Hey, hope you're having a great weekend. Like I said, I'm trying to make these more regular. I'll likely send Thursdays, but some weeks it doesn't happen and sundays it is. If there are topics you want me to write about, please let me know.

This week will be a busy one. I'm flying to do a all day video shoot for a new large partnership I'm doing. Excited to have it announced soon; it will be a fun shoot. Very different and out of my comfort zone. Then I'll be speaking at Forward by Tatari on Thursday. It's an annual event that Tatari puts on and it's world-class. I'll be speaking about my experience using TV to scale a DTC brand. Other speakers are Scott Gallaway, Steve Huffman the co-founder of Reddit, Oren John, and many others. Paid social is getting harder and harder. Whether you're looking to learn more about TV, or already using TV to scale your business, this event will be worth it. There is still time to get a ticket to attend, but they are filling fast. Check out the event and get your ticket here. ​

Lately, entering a new space and working on a new brand, I've been doing A LOT of research into what's working for other brands. Especially more direct response-focused brands. Matt and I just recorded a fun podcast for Operators that's coming out in a few weeks, sharing a few we've been loving to learn from , so I wanted to share a bit today.

Note you should not directly rip off brands. There's too much of that in our space. But you need to know what's working and analyze the principles.

Here are a few brands I've been looking at that I think are getting a lot right.

1. Norse Organics

I've been super impressed with Norse Organics. They are super DR. Their whole site is a funnel, homepage included.

They have long landers full of copy, very specific benefits, and tons of social proof, including walls of Facebook proof. That's a great idea I first heard on Zach Stuck's podcast years ago. Match the creative on the lander to the traffic source.

Even their offer is named after the benefit it solves. Really strong offer, great social proof, and they're riding the natural wave. I'd highly recommend checking them out.

2. Mars Men

Mars Men is Zach Stuck's brand. They raised money from L Catterton, but they were crushing it long before that.

It's a masterclass in the modern DTC playbook. They have a very diverse ad library with very intentional top, middle, and bottom of funnel ads. Lots of statics, tons of UGC, Trybe creative, and tons of unique mechanism ads.

Realy great UGC that does a great job with unique mechanisms. And their site is full of walls of social proof in many different formats.

They also do a great job pulling in a lot of different styles of landing pages, not just sending everything to one page.They have quizzes, listicles, advertorials, and more standard landers. 10/10 execution by this team.

3. Boostcous

I want to shout out a smaller and newer brand that's doing well. Not one of the bigger ones, but a really good example of doing a lot of the right things.

Boostcous is an innovative high-protein couscous. The founder Bar is an awesome guy, and he started Founder Led Organic. I think more brands should do that. He then took those lessons and had it fuel their ad account for a whiel. Now they have a lot more UGC which is good. Some partnership ads in the mix as well. They have a lot of creative, and they're clearly calling out things like high protein and gluten free.

My one critique is that everything is going to the homepage. They could lean into avatar-led funnels around their core value props, like high protein, gluten-free, or getting your kids to eat more protein and then creating very congruent ad to landing page funnels testing listicles for them. I think that's how they'd scale to the next level.

4. Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow is a SaaS company leaning much harder into the paid social playbook than most SaaS companies.

Hector had a video from their UGC program that went pretty viral on X. You can check it out here. I think they're playing the creator game super well, and they clearly have different avatars and angles in their creative.

Same note as Boostcous. With their funding, they might not need to be as aggressive as some of the DR marketers in terms of driving CAC down, but I do think they should experiment with very specific landing pages based on persona and angle. Everything is going to the same, pretty generic landing page now. But I love how much creative they have, many partnership ads, and being intentional about different angles or jobs to be done.

We went way deeper into these plus some other brands on the recent ep that will come out soon. If you liked this breakdown and want more of this, lmk. I can pick one brand and go deeper on them.

That's it for this week. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, if there's anything you want me to cover, let me know.

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Cody