Dose 215: If Your Ads Die in Two Weeks, You Have a Positioning Problem

This week’s dose is also a full podcast episode about how to approach growth. Tune in on your favorite platform:

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

I had a great conversation this week with Alex Greifeld, founder of No Best Practices. I've followed her on Twitter for years. She spent over a decade in fashion ecommerce before going out on her own, and these days she works on creative strategy: figuring out who could buy your product, what story gets them to buy, and what kind of customer each story brings in.

That last part is why I wanted her on the show. We talk about LTV and churn constantly here, but you can't retain someone you never acquired, and how you acquire them shapes how long they stay.

Here are three things from that conversation that I'm still thinking about.

1. The promise you make decides the customer you keep

Alex told me about a fitness supplement brand she consulted for. Their hero product was, at its core, a weight loss product for men. Funny creative, great hooks, and it scaled hard. But the harder they scaled, the worse LTV got. The bigger the promise, the more it pulled in people who didn't have diet or training dialed in and were waiting on a miracle.

Meanwhile they had a recovery and sleep product nobody paid much attention to. Smaller revenue, less focus. LTV on customers who came in through that product? Three to four times the brand average.

Same company. Same ad account. Completely different customer, because the promise was different.

I see this constantly in my own client work. A brand asks why month one churn jumped, and when I dig in, the hook changed six weeks earlier. Retention didn't break. Acquisition started bringing in a different buyer.

Here's the frame I took away from our conversation. Think of your market as three rings. The inner ring is category enthusiasts, people who already use something like your product and have opinions about it. They're hard to win and incredibly sticky once you do. The middle ring is motivated new entrants: the woman entering perimenopause whose doctor told her to lift and eat more protein, the kid training for his first Hyrox. That's where direct response works and LTV can be strong. The outer ring is impulse. Your product went viral in a protein brownie video, or it's January 1. Nine times out of ten, that's a one and done customer.

Every hook you run recruits from one of those rings, whether you meant it to or not.

Takeaway: Pull LTV by acquisition angle, not just by channel. If your fastest-scaling hook brings in your worst cohort, you don't have a retention problem. You've got a positioning problem showing up in your churn report.

2. The 3:1 LTV to CAC story gets weaker as you scale

Everybody throws around the same number: subscription gives you 3:1 LTV to CAC, so you can outspend competitors. Everyone wants to be Grüns. I asked Alex how much of that is hype, and the conversation confirmed something I'd been circling for a while.

You can structure an offer that makes subscription look great to a first-time buyer. Make it the only way to buy, the way Seed did for years, or make the subscribe discount big enough that the choice is obvious. Ten percent off doesn't move anyone.

But as you scale acquisition, you move out through those rings. Impulse buyers don't want a commitment. Your take rate falls, and so does the LTV that made the math work. The 3:1 that looked real at $2 million a year often isn't there at $20 million.

Then channels pile on. People discover you on Meta and buy on Amazon because Prime is easier. Retail launches and site subscriptions dip. Brands crushing it on Amazon ask me how to pull those subscribers back to their own site. My answer is usually: don't. Quit fighting the river.

None of this means subscription is a gimmick. It's a stage-specific lever. Find a niche, thrive in the niche, generate cash flow. That stage, when you're mostly pure DTC and reaching motivated buyers, is when the tactical subscription work pays off most. Subscribe pricing against one-time, onboarding, early cancel deflection.

Takeaway: Model LTV to CAC by cohort and stage, not as one blended number. And if you're adding Amazon or retail, reset your incentive structure before your ecommerce lead and your Amazon lead go to war over the same customer.

3. If your ads die in two weeks, you have a positioning problem

This was the line from our conversation that stuck with me.

You can brute force a brand to $2 or $3 million a year on Meta almost regardless of positioning. Past that, a healthy sign is having some ads that live in the account longer than two weeks. If you're launching a hundred new pieces of creative a week just to hold your number, the creative isn't the problem. The story is.

There's a whole lane of brands playing that game on purpose: magnesium pills, AI-generated ads, fake doctors, 500 variations a week. If that's not what you're good at and you find yourself drifting into it, stop and rotate back.

So what does good positioning look like? A few patterns I keep seeing. Speak to a market nobody is speaking to, like Black Girl Vitamins building around vitamin D needs the standard formulas ignore. Take on an old problem in a new way, like Happy Mammoth reframing weight loss as hormone balance. Change the form factor, but only if it makes the thing more pleasurable.

That's how I'd read Grüns against AG1. They didn't win on greens. They made starting easier and more fun for the middle ring.

And then my favorite example, from Alex's own work with Stars and Honey, a collagen protein bar that tastes like dessert. Customers kept asking for a sample set. The brand said no, then maybe, then finally shipped a 12-bar tasting box. Conversion in the ad account nearly doubled overnight. They didn't change a single ad.

That's the whole newsletter in one anecdote. Your offer is the positioning. Creative just delivers it.

Takeaway: Audit your account for ads older than two weeks. If there aren't any, pause the creative treadmill and test the stories and offers underneath it. A starter kit or sample set that lets a motivated buyer commit with less risk will beat your hundredth hook.

Bottom line: Subscription is a repeat purchase mechanism, not a strategy. The strategy is deciding who you're for, what you promise, and which offer lets them say yes. Get that right and your ads live longer, your take rate holds, and your retention numbers finally reflect your product instead of your acquisition mistakes.

Find the niche. Thrive in it. Then bring the subscription playbook to the people who actually want one.

Until next Tuesday, that's your Subscription Prescription. 💊

- Matt Holman 🩺