PixlFeed Radio

Christian Lovrecich

I use this show to share what I am seeing while operating and growing businesses, and what I would actually do about it. For most of its first hundred episodes, this show was interviews with other entrepreneurs about how they built their companies. Those conversations are all still here. From here on, most episodes are me going through decisions from inside the businesses I work in, including what we are testing, what worked, what did not and what I would do differently. Interviews may come back later. The lens is DTC growth. That means a lot of paid media, creative, offers, conversion and retention. Every one of those decisions shows up somewhere else in the business, so contribution margin, inventory, forecasting and cash come up a lot too. A marketing decision can look great in the ad account and still hurt the business, and that is usually where the useful lessons are. The show is still for entrepreneurs, marketers, operators and people interested in business growth. New episodes also run as videos on my YouTube channel. If you are a founder, CEO, CMO or operator responsible for the decisions that affect a business's P&L, you can apply to join The Growth Boardroom, my private community on Skool, at https://www.skool.com/the-grow....

  1. 1d ago

    Where I Take the Risk in Black Friday Week

    I kept the same Black Friday offer we'd run the year before because I checked the previous year's results and it crushed. I could have built a bigger promotion, but I wanted to know what was already working before adding another test to our biggest selling week. The offer stayed on the calendar for now, which left some other decisions to make. We had fresh creative to test, budgets to think through, affiliate economics to consider and even the question of what should be allowed to connect to the ad account. Some of those decisions had evidence behind them and others could get expensive before we had a chance to figure out whether they were worth it. In this episode I explain why we tested fresh creative in ABO before scaling winners in CBO, because Meta had been picking favorites before many of the other ads got meaningful spend. I also explain why a 3x return on about $200 tells me very little about scaling and why a Meta return target can look like a loss on the dashboard when membership value and marketplace orders are included. Then there's the financial side. I don't want future subscription revenue used to explain every losing day unless the actual cohort numbers, contribution and cash position support it. I also explain why I stopped before raising an affiliate payout and wanted to compare what a partner could earn per visitor instead. And I've had advertising accounts banned before. Recovery has taken anywhere from about a day to four or five days, which is why I wanted direct platform confirmation before connecting anything new heading into peak. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. Why I kept the previous Black Friday offer rather than introducing a bigger promotion 2. Why a new offer or discount structure becomes another test during the biggest selling week 3. Why fresh creative went into ABO and proven winners went into CBO 4. Why a 3x return on about $200 is weak evidence for a major budget decision 5. Why we reset a Meta return target to account for real membership and marketplace value 6. Why subscription retention, January cancellations and cash exposure matter when the first purchase loses money 7. Why affiliate earnings per visitor can matter more than raising the commission rate 8. Why I prefer testing one challenger against a control when there's enough traffic 9. Why I wanted platform confirmation before allowing new ad account connections 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you're working out what to change before Black Friday and what to leave alone, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/j-4QV3ykpeo 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  2. 5d ago

    I Wrote the Rule on Calling Tests Early. Then I Called One.

    I wrote an SOP telling our team not to call CRO tests early unless it was absolutely necessary. Less than a month later, our developer brought me a test that had been running for almost four weeks without statistical significance and I was the first person ready to call it a winner. Later in that same meeting, I was arguing that we should A/B test express checkout buttons our analyst didn't think were even worth testing. I told everybody I was probably being paranoid about it. And I can understand why those decisions sound contradictory. The upsell copy test had been ahead since the beginning, but our analyst estimated that getting roughly another 500 visitors would take another four or five weeks. They considered the result directionally good and didn't think waiting was necessarily worthwhile. We had other experiments waiting for traffic too, so I agreed to call it. Then we started discussing express checkout. Most of our sales came from mobile and I was concerned that adding more payment buttons could take up valuable checkout space or create a problem that stopped customers from finishing their purchases. Our analyst questioned whether we'd even be able to attribute a small conversion rate change to another payment option. Fair point. I was worried about something much more drastic and wanted us reviewing conversion rates, heat maps and session recordings. Then the developer suggested moving the express checkout buttons above the shipping form. Now we had a bigger question. Did those buttons actually populate the customer's information automatically or would people still have to enter everything manually? And we were having this discussion while several of us admitted we didn't personally use the payment methods we were trying to position on the page. This was also the same CRO process where I'd proposed something I called statistical significance infrastructure, only to have our analyst explain that the calculators I wanted already existed online. And we'd created a separate meeting because our original CRO meetings kept running out of time. Naturally, I managed to run the new meeting over because I thought we had an hour when it was supposed to be about 25 minutes. By the end of the express checkout discussion, we had a specific plan. Our other developer would check whether those payment methods required manual information entry. If they did, we'd add the buttons below the form without an A/B test. If they populated the information automatically, we'd move them above the shipping form and test that layout first. That version could make mobile checkout easier, but it was also a more substantial change to the purchasing experience, which is why it gets the A/B test first. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. Why I pushed back on making 12 CRO tests per quarter a fixed target 2. How available funnel traffic changes the time required for meaningful test results 3. The statistical significance calculator I wanted to build that already existed online 4. Why I supported calling an upsell copy test before statistical significance 5. Why adding express checkout buttons made me nervous about mobile conversion 6. What changed when the discussion moved from adding buttons to rearranging the checkout 7. Why our developer proposed two different approaches depending on whether customer information populated automatically 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you're working out which tests are worth your traffic and which changes shouldn't go live without one, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qVovLzypVZM 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  3. 6d ago

    I Called Our Own Store Unauthorized During a Knockoff Review

    We were reviewing marketplace sellers with our brand protection company when I pointed to a seller with 19 listings and said it wasn't one of ours. A few minutes later, I had to correct myself. It was one of our own stores. That became a problem worth paying attention to because the enforcement system could apply a seller decision across all of that seller's listings. Across three calls, we worked through how to set up brand protection, what the software could automate and where somebody still needed to check the information. We also had more than 500 marketplace links to review and some of the sellers were legitimate retail partners. Going through more than 500 links individually could take forever. We needed to move on this, so I proposed exporting the seller lists by marketplace and letting the retail team identify the sellers they worked with. They knew those retail relationships and could tell us which sellers belonged to their accounts before we made enforcement decisions. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. What the brand protection company needed before enforcement could begin, including authorization documents and evidence for copyright claims 2. How we approached obvious suspicious listings and where I was comfortable using automated rules 3. Why the vendor still expected some manual checking after setup 4. How allowlists and deny lists could affect every listing associated with a seller 5. Why genuine products being resold at higher prices were not automatically counterfeit 6. How 17 review incidents traced back to one of our own stores 7. Why I proposed having the retail team identify authorized sellers from exported marketplace lists instead of manually checking more than 500 links 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you're working through marketplace enforcement, retail relationships or other operational decisions inside your ecommerce business, The Growth Boardroom is my private Skool community for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for business performance. Apply to join here: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SEhQn66sH0g 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  4. Nov 1

    What Scaling to $100M on Revenue Alone Cost Us

    (00:00:00) Scaling past $100M on revenue alone (00:00:46) Before you raise Q4 budgets (00:01:15) How the scale year went (00:01:27) What the backorders did to our reviews (00:01:48) The first time orders outran supply (00:03:03) Two years later: a product takes off again (00:04:26) Getting the forecast to the media buyers (00:05:04) A delay of a couple of days, handled (00:05:29) Launch on receipt, not on delivery (00:07:02) Holding spend back for margin (00:07:43) The stock check and the reorder (00:09:18) Why I still push growth (00:10:05) The numbers I track every week A few years ago I was part of helping grow a DTC brand from roughly $40 million to over $100 million a year in revenue. The year we scaled hardest to hit that number, backorders reached about six weeks and our Trustpilot score fell from four point something to around three or two. It wasn't the first time I'd seen orders outrun what we could ship. This episode connects that year to my own small brand years earlier and to what happened at that same brand about two years later, when a product took off again and we made very different decisions on inventory, spend and margin. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. What six weeks of backorders did to a brand's review score 2. Why the same pattern hit my own small brand years earlier 3. Why the inventory forecast has to reach the people buying media 4. Why we set the launch trigger at receipt, not delivery 5. Why we held spend back on a product that was taking off 6. How a stock check led to a reorder and a reforecast with an owner 7. The numbers I track every week: contribution margin dollars, MER, aMER, cost per purchase and 30-day LTV 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you're planning how hard to scale this Q4, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yv-4eiSg7sA My video on the creator videos our ads never used: https://youtu.be/qYxO82OgV_g 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  5. Oct 30

    The Creator Videos Our Ads Never Used

    (00:00:00) Sending product to creators on TikTok (00:01:21) The check to run before the next round (00:01:42) How the creator push started (00:02:01) The samples made the program unprofitable (00:02:16) What I assumed about the shop link (00:02:43) The part that was on me (00:02:57) Commission and the return targets (00:03:36) Performance improved and a theory came up (00:04:33) What our media buyer found (00:05:11) What was actually spending (00:05:32) How the automated campaign picks a video (00:06:00) 95 percent of impressions on one video (00:06:29) Added to the campaign is not getting spend (00:07:11) The plan by the middle of March (00:07:41) Pricing creators against ad impressions (00:07:57) Dropping the shop link (00:08:41) What actually happened In February I ramped up how much free product we were sending to creators on TikTok. I understood that every video they posted with our shop link was added to the automated shop campaign, so I assumed more creators posting meant more videos for our ads to work with. The samples made the program unprofitable and our buying team was working against return targets built for videos with no affiliate commission. I had ramped up the volume without telling them. A few weeks later TikTok performance was improving, which is what I had said the new videos should do. Our media buyer checked every video the outreach had produced. None of them were allocated to our paid media. The campaign was spending on an older creator video and our own content and in a new campaign 95 percent of the impressions went to one video. TikTok's reps told our media buyer the automation pushes the spend into one video. What the creators were producing was organic reach. By the middle of March the plan for the program was built on a different idea: start with our top affiliates before any new outreach, pay creators for views, check that price against what our ads cost for the same thousand impressions and stop asking for the shop link. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. Why being added to an automated campaign is not the same as getting spend from it 2. How to check whether your creator videos ever reached your paid campaigns 3. Why affiliate commission changes the return target your buyers work against 4. Why the people buying media need to know when the creator mix changes 5. What TikTok's reps said about how the automated campaign chooses a video 6. What was actually spending when the new videos were not 7. How to price creators against what your ads cost for a thousand impressions 8. Why the shop link dropped out of the plan 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you are running a creator or affiliate program, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/qYxO82OgV_g My video on the order I gave my team to forget systems and make more ads: https://youtu.be/ujo8Bn7qPO8 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  6. Oct 30

    Why I Reversed My Order for More Ads

    (00:00:00) I told the team to forget systems (00:01:02) Q4 creative plans and the ad count (00:01:17) A warning I did not hear firsthand (00:01:41) Working backward from the spend goal (00:02:27) How to do the math for your own account (00:02:54) What our hit rate actually was (00:03:38) The ad I loved that showed the wrong product (00:04:31) The part that was on me (00:05:22) What another executive learned the year before (00:06:03) We still needed a target (00:07:05) Better inputs for every editor (00:07:54) Predicting the hit rate before a batch goes out (00:08:52) Setting a creative target for the holidays In early September I told our creative team to put systems aside and make as many ads as they could. We were behind heading into Q4 and needed new ads that could carry more spend. Six days later I worked backward from the spend goal for the month to the number of winning ads we needed. Our analyst said there had been one winner across the recent batches. We had been making them without much thought and those were the results we were getting. The next morning I found an ad I loved that was selling one product while the people in it used another. Our analyst found more basic problems in the account. Another executive described the year his team pushed a flood of unreviewed ads and almost none of them hit. I still wanted a target, but it moved to the end of the math. We started from the winners the spend needed and the hit rate we actually had. Alongside that came product training for every editor, a review checklist and a prediction of how many ads in a batch would hit, recorded against the results later. The order to forget systems ended with me asking for them. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. How to work backward from a spend goal to the number of winning ads you need 2. Why the hit rate belongs in the math before any production target 3. Why the push for more ads was part of the reason so few of them worked 4. The basic mistakes that get through when speed is the only instruction 5. Why the pressure for output was partly on me 6. What another executive learned from a flood of unreviewed ads 7. How to set a target when the hit rate is too low to defend a batch count 8. Why every editor should learn the products and the existing footage first 9. A three question review check before an ad counts as finished 10. How to predict the hit rate of a batch and compare it with the results 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you are setting creative targets for the holidays, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/ujo8Bn7qPO8 My video on the gift ads I thought people were tired of after Christmas: https://youtu.be/6mG_w1DPXn8 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  7. Oct 28

    The Gift Ads We Thought Were Tired

    (00:00:00) A hunch that people were tired of our gift ads (00:01:03) How long do you keep running the gift ads? (00:01:31) Why a slow campaign does not prove the angle is done (00:01:43) When there was no room left to scale (00:02:37) The February review and the page switches (00:03:20) Reading every page by its angle (00:04:15) What the read by angle showed (00:04:37) When the creative declines but the angle may still work (00:05:41) How we planned the angles for March (00:06:27) January options and claims that need a source (00:07:21) The St. Patrick's Day sale I started too late (00:08:05) Start the sale when people actually act (00:09:17) Not every holiday needs paid media (00:09:37) What I would set up before Christmas I was starting to think our gift ads had run their course. AppLovin was struggling and we had already built another page with a different message to see what else might work. The question was whether gifting was actually finished or whether we were reading too much into the calendar. Later our media lead looked at spend and return across all the pages using the gift angle. That changed the interpretation. Gifting had performed well early in January and again when it was pushed at the beginning of February. Meanwhile some videos that had previously worked on Meta were struggling. That gave us another reason to separate the performance of an advertising angle from the performance of the creative being used to sell it. The St. Patrick's Day banners were another problem. They appeared on Monday after most of the celebration had already happened because I had given our developer Monday as the date. We had the promotion on the calendar without the actual dates for the banners. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. Why I suspected our gift ads were getting tired after Christmas 2. Why a slow campaign does not establish that the entire advertising angle is finished 3. What to examine when increasing spend is no longer straightforward and contribution margin matters 4. Why switching traffic between pages can make the performance picture harder to interpret 5. How our media lead reviewed spend and return across all pages under the same angle 6. What the January and February performance showed about the gift angle 7. Why declining Meta creative and a declining advertising angle need separate attention 8. How we approached seasonal angles and promotional planning for March 9. Why statistics in advertising need supporting sources 10. How the St. Patrick's Day banner mistake changed what I would put on the promotion calendar before Christmas 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you are deciding whether to keep a seasonal advertising angle running or move on, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/6mG_w1DPXn8 Why most of our holiday ads focused on the customer doing most of the buying: https://youtu.be/LSzyr3DHMS4 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

  8. Oct 27

    The Deal Days That Cost Us Margin

    (00:00:00) More orders but lower contribution margin (00:00:56) Why the deal calendar matters before Black Friday (00:01:16) What changes when an Amazon deal runs (00:01:47) Comparing deal days with days without deals (00:02:14) Why we repeated the same promotions (00:03:38) When discounts might create additional demand (00:04:49) The problem with testing Amazon deals (00:06:11) What we started testing in March (00:06:35) A separate October Amazon deal event (00:07:20) How the reference price affected the offer (00:08:48) The Black Friday choice at the October review (00:09:35) What to check before the next Amazon deal We kept putting Amazon deals on the calendar because they seemed to work. Orders were coming in and conversion was improving, so there was not much in the sales numbers to make us question the schedule. Then our analyst compared the days with deals against the days without them and found that contribution margin was lower during the promotions. That was a problem worth looking into because we had been repeating the previous year's promotional calendar without a clear answer on whether the extra orders justified what we gave up in margin. The team started testing contribution around those deals but I do not have the final readout. A separate October event raised another question when a long running coupon affected the reference price Amazon used to show shoppers the discount. We had to consider that history while discussing how to structure the next major promotion. 📈 WHAT YOU WILL LEARN 1. What moves when a deal runs: conversion, cost of goods and order value 2. How to compare deal days with the days without a deal 3. Why a deal calendar keeps getting copied from the year before 4. Why the deal history needs to sit with the rest of your reporting 5. When a deal adds scale and when it sells to demand you already had 6. Why a holiday deal and a February deal may not do the same job 7. Ways to test a deal through the calendar on Amazon 8. How a long running coupon changed the discount shoppers saw 9. Why raising prices before an event is not something to plan around 10. What I would check before deciding how many days to discount 🧠 THE GROWTH BOARDROOM If you are deciding how many days your Amazon deals should run, The Growth Boardroom is a private Skool group for founders, CEOs, CMOs and operators responsible for a business's P&L. You can apply to join here. https://www.skool.com/the-grow... 🎥 WATCH ON YOUTUBE This episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iE6M2hxmeaw My video on what happened when we had different prices across channels and why I pushed for one price everywhere: https://youtu.be/hpkQL13pZPc 🔗 FOLLOW CHRISTIAN YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channe... LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cl... X: https://x.com/clovrecich TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clovrecich Instagram: https://instagram.com/clovreci... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/peopl... The Growth Boardroom: https://www.skool.com/the-grow... This episode includes AI-generated content.

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

I use this show to share what I am seeing while operating and growing businesses, and what I would actually do about it. For most of its first hundred episodes, this show was interviews with other entrepreneurs about how they built their companies. Those conversations are all still here. From here on, most episodes are me going through decisions from inside the businesses I work in, including what we are testing, what worked, what did not and what I would do differently. Interviews may come back later. The lens is DTC growth. That means a lot of paid media, creative, offers, conversion and retention. Every one of those decisions shows up somewhere else in the business, so contribution margin, inventory, forecasting and cash come up a lot too. A marketing decision can look great in the ad account and still hurt the business, and that is usually where the useful lessons are. The show is still for entrepreneurs, marketers, operators and people interested in business growth. New episodes also run as videos on my YouTube channel. If you are a founder, CEO, CMO or operator responsible for the decisions that affect a business's P&L, you can apply to join The Growth Boardroom, my private community on Skool, at https://www.skool.com/the-grow....