Shane Coleman

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Most brands pay one creator upfront and pray. Flip it: gift product to 50 who actually fit, see which 3 pop, then put money behind those. You're not buying content, you're running auditions. The 3 that win already had an audience that trusts you. The rest never would.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Your ad's first line is the most expensive real estate you own, and most brands waste it describing the product. Nobody's reading yet. Name what changes for the buyer instead — specs don't stop a scroll, outcomes do. Rewrite line one to finish 'so you can ___.'

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Your account ROAS looks fine because returning customers you'd have kept anyway are propping it up. Split out new-customer ROAS and most brands find acquisition barely breaks even. That's not scaling. It's paying to re-buy customers you already owned.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Most brands guess what customers want, then pay to learn they guessed wrong. Put a 3-question quiz between the ad and the product. Buyers hand you their preferences before they spend a dollar, so every ad, email, and product call runs on what they told you, not what you hoped.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Your happiest customers are an acquisition channel you're not running. No ask, no incentive, no system — you just hope word spreads. A referred buyer trusts you before the first ad loads and costs nothing to acquire. Why is this the one channel nobody builds?

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Every paid channel works the same way: you pay to find a buyer. A purchase-entry giveaway flips it. Entrants buy for a shot at the prize, so their orders fund the acquisition. You're not renting an audience, you're getting paid to build one. The only channel with negative CAC.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

The test of an agency isn't the monthly deck. It's whether you can point to one number in your bank account that moved because of them. Impressions and "optimizations" are activity. Marketing is a dollar that wasn't there before. If nobody can point to it, you bought reports.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Nobody tells you this about giveaways: follower count is the vanity metric. If the creator wouldn't actually use the product, their fans can smell it and entries die. Fit beats reach every time.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

What's the last software subscription you cancelled and didn't miss for a single day?

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

If you can't tell me what a customer is worth to you, you're not buying media. You're gambling with extra steps.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Stop testing button colors and subject-line tweaks. Three things actually move the number: the offer, the audience, the angle. Everything else is rounding error you're calling strategy.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Set your free-shipping threshold 15-20% above your average order value. Cheapest AOV lever there is: no new ad spend, no new creative, and it pays for itself on the first order.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

You killed that ad in 48 hours. It never spent enough to tell you anything. Most 'losers' get axed before 50 conversions — the point the data starts to mean something. You're not judging creative, you're reading noise and calling it a decision.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Discounting to clear slow sellers trains buyers to wait for the next sale. Bundle the dead SKU with your bestseller instead — AOV climbs, inventory clears, and margin holds because you never touched the price. Stop marking down what you can package up.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Most "AI for ads" is a chatbot bolted onto your dashboard. Reading the account is easy. Earning the right to change it while you sleep is the hard part, and the only part that matters. That's the line we're building Cesara to cross.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Building Cesara in public: 80% of an autonomous ad system is boring plumbing — API edge cases, reconciling what three platforms each swear happened. The "AI" is the easy part. The trustworthy data pipe is the whole moat.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Cesara doesn't get tired, doesn't have a favorite ad, and doesn't defend last week's decision. Half of media buying is fighting your own ego in the account. Taking the ego out might be the whole product.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

A good media buyer makes maybe 20 real decisions a day and then sleeps 8 hours. An ad account never sleeps. The edge I'm building Cesara around isn't smarter decisions — it's decisions that never clock out.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

Every agency sells you a dashboard. A dashboard tells you what already happened. I'm building Cesara to be the opposite - the layer that acts on the data while you sleep, not the one that reports on it Monday morning. Reporting vs running is the whole gap.

[Shane Coleman @ShaneColeman_]

The hard part of building an AI to run ad accounts isn't optimization — any tool can spend faster. It's restraint: knowing when to do nothing to a campaign that's working. That's the bet with Cesara. More soon.