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pilothouse.co

“There is absolutely no reason you should touch paid ads until you’re doing five to ten million in revenue.”

That was Codie Sanchez, and the post went wide enough that DTC marketers spent a week arguing about whether they should be doing their jobs at all. Eric came back from vacation, saw it, and used it to launch a format he has wanted to make since the beginning of this show.

The Rundown is Pardon the Interruption for DTC. A few topics off the week, three people, everyone gives a take. First panel is Jordan Gordon, who runs post-click and retention at Pilothouse and hosts TWBERP, and Rafael Gi, who works partnerships and client strategy.

What you get:

• Both sides of the Codie Sanchez take. Jordan defends the free traffic position: if twenty percent of your traffic is organic and your total margin is twenty percent, that organic traffic is your profit. Rafael’s counter is that paid media is a muscle, and a brand that waits until $10M to build it has to relearn its culture, team, and workflows at exactly the wrong moment.
• What paid media does: accelerate. Good product grows faster. Bad product fails quicker.
• The wastage Rafael sees most across ten to fifteen audits a week. Brands paying to reach customers who were buying regardless, the platform taking view-through credit for purchases with no click, and that false signal then deciding which creative gets scaled.
• Marketing is downstream from business, and business is downstream from markets. Jordan on why your marketing mix is often not your decision to make.
• Why “evergreen versus campaigns” is the wrong framing past seven figures, and what demand creation looks like next to demand capture.
• “Shift our thinking from tests to bets.” Rafael on what changes once you have proof, and why the change is philosophical before it is tactical.
• Audience hygiene as the precondition for everything. Until existing, engaged, and net new are defined across every channel, none of your tests are valid.
• Advertising is vertical, email is horizontal. Jordan on campaigns for launches, flows for evergreen, and why someone who re-enters your world nine months later still needs to be sold your core product.
• Acute versus routine entry points in supplements and beauty, and the cross-sell each one opens.
• How to spot a brand that has the ratio wrong: growth decelerating quarter over quarter while the new-to-returning revenue ratio inverts. On the email side, campaign-heavy, flow-light, with Klaviyo revenue low against Shopify.
• Unique opens are brand impressions. The argument for email as an advertising layer sitting just below reach.
• The IKEA tote bag, and campaigns that exist to buy eyeballs rather than revenue.
• The car category rule that applies everywhere. If you are not one of the three brands already in someone’s consideration set, your revenue and your fame do not matter.

Who this is for: founders and operators between seven and nine figures, media buyers, and anyone who owns both the acquisition and retention number.

What to steal: the audience definition audit, the growth-versus-new-customer-ratio chart, and the absolutes-not-rates rule for judging new customer work.

Timestamps:

00:00 Should brands wait until $5M to run paid media?

05:00 Building organic traffic alongside paid growth

10:00 The hidden problem with scaling paid acquisition

13:00 Evergreen marketing vs. campaign moments

22:00 Audience targeting and wasted media spend

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