The Secret Behind a $50m ECommerce Empire

Hey Reader,

I was speaking to a friend recently who scaled his ECommerce business from $10M to $50M in the last 18 months.

When I asked him what drove that growth, his answer was simple - creative operations.

But here's what's interesting...their creative isn't even that good in the traditional sense. You wouldn't look at their ad library and think wow.

What made them successful was VOLUME. They put out so much creative that they got feedback on messaging and angles faster than their competitors.

And that’s something I’ve noticed in a lot of high performance creative teams. Yes, creative quality is important - but quantity and diversity is where true scale can be unlocked. And anyway, in many cases, volume negates luck.

So today, I want to break down the 5 key elements I've seen in the best creative teams over the last few years that allow them to put out hundreds (or even thousands) of assets every month.

Let’s dive into it…

1. Build a Creative Operating System

It still surprises me how few brands actually monitor their creative output. If you're trying to increase production from X to Y, you need to know what X is first.

At Adcrate, we have a spreadsheet for every client that tracks everything from content style to launch date. Here’s what it looks like:

Note: This is NOT to analyze our creative. We use Motion for that. This is just to track our creative output on a week by week basis, which can easily be done through a couple of pivot tables in Google Sheets :)

2. Hire the Right People/Teams

First off you need to ask yourself who you need to hire. A freelancer, an agency, an in-house team or a combination of any of these.

If you're making less than $1 million ARR, the relative result that you would need to justify the price of an agency or an external team is not worth the cost. At this point you should be focusing on working out how to sell your product - which is the most important thing.

• For smaller brands, an in-house team focused on understanding and selling your product could be more beneficial than outsourcing.

• For bigger brands, a mix of in-house and agency expertise can give you a healthy amount of creative diversity at scale.

If you are going the in-house route, here’s a tweet I made on which skills I would screen for in each role:

3. Leverage Ad Creative Tools

There are tools that can help you 10x your output overnight. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Creative OS - for static ads inspiration

• Midjourney - for image generation

• ChatGPT - for review analysis and categorisation

• Claude - for scriptwriting

• Arcads - for AI UGC

• Eleven Labs - for AI voiceovers

4. Build a Content Library

One of the biggest issues I still see brands having is asset management. That’s why using a tool like Air, Playbook or Recharm is so important.

They allow you to tag your assets by:

• Creator

• Content type (studio, UGC, static)

• Value props

• Hooks/body/CTA

…or whatever other custom variable you want to include.

Here’s a quick tutorial on how we use Air to manage our assets across different brands:

5. Incentivize Your Team

As Charlie Munger says, "Show me your incentives and I'll show you your outcomes."

Incentivize your team or agency to produce winning ads and they will often find a way to make more of them.

At Adcrate, we often tie our compensation to ad spend - if we make great ads that scale efficiently, we earn more. If we don't, we earn less. It aligns everyone's interests toward the same goal (and by the way, if you want us to do that for you, click this link here).

You could very easily do this for internal team members too by either giving them a percentage of adspend or bonuses for ads hitting certain thresholds.

TLDR: The game of creative is about finding leverage through platforms, people, and providers. Build the infrastructure first, then get the right people to operate it.

That's all for this week! If you found this valuable, share it with a friend who’d benefit from being able to put out more creative :)

See you next week,

Alex