Hal Smith

Digital Ads | Founder @hstreetdigital

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Looking for a hungry, high-agency Growth Strategist who wants to help scale some of the best outdoor brands in America.

You'll thrive here if you:
→ Have 5+ years scaling DTC brands on Meta and Google
→ Are obsessed with customer acquisition, contribution margin, and profitable growth
→ Understand attribution, MTA, MMM, incrementality, and the limitations of each
→ Love pulling data, finding insights, and presenting recommendations to clients
→ Have strong opinions on growth, testing, and scaling, but are willing to change your mind when the data proves otherwise
→ Take ownership, solve hard problems, and proactively bring new ideas to the table

This is not a "manage campaigns and wait for instructions" role.

We expect our Growth Strategists to diagnose constraints, build 90-day growth plans, challenge assumptions, and help clients make better decisions.

Compensation: $120,000–$210,000 OTE

To apply, email [email protected] with the subject line: "Growth Strategist Opportunity"

Please do not apply if you prefer being told exactly what to do, dislike presenting to clients, or are uncomfortable taking ownership of outcomes.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

@AdamGillman HIYA

[Barry Hott ☄️ @binghott]

This is an unprompted @andrewfoxwell appreciation post. Foxwell Founders Slack is so insanely valuable.

Got some great prompt guidance and creative inspo already and it's not even 8am.

[David Senra @davidsenra]

Rick Rubin’s fishing metaphor:

This is the sign of a true professional. He doesn't sit around waiting for inspiration to come— he goes to the studio rigidly, every day, ready to work, knowing that it will be there for him when he calls on it.

“It's like fishing. You can go out and spend the whole day fishing and not catch any fish. You can work for a day or for a week and nothing good can happen. That happens. It's out of our control.”

You have to trust the process. You have to keep showing up.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Most brands try to scale all year, and that’s the mistake.

The real growth comes from knowing when to plant… and when to harvest.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

The data to grow your brand is already in front of you. 

You just need to see it through the right lens. 

Check what percentage of your ad impressions are going to existing customers vs new ones.

Ask whether your creative is speaking to a specific person with a specific problem or just saying something vague that could apply to anyone. 

Look at your pixel quality score and your conversion event hierarchy.

Those 3 things, in plain sight, will tell you more about why paid ads aren’t scaling than any strategy session will.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Imagine spending $6M in just 11 hours… and learning faster than everyone else because of it.

That’s what happens when testing becomes your biggest advantage.

[James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp]

The graveyard of amazing products that died because founders refused to admit that sales and marketing is 90% of all startup work is never ending

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Learn More: https://t.co/k97sB9ozVF

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Before I look at ROAS, CTR, CAC, or anything else, I want to know what the contribution margin on the product we’re scaling is. 

That number is the ceiling on everything. 

It’s the max we can sustainably pay to acquire before the economics of the business start to deteriorate. 

If that margin is too thin, no amount of creative brilliance, audience precision, or landing page optimization is going to make the math work at scale.

You might be able to engineer your way to a slightly lower CPA, but you can’t engineer your way out of a fundamentally broken unit economics problem. 

What surprises most brands is that contribution margin isn’t as fixed as they think. 

It’s actually one of the most adjustable variables in the whole system. 

Bundle strategy, for example, changes it immediately. 

When one of our recent clients saw customer that were just as likely to buy the home and travel kit bundle as a single unit, the blended contribution margin on that offer improved enough to justify more aggressive bidding. 

Other strategies to move the margin lever without requiring a product redesign include: 

- Pricing tests
- Upsell sequences
- Post-purchase offers
- Subscription conversion

Most brands are so focused on reducing what they spend on media that they never think about increasing what they make per transaction. 

But it’s an equally valid path to improving CAC efficiency. 

A $10 improvement in average order value on a $100 product can do more for your CAC ceiling than a month of creative testing. 

Start with contribution margin, model what target CAC needs to be at your current and aspirational spend levels, and then build your acquisition system backward from those numbers. 

The math tells you where the opportunity is.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

A Google brand keyword campaign is where we often find the selection effect in full operation. 

When someone types your brand name directly into Google, they already know you and are likely intending to buy. 

Meaning, they’re going to your site whether your ad appears or not. 

Bidding on your own brand name and taking credit for those conversions inflates your Google performance numbers while telling you almost nothing about whether paid media is actually driving incremental demand. 

That doesn’t mean you should stop protecting your brand terms, since competitors will bid on them if you don’t, but you should be clear-eyed about what those campaigns are. 

They’re defensive rather than growth-oriented.

Your incrementality story lives in non-brand prospecting.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Learn More: https://t.co/k97sB9ozVF

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Not all customers are equal, some drive almost everything.

The real advantage is knowing exactly who they are and how to reach them.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

There’s a persistent belief in outdoor that investing heavily in DTC performance marketing will “cheapen” the brand or compromise brand equity. 

I understand the instinct, but it’s usually wrong. 

And believing it is costing brands real growth. 

Performance marketing, done right, puts your brand in front of the right people with the right message at the right moment. 

The real culprit that cheapens brands is either a weak offer or sloppy targeting.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Learn More: https://t.co/k97sB9ozVF

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Your pixel quality score is one of the most overlooked performance levers in your stack. 

But most outdoor founders have never checked it. 

It’s sitting in your Meta Events Manager right now, giving you a direct read on how well your conversion signals are configured and how much trust the platform places in your data. 

A low-quality score means Meta is essentially flying blind when it optimizes your campaigns. 

It doesn’t have a clean, reliable signal to work from, so it’s making probabilistic guesses about who to show your ads to. 

That translates to higher CPAs, looser targeting, and longer ramp times when you launch a new campaign or creative.  

Most brands in this situation assume the problem is creative or bidding, so they keep swapping ads and adjusting budgets. 

But the root cause sits untouched in Events Manager. 

The pixel quality score is a symptom of a deeper set of issues:

- Duplicate conversion events
- Proxy signals standing in for real outcomes
- Inconsistent event naming
- Mismatched attribution windows that confuse the algorithm

And the fix starts with a full conversion architecture audit. 

Once your signal quality improves, you’ll often see performance gains without changing a single ad because the platform is finally being told to find the right people instead of the most available ones.

We’ve made pixel quality a gating requirement before scaling any account because you can’t spend more until the foundation is trustworthy. 

Go into Meta Events Manager today, find your pixel quality score, and treat anything below a strong rating as a constraint that needs to be removed before you burn more budget on top of it. 

It’s one of the fastest diagnostics you can run and consistently one of the highest-impact fixes we make in the first 30 days of any engagement.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

I would argue most bigger name, outdoor brands don’t have a traffic problem.

They have a systems problem and if they fix the right levers, growth follows fast.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Most outdoor brands were built by product people, guides, athletes, or outdoor enthusiasts. 

These people usually aren’t performance marketers. 

On the plus side, it means the products and brands are authentic. 

But it also means there’s a massive gap between how good the products are and how well they’re being marketed digitally. 

The brands that close the gap are the ones gaining share right now.  

The opportunity is real and it’s not fully saturated yet. 

But the window won’t stay open forever.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

We ask a pretty unglamorous question when we kick off with clients.

Is this account actually structured to acquire new customers, or is it retargeting existing ones? 

Most brands have never explicitly built a campaign structure that separates net-new prospecting from retention and retargeting. 

They’ve let the platform optimize across everyone, and the platform has chosen the path of least resistance. 

Which means existing customers. 

The structural fix might not be complicated, since you just have to have separate campaigns, objectives, and measurement, but you have to ask the question first. 

Unfortunately, most brands don’t start with the question and instead move on to things that only exacerbate the problem. 

But structure trumps tactics every time.

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Learn More: https://t.co/k97sB9ozVF

[Hal Smith @hal4ads]

Most agencies fail with ads because of misalignment.

If expectations aren’t clear, nothing else matters.