Scalability School

Question: What are category entry points, and how do you use them in Meta ads?

Direct answer: Category entry points are the buying situations that make someone think of a category, like standing front row at a concert or lying awake next to a snoring partner, and the more of them a brand is linked to, the larger its share of mind and its share of sales. To use them, map situations across the whole category with the 7 W's rather than...

What should DTC brands A/B test to increase revenue per visitor?

Test the variables that change how the offer is perceived before you test reassurance. In Brad Ploch's recent split tests, cutting a $279 product's sale price from $229 to $199 lifted revenue per visitor 44%, adding six problem-focused questions to a quiz doubled it, and swapping the post-purchase offer took upsell revenue per visitor from about $2 to $10. Trust signal...

How do you build a DTC offer that raises profit without hurting conversion rate? Simplify the offer so a shopper understands it in seconds, then raise MSRP so you can show a bigger discount at a higher final price. The offers scaling DTC brands run today are buy more save more, a discounted first subscription order, or tiered dollar-off bundles. Brian Ng of Digital Ride raised one brand's MSRP to $74.95 behind a 50% discount and sa...

How do you scale a subscription app with Meta ads?

Start with an offer whose value is obviously outsized for the price, then test the packaging rather than the product. Format Finder moved from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and the single change that moved AOV the most was toggling annual billing on by default. Free trials failed outright because the cost to acquire a trial on Meta never backed out. Target customers...

How much should you pay a DTC agency in 2026? For Meta ads management on its own, the market has settled between $2,500 and $5,000 a month, and paying above $5,000 only makes sense when the brand spends six figures a month or the scope adds creative, forecasting, and CRO. Creative is the one line item worth paying at the top of the market, because a single breakout ad can add $20,000 to $50,000 a month in profitable spend. Percenta...

How do you build a performance creative team for a DTC brand? Start with the most experienced hire you can afford, a director-level player-coach for nine-figure brands, a senior agency-trained strategist for smaller ones, and let them build the team top-down, using freelancers to fill gaps while full-time roles get approved. Match output goals to headcount, because ...

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Hannah Houg and Matthew Gattozzi to answer the question every team is quietly avoiding: how do you use AI for creative strategy without losing the judgment that makes ads work? The short answer is that you bring AI a hypothesis instead of asking it for one. You'll learn which four parts of the process to protect from AI entirely, why the briefing stage is where ad quality...

Brad and Zach go deep on the single biggest scaling lever most media buyers are ignoring: the landing page. The spine of the episode is a mindset shift, meaning you can scale spend without new creative, new offers, or more discounting. You scale with pages.

They open with creative-to-lander congruenc...

Marin Istvanic joins Scalability School for a deep tactical session on what it actually takes to scale e-commerce brands to nine figures with paid media on Meta. Marin is one of the most hands-on media buyers in the DTC space, managing upwards of 5 to 7 million dollars a month in ad spend across his agency clients and his own internal brand (and this episode reflects that).

The conversation launches right into the hard hitting ques...

The Zach Stuck returns to Scalability School for one of the most packed episodes to date. Coming off a massive run of activity: selling his agency, Homestead to Verndale, co-founding MarsMen and closing a $27.5M Series A with L Catterton (ofcourse lets not forget becoming a new dad, too). Zach walks through what actually happened, what it took, and wh...

Host Brad flies solo to walk through exactly how his team structures Meta creative testing across eight figures a year in ad spend. The episode is a tactical follow-up to a previous episode with Phil, prompted by a viral Twitter thread Brad posted on the same topic.

The core philosophy: stop trying to outthink Meta's algorithm on budget allocation. Instead, run a single CBO campaign per product or offer, treat ad sets as simple fol...

In this episode of Scalability School, Andrew Foxwell is joined by Sarah Levenger and special guest host Will Sartoris for a deep conversation on what separates average creative strategy from high-performing creative strategy in 2026.

The core theme is that winning creative is not just about producing more ads or testing more formats. It is about understanding people better. Sarah breaks down how the best creative strategists build...

Andrew Foxwell (Foxwell Founders / Scalability School) sits down with Andrew Faris (AJF Growth / The Andrew Faris Podcast) for a joint co-release episode to break down the findings from the Foxwell Founders x Motion 2026 State of Agencies Report. A data-rich survey of hundreds of agency owners and in-house operators across 30 countries. The conversation covers AI's dual role as the #1 growth opportunity and the #1 threat for agenci...

In this episode of the Scalability School podcast, hosts Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Reza, co-founder of Motion, for a deep dive into how AI is fundamentally reshaping the way DTC creative teams operate. Reza shares his perspective on the widening gap between data-driven media buyers and creative producers, and why the most valuable professionals in the space are the ones who can bridge both worlds.

The conversation...

In this episode of Scalability School, host Andrew Foxwell is joined by Phil Kiel of Taikun Digital and co-host Brad Ploch to tackle the single most-asked question in the Foxwell Founders community: how do you actually test creative on Meta in 2026? The question was asked over 160 times in just 45 days, making it the undisputed #1 topic among media buyers and brand operators in the community.

The conversation digs into two distinct...

This episode is like a Meta scaling "early warning system" masterclass. Andrew, Brad, and guest Kurt Bullock break down why so many media buyers hit a plateau (even when ROAS looks "fine") and how to diagnose it before performance rolls over. The core idea: Understanding CPMR to give you a clearer view of whether you're actually expanding into new pockets of the market or just recycling the same people harder and harder.

They walk ...

In this episode of Scalability School, Andrew and Brad are joined by Daniel Okon, CEO of ACTIV, a growing digital first agency that has also moved to incubating/growing multiple 7 figure brands in the health & wellness space, to decode Meta's "Andromeda" update. Andromeda has created a huge shift in the ad ecosystem where the algorithm (via systems like GEM and Lattice) now aggressively favor true creative diversity over simple...

This episode is a practical walk-through of forecasting for e-commerce growth, specifically how media buyers and operators should think about revenue targets, paid spend, CAC/ROAS degradation, contribution margin, fixed costs, and cash flow without building a fantasy plan that assumes everything stays perfectly flat.

Abir (outsourced CMO/operator for multiple e-comm brands) and owner of UpCounting.com breaks down a simple-but-real ...

This episode is a tactical breakdown of AppLovin as a scaled acquisition channel—what's actually different vs Meta, what you should change in creative + campaign structure, and how to think about incrementality + reporting so you don't judge it with the wrong yardstick.

Miranda Pettinger, Performance Marketing Manager at 365 Holdings explains how they onboarded to the platform when Meta was underperforming and AppLovin starte...