No BS eCom advice to hit $1m/month

SUMMARY

Spencer Pawliw, an eCommerce agency owner, discusses raw strategies for scaling brands to $1M/month, stressing superior creatives, growth loops, and focused execution over distractions.

STATEMENTS

• Most eCommerce scaling issues stem from poor creatives, not customer value propositions, buy traffic, targeting, or market conditions.
• Brands often waste time tweaking buttons like ad sets or interests instead of improving creatives, leading to stagnation.
• Continuous creative production, learning from failures, and ego suspension are essential for better ads and scaling.
• A brand achieved $80K daily revenue with $30K profit by prioritizing creative quality over other factors.
• Clients resist admitting even visually appealing creatives fail if they don't convert, complicating agency relationships.
• Many brands jump to blaming media buying after failed creatives, overlooking that good creatives require skill and iteration.
• Reviewing only winning ads limits learning; analyzing the 90% that fail reveals why they underperform and boosts future winners.
• Ad review is a skill honed over time, starting awkwardly but improving through consistent practice.
• Comparing losing ads to proven winners via tools like Ad Spy uncovers weaknesses and drives improvements.
• Structural elements like TikTok response bubbles aren't sole win factors; deeper analysis of creator delivery, environment, and congruence matters.
• Subtle audio cues, like background sounds, enhance ad believability and conversion.
• Landing page congruence with ads can yield 10x better performance than generic pages.
• Treat landing pages like ads: build them for every major angle to maintain customer journey continuity.
• High-volume content creators (100-500 videos daily) outpace low-output brands, enabling $100M/year scale without rigid strategies.
• Investing in insights from larger brands breaks limiting beliefs and accelerates growth.
• Growth loops involve customer research, original idea creation, testing, analysis, and iteration, lapping competitors.
• Copy-pasting competitor ads without deeper understanding keeps brands small, as it builds no proprietary skills.
• Staying focused on proven tactics, rather than chasing shiny objects like new platforms, drives compound growth.
• Smart pivots within an industry can succeed, but abandoning core expertise for unrelated ventures leads to losses.
• Depth in a few channels, like Facebook ads and advertorials, can scale to $300K/day with high margins.

IDEAS

• Creatives are the true bottleneck for scaling, often mistaken for targeting or product issues, forcing brands into endless futile tweaks.
• Producing more ads isn't enough; treating creative development like skill-building practice requires reviewing failures to evolve.
• Ego blocks progress when founders deem non-converting creatives "good-looking," ignoring real conversion metrics.
• Losing ads hold 90% of the learning potential, yet most marketers ignore them, missing opportunities to refine angles and execution.
• Ad success compounds from subtle elements like audio congruence and environmental storytelling, not just visuals.
• Landing pages should mirror ad promises exactly, turning a 1% conversion into 10% by sustaining narrative flow.
• $100M brands generate 20x more ads and 50x more content than $10M ones, highlighting volume's role over perfection.
• Conversations with top performers shatter assumptions, like discovering high-volume, low-strategy content flooding wins big.
• Growth loops start with avatar research, not imitation, creating self-sustaining cycles of original content that outpace rivals.
• Laziness in research leads to copy-paste traps, building no skills and capping growth at low revenues.
• Shiny object syndrome distracts from compounding expertise, as seen in crypto chases derailing eCom focus.
• Two years of laser focus on just Facebook ads and advertorials built a $300K/day brand, proving depth over breadth.
• Brand building demands original marketing to create exit value, unlike dropshipping's short-term copy tactics.
• Subtle belief shifts, like accepting landing pages outperform product pages, require evidence from competitors to adopt.
• Iteration on learnings via hypothesis testing refines what truly works, cutting waste over time.

INSIGHTS

• Scaling eCom hinges on creative mastery as the foundational lever, where superficial tweaks distract from the core need for iterative, failure-informed production.
• True ad expertise emerges from dissecting losses, transforming perceived randomness into predictable patterns of success.
• Congruence across the customer journey—from ad to landing page—amplifies conversions by fulfilling expectations, revealing how post-click experience often decides revenue.
• Volume of intentional content creation separates elite brands, underscoring that sustained output builds momentum beyond strategic rigidity.
• Growth loops foster originality and deep customer understanding, creating competitive moats that imitation cannot breach.
• Focus on proven methods compounds skills and results, while shiny distractions erode progress by scattering effort.
• Learning from superiors accelerates breakthroughs, dismantling ego-driven blind spots that keep brands mediocre.
• Subtle production elements, like ambient audio, subtly build authenticity, compounding to drive belief and sales.
• Building proprietary systems through research and action cultivates long-term brand value, enabling exits unlike transient copy-paste models.
• Hypothesis-driven testing of insights ensures learnings evolve into actionable knowledge, pruning ineffective paths efficiently.
• Depth in select tactics outperforms shallow experimentation, as sustained refinement yields exponential scaling.

QUOTES

• "It's not your CVO, it's not your bit type, it's not your targeting, it's not your market, it's your damn creatives. I'm sorry to tell you, but they suck."
• "If you only review ads that win, that means you're reviewing 5 to 10% of the ads you make."
• "Success with Facebook ads isn't sexy. It's boring. Study more losing ads to know what not to do and watch how many more winners you make as a result."
• "The difference between a $10 million and hundred million dollar brands is not a 10x. Damn. Period."
• "Scaling to 100K per day is easy only if you understand growth loops. Most brands that struggle to scale don't have a growth loop."
• "If you want to stop eating [__] in 2025 you have to stop looking for the next best thing. The number one thing that will help you have a incredible year is just doing more of what is already proven to work."
• "The biggest difference between the brands that scale and the brands that don't is they just understand why things work."

HABITS

• Dedicate time weekly to reviewing both winning and losing ads, comparing them to competitors' high-performers for targeted improvements.
• Produce 5-10 original videos monthly with intentional scripting based on customer avatar research, avoiding pure imitation.
• Maintain a checklist for new creatives and landing pages to action prior learnings, ensuring hypothesis testing.
• Engage in regular calls or podcasts with higher-revenue mentors to challenge and update scaling assumptions.
• Focus daily efforts on 1-2 proven channels, like Facebook ads and landing page optimization, for at least two years.
• Use AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude routinely to framework landing page messaging from ad breakdowns.
• Build landing pages quickly for every major ad angle, prioritizing messaging and imagery over complex designs.

FACTS

• A brand scaled to $70-80K daily revenue in five months by adopting high-volume content systems from a $100M/year operator.
• Congruent landing pages achieved 10% conversion rates versus 1% for generic ones, yielding 10x performance.
• $100M/year Shopify brands run 20x more ads and generate 50x more content than $10M brands.
• One health brand reached $300K daily at 30-40% margins after two years focusing solely on Facebook ads and advertorials.
• An agency scaled a client 150-200% yearly primarily through landing page congruence tweaks over six months.
• Ad Spy-filtered ads by shares accurately identify long-running winners, outperforming Facebook Ad Library's longevity metric.
• A $100M brand produces 100-500 videos daily without formal creative strategy, relying on systematic volume.

REFERENCES

• Evolve community on Skool for eCommerce scaling.
• Ad Spy tool for ad spying and filtering winning ads by shares.
• Facebook Ad Library for basic ad research.
• ChatGPT for breaking down ads into components.
• Claude AI for generating landing page frameworks and listicles.
• Page Deck tool for rapid landing page building.
• TripleWhale Analytics for eCom tracking (with EASYA15 discount).
• Insense UGC for user-generated content (with EASYA100 discount).
• Opensend for reducing abandoned carts.
• Alex Hormozi's principles on focus and pivots.
• Alex Ramoszi's insights on content volume.

HOW TO APPLY

• Research your customer avatars deeply to identify pain points and preferences, forming the basis for original ad ideas rather than copying competitors.
• Develop briefs from avatar insights, scripting 5-10 ads weekly and launching them to test 90% failure rate while capturing the 10% winners.
• Review all launched ads post-performance: analyze losing ones for angles, execution flaws, and congruence issues, then compare to high-spend competitor ads via Ad Spy.
• Extract key learnings into a checklist, hypothesizing improvements like adding subtle audio cues or environmental details for the next test batch.
• Build congruent landing pages for winning ads using AI tools to match messaging and imagery, testing them against generic pages to measure conversion lifts.
• Iterate the loop: action learnings in volume production, track scaling progress daily, and consult mentors quarterly to refine the system for sustained growth.

ONE-SENTENCE TAKEAWAY

Master creatives and growth loops through focused iteration to scale eCom sustainably beyond $100K daily.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Prioritize creative audits over media tweaks, allocating 50% of weekly time to reviewing and iterating ads.
• Implement growth loops starting with avatar research to generate proprietary content, aiming for 10x output volume.
• Build custom landing pages for every ad angle to ensure 10x conversion boosts from congruence.
• Learn from $100M+ operators via direct conversations or communities to shatter scaling myths.
• Avoid shiny objects by committing two years to 1-2 core tactics for compound expertise.
• Use tools like Ad Spy and AI for efficient analysis, filtering ads by engagement to benchmark winners.
• Test hypotheses rigorously on learnings, measuring outcomes to build a data-driven creative arsenal.
• Foster originality over imitation to create brand moats and enable high-value exits.

MEMO

In the cutthroat world of eCommerce, where startups chase viral hits and established brands fight saturation, Spencer Pawliw cuts through the noise. As founder of an agency scaling Shopify stores to seven figures, Pawliw insists that the path to $1 million monthly revenue isn't paved with algorithmic hacks or trendy platforms. Instead, it's built on relentless creative refinement—a lesson drawn from client meltdowns and chats with $100 million-a-year titans. "It's not your targeting or market," he declares in a recent podcast. "It's your damn creatives. They suck." Pawliw's unfiltered advice, shared alongside a co-host dissecting his tweets, reveals how most brands sabotage themselves by fiddling with buttons while ignoring the ads that actually move the needle.

The core revelation: creatives aren't a checkbox but a skill demanding autopsy of failures. Pawliw recounts a client emailing frantically about testing ad sets and interests, only to hear the blunt truth—fix your visuals first. Brands often copy competitors, launch, watch 99% flop, then upload more clones, trapping themselves at $10,000 daily. Pawliw's agency broke this cycle by treating losses as goldmines: review the 90% that bomb, probe angles and execution, then iterate. A subtle tweak, like syncing background baby cries to a "tired mom" narrative, can forge authenticity that generic efforts miss. This nerdy deep-dive, honed through hundreds of reviews, turned a client's output into $80,000 daily sales with $30,000 profit.

Landing pages emerge as the unsung hero, often overlooked in favor of product slaps. Pawliw shares a stark A/B test: identical ads leading to a generic page yielded 1% conversions; a congruent one, mirroring the ad's promise, hit 10%—a tenfold leap. "Treat LPs like ads," he advises. Use AI like ChatGPT to dissect winners and Claude to draft messaging, then build swiftly with tools like Page Deck. In Dubai's eCom hubs, where multimillion-dollar stores thrive, this post-click continuity crushes: open-loop videos feed into advertorials that close the journey. Pawliw warns against sending unaware audiences to bare product pages—it's like promising a feast and serving crumbs.

Volume trumps vanity in elite scaling. A call with a $100 million Shopify operator shattered Pawliw's beliefs: no scripted strategies, just 100 to 500 daily videos flooding the funnel. That's 20 times more ads and 50 times the content versus a $10 million brand—not a mere 10x gap. This insight fueled Pawliw's recent client surge to $70,000-$80,000 days in months. Yet, underestimation plagues aspiring scalers; they test one ad weekly, mistaking sparsity for strategy. Growth loops offer escape: research avatars, birth ideas, brief creatives, test failures, analyze winners, repeat. This self-reinforcing cycle laps copy-pasters, building skills that compound into nine-figure exits.

Distractions kill momentum, Pawliw emphasizes, echoing Alex Hormozi's focus gospel. Chasing crypto windfalls or "next big platforms" derails eCom grinders, who return broke after shiny-object binges. One friend stuck to Facebook ads and advertorials for two years straight, now pulling $300,000 daily at 30-40% margins—multi-seven-figure nets monthly. Pivots make sense, like gyms going online during COVID, but jumping ships? Reckless. For 2025, Pawliw's mantra: double down on proofs. Ditch dropshipping's virtual-assistant mimicry; craft original marketing for lasting brands. In a field rife with fleeting trends, this disciplined depth isn't just advice—it's the blueprint for thriving amid AI-driven floods and algorithm whims.