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Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
AI is recommending someone in your category right now. Is it you?
Why "I'm the founder" still works as a hook
Build an audience before you build a product
Stop Spending. Start Scaling.
AI Launch Codes: Get Proven Ad Concepts. Every Monday. Automatically.
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Let’s dive into it👇
Generative Engine Optimization
AI is recommending someone in your category right now. Is it you?
Your customers stopped Googling. Now they ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity who to hire, and the AI hands back a short list. If you are not on it, you never find out. You just lose the deal to whoever the model trusted that day.
That is what BusySeed fixes. We track 1.4 million prompts to see exactly how AI answers about your category and who it recommends instead of you. Then we get you on the list. One client went from 14% to 35% AI visibility in seven weeks.
Want to see where you stand? We will run you a free audit, live on a call, no strings.
Organic Content
Why "I'm the founder" still works as a hook
A lot of ad advice says not to bother introducing yourself as the founder in an ad.
The reason: nobody cares who runs the company, they care about the product.
In practice, this hook keeps outperforming that advice.
The reason?
When a founder says "I'm the founder of [brand]" and shows their name on screen, the ad reads less like an ad and more like organic founder content, the kind people already follow and trust on their own feed.
Viewers also tend to root for someone visibly building something, especially if that person feels relatable rather than polished.
Two details make this hook work rather than fall flat.
First, say why you built the company, not just that you did. If your reason involves failed attempts at solving your own problem, lead with that.
Second, put your name and "founder" as on-screen text, not just spoken. Viewers who watch on mute or skim past still register it.
Action Summary:
Film a 5-10 second clip of yourself saying your name and "I'm the founder of [brand]"
Add on-screen text with your name and "Founder" underneath
Follow it with one sentence on why you built the company (the problem you were solving for yourself)
Test this as a standalone hook against your current top-performing ad
Pod Bites
Build an audience before you build a product
In this DTC Daily Podcast, Seth, founder of Wellness, broke down how having a built-in audience turned a product launch into an instant seven-figure business.
Most founders build the product first and then figure out who to sell it to. Seth did it the other way around. His health and wellness education company for moms was already the largest of its kind before Wellness existed. When he launched, the customers were already there.
Here's what founders should actually focus on.
Build the audience before the product: Wellness launched because Seth's existing audience kept asking him to sell what he was teaching them to make. The product followed the audience, not the other way around.
Create anticipation before launch: Seth used a separate email list to slowly drip product details without revealing everything upfront.
Use your email list to seed Meta ads: Once customers came in, Seth uploaded that list to Meta to build lookalike audiences.
Test influencers in volume first: Start with 20 to 30 influencers and see what converts. Smaller, up-and-coming creators tend to have more loyal audiences and charge less than established ones.
Push subscriptions over one-time orders: Wellness nudges customers toward quarterly subscriptions. It saves on shipping, reduces churn, and keeps customers from forgetting to reorder.
Don't write off direct mail: For customers who have stopped opening emails, Wellness sends physical mail twice a year with a discount code to reactivate people who have otherwise gone quiet.
Stop Spending. Start Scaling.
Most brands running external traffic aren't scaling — they're just spending. Levanta's free playbook breaks down 7 proven strategies: what works, what bleeds budget, and how top brands drive millions in off-Amazon revenue.
Get Proven Ad Concepts. Every Monday. Automatically.
Meta's Andromeda update changed how ads get delivered.
You don't pick your audience anymore. Meta reads your ad and picks the audience for you. It transcribes every video, scans every image, and serves the ad to whoever the creative resonates with.
The creative is the targeting now.
That created a new problem. If your new ad looks like your last ad, Meta bundles them. Same audience pool, climbing frequency, falling reach. Meta's own research: purchase probability drops off a cliff after 2 impressions of the same creative.
So the algorithm demands new concepts. Constantly.
But coming up with new ad concepts is easier than you think. Your competitors and category leaders are already spending millions testing new concepts.
And the Ad Library shows you the results. Every active ad, ranked by impressions.
We built a system that finds new ad concepts every week and delivers them to you every Monday morning.
But before the system, understand what an ad concept actually is:
An ad concept is the intersection of four variables: persona × angle × offer × format.
Grüns is running this concept right now:
Persona - GLP1 User
Angle - Perfect nutrition partner for people using GLP-1
Offer - 61% off + 4 free gifts
Format - UGC Video
Change one variable and it's a new concept. Meta finds you a new audience.
This is what Andromeda rewards. Not more ads. More intersections.
Now the system.
Every Monday, a scheduled task pulls your competitors' top ads from the Ad Library, ranked by impressions. It tags every ad across the four variables. It checks the map against your own ad account. Then suggests new ideas for you to test this week.
Here is what it looks like:
This is the raw data of every ad scanned
What it found:
→ AG1 owns science-without-fun. Grüns owns fun-without-science. The cell between them is empty. 8Greens has an FDA-veteran formulator and apple-flavored gummies. It fits exactly there, and runs zero ads on it.
→ Grüns is force-buying the GLP-1 persona with 4 ads, selling generic greens. 8Greens has an actual fiber gummy, the one product that persona needs. Not one ad in the lane.
→ 8Greens runs a 20% welcome code on their own site. Zero ads mention it. The scan caught that in the first pass.
Every finding then became a concept brief: persona, angle, offer, format, hook direction, plus the brand fact and competitor evidence behind it. Ten of them, every Monday.
The full build is below for AI Launch Codes subscribers: the skill file, the scheduled task prompt, the brand context template, and the exact Apify setup. Twenty minutes. Runs every Monday
The Monday Concept Engine
Set it up once. Every Monday it reads your competitors' ads, checks them against your brand, and hands you concepts to test.
Here's how:
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