Put yourself in situations where you have too much at stake to waste time or resources—if you cannot afford to lose, you won’t. Place yourself on “death ground,” where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.
90% of executives wake up before 6am. Not because of some hustle fantasy. Because the first 2 hours of silence are worth more than 8 hours of reactive chaos.
Since I joined @Neko, we've shipped 100's of product launches. This is our biggest update yet:
1. Body composition in every scan
2. All-new app and all your health data in one place
3. Our most advanced scan room yet
Can't wait for our members to experience this!
"What ad format do I need to test bro??"
⠀
This dude in Evolve scaled to $100k/day on simple static ads.
⠀
There are a dozen formats that print right now. They all work.
But format was never the variable, he spent his first couple days on research instead.
⠀
You're asking "AI animated or UGC?" when you should be asking "what does my customer actually care about, and how do I put that in front of them?"
⠀
That's the operator lens vs the customer lens.
You're picking formats. They're feeling a message.
⠀
Run 5 formats with the same weak message and none of them hit. Customers don't care how polished it looks. They care if the message lands.
⠀
So what makes it land? Two things stacked:
⠀
1) What your customer already watches organically. Not what looks good to you.
⠀
Grandma on Facebook stops for a slow talking-head. A 19 year old in beauty stops for a UGC girl yapping into her phone.
⠀
Find what's already stopping their scroll in your niche, with zero ad spend behind it. That's your format.
⠀
This is why "VSLs are the meta rn" and "UGC or statics?" is BS.
⠀
It's also why long-form statics (native-style image ads) crushed as an alt to VSLs for unaware and problem-aware audiences - people were already reading stories like that on their feed.
⠀
2) Research-backed messaging.
⠀
A polished video means nothing if the words don't match what your customer already believes about their problem.
A messy UGC clip means nothing either if it says something they don't relate to.
⠀
Pull the exact pain points and the exact words your customer uses. Reviews, comments, DMs. Dig.
⠀
Back to the Evolve guy. He spent his first days figuring out where his avatar sat.
⠀
Solution-aware. Already tried other solutions in the category, already knew they didn't work. They just hadn't been told why.
⠀
His product had a mechanism the market hadn't seen. So instead of guessing at a format, he built the entire ad around that gap:
Why everything they'd tried let them down, and why his didn't share the flaw.
A simple image ad comparing his mechanism to the old solutions.
⠀
IM8 did the same getting started - side-by-side image ads putting their dosages against AG1's underdosed label.
⠀
That gap was the whole ad. 0 to $100k/day in 2 months.
⠀
He didn't find a new format. He met his customer at the right awareness level with the right message.
⠀
It was never the format. It was meeting them where they already are.
Few.
2022 vs 2025
What got us here?
- being obsessed with the product.
- being obsessed with every touchpoint of the customer journey (support, shipping, packaging).
- staying focused on one acquisition channel instead of trying to win on Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat and 10 other things at the same time.
- hiring people who are better than me.
- building systems that work without me.
- and reinvesting aggressively every year.
Wall Street Titan Energy
This was the mindset of 1980s Wall Street legends:
Extreme confidence
Relentless persistence
The author interviewed the biggest buyout titans.
They all shared the same trait:
An unshakable belief that they would find a way to win.
dont be confident, be over confident. be delusionally confident. be so confident that doors open for you and reality bends for you. be sure that GOD walks beside you. The meek inherit nothing if they never believed they were worthy of more. be too much. be impossible to ignore.
The Guppy trap:
You’re doing $100K/month
You’re flying first class
You’re paying staff you “like”
You’re addicted to lifestyle
But here’s the truth:
You’re not building a business…
You’re funding staying small