Scalability School

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 with a need rather than a want, since need-driven buyers churn less and complain less, and turn your best users into your ad creators by paying them a percentage of the spend their ads carry.

Scaling a subscription app with Meta ads comes down to the offer, the pricing
packaging, and where the creative comes from. Brad Ploch and Zach Stuck sit down
with Naveed, who went from affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency
to an ecommerce brand to Format Finder, the app he built in three weeks and now
runs at $20,000 to $25,000 a day in Meta ad spend. You'll learn how he builds an
offer, the pricing tests that worked and the one that failed, the campaign
structure behind the spend, and the creator flywheel that turns his own users
into his best-performing ads.
We discuss:
- How to tell whether an offer is worth running before you spend a dollar
- Why problem-solution fit matters more than unit economics at the start
- The move from a single $97 plan to $29, $59, and $97 tiers, and why the free
  trial never backed out on Meta
- The pricing change that moved AOV the most, and it was not the price
- Why customers with a need churn less than customers with a want, and how a
  realtor funnel tested that theory
- Why he runs one CBO split by geo, no ABO testing, and no interest targeting
- The creator flywheel: users who hit a million views make his ads and take 5%
  of the spend those ads carry
- What a one-click AI video editor actually costs to run, and how SaaS margins
  survive per-user API fees
- How he runs the ad account, customer service, and product development through
  AI agents in Telegram and Slack
- Why the harness around the model matters more than the model
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Connect with Naveed https://x.com/navuud
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
 Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach
Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no
recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and
real ad accounts.
Chapters
00:00 How to scale a subscription app with Meta ads
00:29 Meet Naveed: Switch Research to Format Finder
02:45 From affiliate marketing to a 45-person performance agency
04:06 Getting banned by Meta and what it exposed
05:45 Why the ecommerce inventory cycle burned him out
08:10 How One Peak turned viral videos into a course business
10:10 Building Format Finder in three weeks with AI
11:50 What the app does, from format quiz to finished cut
13:15 Why the offer is the biggest lever nobody talks about
16:18 How to price a subscription without killing conversion
19:15 The pricing change that moved AOV the most
19:55 Why customers with a need beat customers with a want
22:05 A word from Northbeam
23:20 Why your ad does the targeting, not your audience settings
24:45 Ad account structure: one CBO, no ABO testing
25:31 The creator flywheel: paying users 5% of ad spend
28:35 How the video editor cut churn and unlocked scale
29:35 SaaS margins when every user burns API tokens
32:50 Why the TAM for creator tools is enormous
37:50 Running ads, support, and dev through AI agents
42:00 Where to find Naveed

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. Percentage-of-spend deals are fair when they carry a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target attached, and they should never be charged against branded search.

DTC agency pricing is all over the map, so Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck break down what you should actually pay in 2026 using a Foxwell Founders survey of 200+ agencies. You'll learn the real retainer ranges for Meta ads management, when percentage of spend is fair and when it is a red flag, what a media buyer should be doing to earn the fee, and what creative, email, SMS, landing pages, and CRO cost right now.

We discuss:
What 200+ agencies reported charging, and why 4 out of 5 quote a flat retainer or a retainer plus a percentage of spend
Why $2,500 to $5,000 a month has become the market rate for Meta ads management with no creative attached
When to keep an agency, bring it in-house, or pay up for one exceptional freelancer
Why percentage of spend only works with a hard cap and a CPA or ROAS target
At what monthly spend incrementality testing starts to matter
Why nobody should charge a percentage of spend on branded search
Why creative is the one agency worth paying the most for
What to pay content creators directly, with and without whitelisting
Email and SMS pricing, and the attribution model that gets brands fleeced
Landing page and CRO pricing per page and per month, plus five fixes that work on almost every store

Get the newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
Full Episode and transcript: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-school-podcast/what-you-should-pay-a-dtc-agency-in-2026Learn more: https://www.scalabilityschool.com

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com 

Scalability School is a weekly show from Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck about what is actually working right now in DTC growth. No theory, no recycled LinkedIn takes, just the numbers and decisions behind real brands and real ad accounts.

Chapters
00:00 What you should pay a DTC agency in 2026
01:58 What 200+ agencies told us about how they price
02:45 Meta ads management pricing: the floor, the market rate, the ceiling
04:42 Should the fee be flat, or tied to performance?
05:13 Why $3K to $5K became the market rate for ad management
07:36 When to use an agency, go in-house, or hire a freelancer
10:20 Why percentage of spend works when you cap it
11:01 What a media buyer should actually do to earn the fee
16:52 The gap between pressing buttons and real media buying
19:17 At what monthly spend does incrementality actually matter?
22:42 Google Ads agency pricing and the branded search problem
28:45 Creative agency pricing and why it is worth paying the most for
31:45 What to pay content creators directly
35:58 Email and SMS agency pricing without getting fleeced
39:42 Onshore vs offshore teams and what actually changes
43:20 Landing page and CRO pricing, per page and per month
48:15 How fast a landing page should go from idea to live
50:03 Five CRO fixes that work on almost every store

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 ad volume is determined by team size, and vet every candidate with a paid assessment that tests both craft and how they use AI. Building a performance creative team starts with hiring the most experienced brain you can afford, a director-level player-coach, then filling in strategists, editors, designers, and a creator manager around them.

In this episode, Andrew Foxwell and Brad Ploch sit down with Joanna Wallace, who founded the creative department at HexClad and served as VP of Creative Strategy at Birddogs, to map out exactly who to hire, in what order, what they cost, and how to test them before you commit millions in ad spend to their strategy.
We discuss:
Why going cheap on your first creative hire is the most expensive mistake in DTC
What a creative strategy director actually costs in 2026 (It's not what you think) and why
Why your ad volume is determined by your team size, full stop
Why agency experience beats brand-side experience for strategist hires
How to run paid assessments that expose AI-generated word salad
The coordinator role: the smartest entry point into creative strategy
Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
Connect with Joanna Wallace: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joannasloamewallace/

Joanna's creative strategist evaluation template:

To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch 
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com.

This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
Scalability School is the podcast for DTC media buyers and e-commerce operators who want to scale profitably — hosted by Andrew Foxwell, Brad Ploch, and Zach Stuck.
Chapters
00:00 How to build a performance creative team for a DTC brand
02:02 The #1 hiring mistake: going cheap on your first creative hire
03:04 What a creative strategy director costs in 2026
05:06 Player-coach: what the director does in the first six months
09:10 Why ad volume is determined by team size
13:13 The hiring order for seven-figure brands
18:18 Why agency experience beats brand-side experience
21:21 What nine-figure creative teams do differently
25:24 Sharing creative learnings across the whole company
31:27 Where to find great creative strategists
37:36 How to evaluate candidates with paid assessments
41:38 How to break into creative strategy (the coordinator route)
47:43 How to keep a creative team from burning out

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 actually degrades, and how to give your strategists room to think without torching your output.
Hannah has built ads and campaigns for 300+ DTC brands. Matthew's studio has driven $100M+ in client revenue. Both use AI daily. Both have watched it quietly weaken the same muscle they get paid for.
We discuss:
Why every creative brief in the space suddenly looks the same
The difference between AI helping your research and AI writing your hypothesis
Why AI is good at following rules and bad at breaking them, and why that matters for scale
How Hannah lost the ability to write a script after a few months of AI-first drafting
What a genuinely good AI input looks like (and why it's built before you open the tool)
The one-sentence goal every brief needs before anyone writes a word
Why building 7 personas on a $10k/month budget is a math problem, not a strategy
What "deep context" actually means, and why most teams don't have it
Why the efficiency-vs-quality fight is a leadership conversation, not a tools conversation
Join The Scalability School Newsletter: https://www.scalabilityschool.com/scalability-newsletter
This episode is sponsored by Proppel, the hiring agency that has placed more than 75 employees for Foxwell Founders members. Get 10% off your first hire when you mention the Scalability School Podcast: https://www.weareproppel.com/foxwell-founders-proppel
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you!
To connect with Hannah Houg send a DM at: https://x.com/hannahhoug
To connect with Matthew Gattozzi send a DM at: https://x.com/MatthewGattozzi
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com.
 
Chapters

00:00 Intro: why AI creative strategy is producing the same ads everywhere
04:08 Why every creative brief suddenly looks the same
07:18 What makes a great ad, and why AI can't break rules
10:22 Is research or briefing where AI actually hurts ad quality?
12:26 Why AI can't come up with the big idea
14:33 The danger of letting AI write your hypothesis
16:39 How AI quietly degrades your copywriting muscle
19:45 How to find an insight before you open AI
25:55 Why hyper-specific creative is winning on Meta right now
29:57 Why your team needs space to think, not more output
30:58 Has any LLM actually cracked ad copywriting?
33:00 Why creator talent match beats a perfect script
37:07 What a good AI input actually looks like
40:10 The one-sentence goal every creative brief needs
44:14 The persona trap that sinks small ad budgets
47:21 What "deep context" actually means
50:24 Why strategists want to slow down while owners push efficiency
53:27 Why this is a leadership problem, not a tools problem
56:32 Break your margins today for performance later
57:32 Bonus: the Michigan method

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 congruency: the ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it. Zach shares how MarsMen now runs 33 active landing pages organized by roughly 10 messaging pillars (aging, cortisol, energy, weight loss, GLP-1, TRT vs. natural), and the company has a hard rule that no ad launches without a congruent page behind it. The reason goes beyond conversion rate: Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading the landing page itself. Page copy is a targeting signal, not just a destination.
Brad backs this with a case study: a client sending all traffic to a PDP ($41K in spend) duplicated the exact same creative to a "5 Reasons Why" page. Same spend level, substantially better ROAS, lower CPMR, and the age breakdown showed 45+ ripping harder than ever. Same ad, new audience, unlocked entirely by the page.
From there they cover the format progression (listicle → advertorial → dynamic hybrid page → quiz), the specific page elements that matter (comparison charts, clear single CTA, social proof, FAQ, shoppable PDP sections injected below listicles), how to structure tests inside the ad account, kill criteria (48 hours at MarsMen's spend level, plus a "graveyard campaign" with cost controls to separate creative problems from page problems), what "winning" actually means (net new spend volume added to the account, not just beating the PDP head-to-head), and reporting (spend velocity as the success metric, heat maps, and session recordings, including one recording session that led to a single button change worth +20% revenue per session).
The episode closes with the getting-started playbook: don't reinvent the template. Go pull the landers from the biggest spenders in Motion or any ad-tracking tool and copy the structure, because they all run nearly the same one. The real bottleneck is copywriting, which is much harder than people think (raw AI output without heavy pre-prompting gets you "shit copy with a bunch of em dashes"), and perfectionism: your landing pages can be uglier than your website, and your ads can be uglier than your landing pages. Use your brand font and colors, but if it's not perfect, get started.


Key Takeaways
Did you know Meta's Andromeda algorithm is reading your landing page copy, not just your ad, and using it to decide who sees your ads?
How one brand took the exact same ad, swaped the PDP for a "5 Reasons Why" page, and matched $41K in spend at a substantially better ROAS while unlocking an entirely new age demo.
What if you could scale spend without a single new creative, new offer, or deeper discount, using only landing pages?
Why "my lander beat the PDP" is the wrong definition of a winning landing page test.
What watching just 20 session recordings revealed that a single button change fixed.
Why MarsMen refuses to launch any ad that doesn't have a congruent landing page behind it, and how they actively enforce it with 33 live landing pages.
Why nearly ALL nine-figure brands run the same landing page template, and why this one thing (and not design) is the real reason your pages take forever to ship.
This episode of the Scalability School podcast is sponsored by NorthBeam and they just launched Northbeam Incrementality. Northbeam Incrementality gives you easy, automated, self-service incrementality tests, while protecting you from the major mistakes so many people make while running incrementality tests. Your MTA handles the daily tactics, your MMM guides the long-term planning, and Incrementality provides the causal truth. It's a closed loop that allows you to scale what works and cut what doesn't. Right now when you head over to www.northbeam.io/incrementality, they're offering Scalability School listeners 50% off unlimited tests for a year when you join. Just tell them we sent you! 

Chapters
00:00 – Intro
02:42 – Creative and lander congruency: the ad makes a promise, the page has to keep it
04:20 – Mars's 33 landing pages and the "no ad without a congruent page" rule
06:48 – Organizing pages by pillar and how wide to go
09:04 – Case study: same creative, $41K PDP vs. 5 Reasons Why page (and the 45+ audience unlock)
11:27 – "Andromeda is reading the page, not just the ad"
12:52 – What CPMR is and why it's debatable as a metric
13:54 – The landing page format progression: listicle → advertorial → dynamic page → quiz
16:51 – The elements that actually move the needle on a listicle
20:48 – Testing individual page elements and the spend velocity you need to validate
23:46 – How pages get launched into the ad account (3 net new funnels a week)
26:44 – What a "win" actually is: adding net new spend volume
29:01 – Kill criteria: 48 hours and the graveyard campaign
30:08 – Persona-specific PDPs and injecting the PDP below the lander
32:32 – The Dr. Gundry VSL rabbit hole and why VSLs demand insane AOVs
34:29 – Using one open-ended quiz question to generate new creative pillars
37:23 – Landing page reporting: spend velocity, heat maps, and the recording that added 20% revenue per session
41:09 – How to get started: copy the top spenders' templates, copywriting is the real bottleneck, and "your landing pages can be uglier than your website"
To connect with Andrew Foxwell send an email Andrew@foxwelldigital.com
To connect with Brad Ploch send him a DM at https://x.com/brad_ploch
To connect with Zach Stuck send him a DM at https://x.com/zachmstuck
Learn more about the Foxwell Founders Community at https://foxwellfounders.com
Learn more about the The Hive Haus Creators Community at http://HiveHausUGC.com 
 
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