creative. Knowing that the engine that we need is more creative, diverse creative and quality of that creative.
- [28:50]
A
And you know the angle and you know the angle.
- [28:51]
B
You validated multiple times. You didn't just get an incredible weekend where it popped off right. I think that's the. But what's the, what's the challenge there? How many of those do we get? What's the engine of us? We continually start this up. So when you go into some of these brands are spending 100, 200, $300,000 a month. The engine is often very difficult to do because you have two agencies over here, you have a creator manager over there. So the, the organization of the person that's driving that engine is very feed the machine of meta and that that and so you, then you come into AI. I live in two different places because first off our brand is very AI focused. Like you'd think about it. But it's all motion graphic. We use zero AI. I, I, I'm in the camp of going dude, don't be unethical. Don't, don't do fake men losing hair and like dripping and it's like oh my God, I got full head in my hair. Like I, people are going to take it very, very far and people are
- [29:47]
A
doing it right now.
- [29:49]
B
Yeah, I have this one, I have this one brand that I love them to death and they are a little bit more aggressive than I personally like to tend to be. It's better for like gut health and cleansing. What happens, what happens in your gut? You get viruses. It's like pretty graphic creative of. It's like these viruses are in your stomach. Like that's like it just hit you but then what it's selling you is like a spoonful of a medicine and then you're gonna buy 12 bottles. That's a, that's a lot like that, that is a different approach to it. But that creative works because what it is, it's, it's a agitate into problem solution. So I get it fee based, super fear based. But these guys have been doing, they've been ripping. Do you know how many times they would rip or how many I've come across the fake Joe Rogan CGI pitching thing. Oh dude. I've actually seen you you a couple times way back when. Like you'd be on like a podcast with someone. I was like, that's not neat. I gotta dig this. I don't know why I didn't send it to you, but it was like you doing a full podcast interview with a guy that like definitely did not interview. No, like, seriously. Yeah, I'm actually really. I just remember it. I'm so bummed. I have, I have this, I have this. I have, I'll find. I gotta find this. But that it's always, it's always existed. It's just like the ethics in which people are gonna leverage it to the point I think if you're a new founder now, you AI incorporation of holding the product. Don't do. I think when it gets weird, when you start doing a lot of faces or like UGC speaking to thing now you're now you're now. It's not real like what I think. And I brought this up to you because you and the founder crew, I was like, hey, if it's Nathan, you said it. But if they want to scale the type of creative of you and it's you and you've approved it, this is your shit. Wouldn't you just say, hey, like, make me 30 videos of me saying these things I said a couple weeks ago? Why not? That's not unethical. You did it. It's you.
- [31:46]
A
So what's the common thing that you see? You said you see 20 to 40 AD accounts on the high level a week. What's the common mistake that you see? And I guess really from understanding, like from a, from a brand that's they got traction, somewhat traction, like it's just not a brand new account. There's just like, it's not a brand new brand. They just come in and it's like, oh, hey, my ads aren't working. What was the common mistake that you see founders are making there?
- [32:12]
B
They usually fall in a couple of buckets. The biggest bucket would be they have too many ads, too many ads and too little of ad sets and too little of campaigns. When you go into each of these campaigns, it's small iterations of things that have worked in the past. And it's like 10 or 15 of these. And so on a daily basis, that ad might get a couple dollars in spend or the spend gets concentrated to like maybe two or three, but those aren't the ones that are driving the revenue. So it's like too much meta can't sort through what they should actually allocate spend towards. And you go and you're like, dude, this has been running for 20 days, maybe a month, and it's only gone $40 in spend. But you have 20 ads that got $40 in spend. So it's just eating away at the budget. It's like kind of like what I call like a slow chew to chewing through budget. It's not really getting you any learnings. And then you have the other side where there are too few of assets and they're not getting new things interested or introduced it into enough. I live in two different buckets around the people. Like, how do I scale? They ask this question like, how are you scaling? And depending on the scenario in the ad account, I do believe in a graduation period, or what we call scale it where it lies. Graduation period is I prove this out at a certain level in my testing campaign and I'm going to duplicate it into another campaign, isolate it and maybe make variations and then launch it specifically. It's one ad works. It's maybe a video of a girl. I'm selling the product and then I'm going to pull a clip out, I'm going to make an image of it, I'm going to make a motion graphic of it and I'm going to keep that original video. So I'm giving it. We know something about this is working. Let's give it its chance to kind of flourish by itself. That's one. That's like the graduation style. And the other style would be scale it where it lies. So if it's performing in the ad account, rule one, don't fix it. If it's not broken, increase the budget. So then that way you're just trying to scale and increase the budget where it is. You start to look at the ones that are starting to work. They're really only running to one or two pages. Again, it's shocking. It will work. It will work. But when it doesn't work, and I was talking to a brand this morning, he runs his products exclusively in Italy. He notices that after the 15th of the month, the amount of purchases that are happening are much less because they're running out of money towards the back half of the month. So supplements. And he goes, yeah, well, I really only have two things working. I have my Bogo campaign working and I can't crack this new test. We're growing from pages, but the new test is 80% of his budget. It's scary for me if that one campaign is not working as 80% of the overall budget, but yet it's not performing like it was. What do you do? You don't have options. Yeah, so you have to have multiple things in the AD account producing at different levels at all time. It's that ecosystem of how you have to run it. So I usually try to push and I was like, okay, what is the secondary product we can do? Can we bundle around this? Can we reposition how people are selling this? I push them as hard as I can into those two different directions just because they A, they don't have the muscle or B, their, their kind of half assing it.
- [35:22]
A
One thing I also see as well, and it's a common thing, I don't know if you see it is there's a psychological piece around scaling and just like the numbers are there but you just can't, like the person just can't bring themselves to truly kind of just like you said, add zeros. What is that? And how do you help founders work through that? Because that's tough, right? And if it's your own money then it's easy for you because you've spent at the highest of all high levels, you've maxed out the accounts. But yeah, there's this kind of psychological fear and mindset piece of just like I'll just add like, you know, maybe an extra hundred. Like they scale too slow. Like, like all that pace.
- [36:12]
B
Yeah dude. And I'm, I'm saying this as I owe amex like $400,000 on my credit cards. Like, I'm saying this from like someone that like knows I have credit card interest building right now. And so it's very real like my money that that credit card, that shit's linked to Google. So I feel this, I, I, I, I think I, I have a little bit of a disassociation to, to the zeros or the dollars on the account now because of how long I've been doing it. That's all. I'll start there. So I'm, I'm, I'm aware of where I'm, I'm aware of the privilege of what I, your, the confidence in the numbers is going to allow you to feel more confident in increasing the budget. And so first off, they probably aren't super confident in where they are. So we have to start there. So we'll fix that. Say we get to a point where like yeah, I understand this is working, it makes sense. That's the baseline, the difference between a really good media buyer and this is a little tongue in cheek. The difference between a really good media buyer and a bad media buyer is that a really good media buyer knows how to Spend money. Very loaded paragraph. The reason is that they've seen the scenarios in which they should increase the budget and they've seen the scenarios in which they should reduce the budget. And a lot of this is reassurance of what we do we call like the accordion view. The accordion view is the day of you're making decisions today. Today is actually. Those aren't the decisions. The decisions you're making today are actually based upon what has been happening for the past week. So your decision, we have three decisions on each day. If it's working, I either increase the budget. If it's not working, I decrease the budget or if it's too soon to tell, I leave it be. Then I accordion out. I go to the past three days of trend spend has been budgets being exhausted. The metrics around cart, the metric cost of cart, the metrics around cost per click. The metrics around CPM are trending in a stable or decline to the positive direction. It's getting more cost effective. Then I accordion out again to seven days and we still see that trend. Maybe, maybe at the beginning it was too expensive and it wasn't hitting or it stopped spending for a couple of days. So the further you accordion out and then you come back into the day today and make a decision because now I go today, this, this looks good. Why does it look good? Because baseball, in the last three days, the trend of conversion has increased. The amount of budget being spent on this ad has increased or stayed the same. And the performance of the carts have been steadily at a place where this will be profitable on the next conversion, next purchase. So this constant view of today but three, today but three plus seven. But today plus three plus seven plus 14. It's a muscle and it's a routine of habit of checking. You were shocked that we do day to day we do hourly updates, right?
- [39:00]
A
Crazy.
- [39:01]
B
We do hourly updates when you're. When you're dropping a mill a month, which this is a peak in July and August last year before we went into a retail expansion. That's important. Okay. Now I don't think people spent. If you're spending a hundred thousand a month, I don't know if you need hourly. It'd be cool. But what are you really making decisions on at that point? The more channels you have, the more updates you need because the different type of opportunities you potentially scale. I think that that's where it gets more intense. When you are getting an hourly update on performance, you start to realize that a change that I make at 7am will dramatically the change I made at increasing budget at 7am if not reviewed by noon and if not reviewed by 3pm in your time zone will result in you ruining a profitable day.
- [39:55]
A
That's crazy.
- [39:57]
B
I think that's what I think. And, and it's manual. This is also a very, very important thing to me. AI comes. It makes it a lot more easier for you to ask a couple questions. I love Sidekick from Shopify. I think I use this on a daily basis. I'm like, hey, can you give me like retraining customers versus new customers? I love, I love Psychic. I think it's great. We use cloud, we use a couple other tools. I don't have anything custom, but I want these people pulling every single day. I want them to see the numbers. I want them, I want the scenario to come to me after. Like, I want it to be a dashboard interactive. Sure, it can be pretty sure, but I want them to be like inputting. We spent this on Meta yesterday. We acquired this many AOV subscribers, etc, and I want them to see it because you got to be in it. If not, you're not really, you're not really in it, you're not really operating, you're just, you're playing.
- [40:43]
A
So I think you really broke down like a really good framework for founders if they want to scale. But one thing I want to talk to you about is agencies fail when founders don't understand their own numbers. And what do founders need to know before handing over their ad spend? And you, you know, you have many different agencies, you know, founder operators. This is going to be an incredible membership that we're launching. We're going to help founders know their numbers scale up. You know, what do they need to know?
- [41:13]
B
Yeah, I hear you on this one. So as an agency owner, we, we will lose more than we will win if the founder comes in and says like a roast needs to be a 3X, we're like, like, okay, okay, like how? Like how did you get there is 3x at a hundred thousand to spend. 3x at four hundred thousand to spend. Like the, the, the, the, the conversation, the narrative around like your roas is this your roast? Like this is important Roast doesn't mean Rose is what the dashboards are telling you. You look at triple whale, you look at North Beam, you look at Meta, you look at Google, you look at Snapchat, you look at Shopify, they're all giving you weird stuff. They're all on different attributes, trust them.
- [41:52]
A
And they're all gunning to show you that they've Got your return.
- [41:56]
B
Yeah. So you keep, you, you stay in the dashboard. Yeah, you keep, you keep hitting the refresh there. So on the agency side, when so say, and this is kind of like where this is rooted in is contribution dollars, cash available to deploy money in the bank account. What is shop, what is your shopify payouts looking like? Like what is the net revenue that you're able to, that you're predict that you're going to be able to use for, for the day to day working capital? I was never needing to do that. When I'm, when I'm just agents, I go like, cool. What are the numbers I need to make sure I hit? Ross, Is this cool? Then I can spend, they always do this spend unlimited budget on as long as you're getting a 2x or 3x such bullshit. Because that, that all that means to me is either a two things. Actually, I'll take that back to two things. It means that they know the numbers so well, so well that they go just look at this one number right here, Ross. Okay. Or they don't know at all. And they believe that it makes them feel good because others have told them that you should be at a 3x. And so as an agency, you're like, all right, well I got to understand how this. So we always, you take the product costs and their shipping costs, their average order value, their dollars. Or you can, you can put in the team that is being dollars being spent on the agency. The fee has to go into the overall net profit you have to make. You go into the cost of advertising dollars. Are you, are they covering shipping? Are you covering shipping? So like there's so many scenarios that you have to kind of plan through that and the fluctuation of like how much of this is new customers versus returning. So all, all, literally all of that. Like we walked through all these dashboards yesterday and there's no, just like one place to like plug it all in. You can get close. Like you can be dangerous, but you're not gonna get specific. But if you're not specific, you're not gonna be able to spend into a confidence that is gonna make you feel like, I can't increase this not by $20, but by $2,000 today. And it takes, it does take some hand holding. It does take some everyday updating and dashboarding and checking. But as soon as you start getting the trends over long periods of time, you feel confident. For instance, if Al, who's my head of performance, he's going to come to me, he's Like Shaq yesterday, we first time customer AOV was 1 $7. Our blended new customer, our new customer CAC was $65 and our CAC to LTV is 230. He can give me these three numbers. I go, okay, you could have spent $120 minimum including product cost and you could have allowed that CAC. So that CAC could have been 120, not 60. Because I know that payback was already going to hit month zero the month I acquired them. And so what we were doing in the call was like, what if we spent two times what we spent last month and acquired two times the amount of customers, what would that result in? And then you, you scenario it on out, are they coming back or not? And I think that that and agency's not going to do that. Like just, they're just, they just won't, they don't have the time. You're renting the human, you're renting the human cow that you're getting that is going to allocate a little bit of mood to you and that's it. And it's shocking. We have three agencies. I'm very proud of these agencies. I love them to death. I think the leadership team is incredible there. But we by design. And you're paying for this. You're paying for collective knowledge and acceleration of learning and a level of professionalism and confidence in decision making. That's an agency, that's, that's council, right?
- [45:18]
A
Yep.
- [45:21]
B
That's. Let's say someone's running paid media. I'll use USD. I won't do the AUD. 30% off on this one. Okay. USD, say someone's running paid media that a hundred thousand dollars spent. Clients, they, they're doing their email themselves. You're going to spend on an agency between $5007, $500 that maybe that includes creative, maybe they get edits, whatever. Or the 5,000, $7,500 you put towards ad spend or new creative or a portion that's paid towards someone that can look over your shoulder, allow you to get the confidence to make these decisions. You pay a fraction of that. 15, 2,000, 2,500. And now you are in control of everything. But that's literally a net save of what's an average contract? Six months. Yeah. Thousands of dollars you just blew.
- [46:12]
A
Yeah. So dude, that's what I'm really pumped to talk about. I could talk to you about this all day.
- [46:18]
B
That gets me really fired up, dude.
- [46:19]
A
We could talk about all day. You have just absolutely just thrown straight Fire on Facebook ads, the technical setup, how to scale in 2026. I want to quickly just touch on founder operators because this is a community we're launching, right? And we are so excited to build this incredible special community where we're going to help you really kind of go through learn the numbers, build that marketing strength in house if you want to learn it. And so what does it mean to you to be an operator and why, why should people seriously think about joining this community?
- [46:55]
B
So I think it's. I've been wanting to talk about this for a very long time. I'm not a, I'm not a visionary. I'm not a, I'm a partner in everything, everything I've done. I've always been a partner in it. Right? There's a reason why this isn't like a big Nick Shackelford shenanigan thing, dude. I believe I'm incredible. I'm an incredible support system, I'm an incredible manager and I'm a credible executor which by definition all those three things roll into an operator. I like the day to day. I like the management of the team. I like that incredibly conversation. I like the incredible deep hard conversations of the shit you have to do. And I also am what I would say. I'm always on a pursuit of my locker room. Growing up and playing sports, growing up and playing in groups. I want to be like around common beliefs and interests of people doing. That's why I love in person events. That's why I love community around areas of interest for myself. And if it wasn't for E commerce, if it wasn't for online marketing, if it wasn't for agency, if it wasn't for digital, I would be a high school soccer coach at modern day high school in Orange County, California. I'd be doing and nothing's wrong with that, that'd be awesome. But instead I've been able to, I'm here been able to influence and help a lot, a lot of founders in this world. And you start to realize the more that you do this thing, everybody in your life has no idea what it is that you do. They see you open a computer. I love my wife to death. 17 years, she still is like I don't know what you do. I hear you talking and yapping in the phone all the time, but I don't know what you do when you have a community that you only have to say a couple words and they fully understand what it is that you're going through and then have actual critical feedback or an opinion on it just means a lot more. Yeah.
- [48:42]
A
So look, dude, we are synthesizing the framework, the source, the system, the blueprint. It's going to be a really special community. Founder operators, we have to work towards wrapping up, but if you guys enjoyed this, I just want to say thank you, Nick. You've given us just an absolute masterclass on Facebook ads. I hope you guys guys enjoyed this. And if you guys want to find out more, you go to founder.com forward/operators. Nick is our operator in residence. There's so much more coming soon, but thank you so much, Nick. This was great to have you. It's been awesome this past week, just hanging out, learning from you and building this amazing friendship.
- [49:19]
B
Thank you, brother.
- [49:20]
A
Hey, founder fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today and if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is 100% free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful founders and entrepreneurs all around the globe. So your feedback helps us grow, improve, and even bring on more incredible guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment and leave us a review. It really means a lot to me and the founder team. It makes so much of a difference. Thank you again for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode.