Mo is a growth strategist who’s helped scale 8- and 9-figure DTC brands in health, wellness, beauty, skincare, and more. He comes from a pharmaceutical background, but what really sets him apart is how he blends data and customer insight to lead content strategy — he’s been behind over 1,500 pieces of performance-driven content, from UGC to statics to direct response ads. On top of that, he’s hands-on with product development, creative systems, and helping teams actually execute and scale with clarity.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews creative strategist Mohamed Elwahary (Mo), who specializes in scaling high-revenue DTC brands. Mo shares actionable insights on holistic data analysis, customer persona development, and the power of testing content at scale—especially on platforms like Meta and TikTok Shop. He emphasizes using real customer language in marketing, the importance of founder-led storytelling, and leveraging AI tools for creative production. The episode concludes with Mo’s personal recommendations and advice for brands aiming to break through growth plateaus and reach nine-figure success.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Mo 00:00:00  One of my case studies are doing. We’re doing really great on Amazon, and they decided at some point to turn off all of their meta ads. Instantly, their Amazon sales shrink by 35% instantly. Why? Because what you do not know in the arena where we live, I might see your ad on Facebook and buy from Google and buy from Amazon and buy elsewhere. Come again and buy back later even with the referrals. So we need to understand things holistically.

MC 00:00:41  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.

Josh Hadley 00:00:55  Do you want to know how to increase your sales page conversion rates? What is the difference between a struggling product and a multi-million dollar brand came down to just one thing. Your sales page and your brand messaging. Today’s guest knows exactly how to optimize for those conversions. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley.

Josh Hadley 00:01:16  I scaled my own brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures, I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in eCommerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, and Stephen Pope from My Amazon Guy. Today, I am excited to welcome a guest who truly embodies what it means to scale brands with creativity and precision. Mohamed Elwahary, Mo is a creative strategist who has helped scale eight and nine figure DTC brands in health, wellness, beauty, skincare and more. He comes from a pharmaceutical background, but what really sets him apart is how he blends data and customer insight to lead content strategy. He’s been behind over 1500 pieces of performance driven content, from UGC to statics to direct response ads. On top of that, he’s hands on with product development, creative systems and helping teams actually execute and scale with clarity. With that introduction, welcome to the show Mo.

Mo 00:02:19  Thank you. Josh, thank you very much.

Mo 00:02:20  Much appreciate that. Thank you.

Josh Hadley 00:02:22  No, I’m excited to have you on the show because you’ve worked with some big brands in helping people really scale into the nine figures. You’ve seen what’s working for nine figure brands, and you’ve helped coach and guide brands to really get to that point. But to start off the conversation, I want to start focused on like maybe some of the the data and the metrics that you’re seeing going on in the e-commerce marketplace right now as just some benchmarks, because you’ve been so involved, you have access to lots of data that others probably don’t see. And so I would love to start with, why don’t you walk through like contribution margins, net profit margins that you’re seeing across the board that are healthy or below average, and so that our listeners can kind of benchmark themselves in terms of can I get this brand to scale to eight or even nine figures?

Mo 00:03:17  Of course.

Mo 00:03:18  Yeah, we can do that. I have prepared some numbers for us to go through today across different industries, period fashion, skincare, health and wellness.

Mo 00:03:29  Of course, every brand has its own unique numbers, though having some benchmarks would help. So to start with net sales from what I noticed in 2025 or shall we say 2024 2025, the net sales are almost between 80 to 85%. Their gross profit margins is around 55%. Their contribution margin is around 2,528%. As we all know, the higher the better. Their EBITDA is almost 8% thanks to their OpEx, their sales and revenue. They grow year over year. According to the last year by 15%, gross margin improved by 3%. Maybe this is potentially due to Covid, due to other political geographical location that has occurred. So because as we all know, whenever someone has disasters, someone else is benefiting from that. So that could be the reason. the contribution margin, with that being said, declined by 5%, which makes complete sense due to international transactions. Shipping, Import export. New tariffs. Whether you’re pro or anti. That’s not the problem. But that has led to that. So these are some of the numbers that I have come across 20%.

Mo 00:05:09  And there’s something my warrior brain whenever I speak to business founders and they’re in the eight and nine figure arena. Only 20%. Only 20%. Understand the data and use it well, 20% have the data, but do not know what it means. And 60% go based on their gut feeling.

Josh Hadley 00:05:36  And when you say like the data, are you talking about like their financials in the business, like 20% actually are looking at their their accounting books at the end of every month, analyzing them, making business decisions based off of that 20%. Maybe look at them but don’t really analyze it. And then you’re saying 60% just or going by the seat of their pants and hoping that there’s money in the bank account at the end of every month?

Mo 00:06:02  Frankly speaking.

Mo 00:06:04  Not just the accounting, any numbers, whether it’s marketing, financial, any numbers, whenever they want to make any decision. Those 60%, they make it based on their gut feeling. I want to go off to this audience. Why? Well, because I believe this is usually how they know they are part of the 60%.

Mo 00:06:27  They never tell you. Well, according to my Amazon sales, according to my Shopify sales, I can only 20% of those do that. Usually people say, well, my competitors, I have seen this ad and that’s why I want to mimic. Okay, but do we have deep data into why we want to do that 60% of the time? The answer is no.

Josh Hadley 00:06:47  Interesting. So I guess if that’s the case, I mean, you have a lot of brands that come to you for coaching, consulting for you to help them scale to those nine figures. What are some of the biggest, like, pain points that they’re experiencing, and how do you walk them through being able to scale up their business?

Mo 00:07:07  Great question. Number one is trust. This is usually the number one issue they come up with. And they come to me with Mo where in the eight figure we have been in the seven figure eight figure for so long. It’s not passing that stage. When I go to nine figures okay.

Mo 00:07:27  What do you think we need to do? That’s what I usually ask them. What do you think we need to do? Most of them, ironically speaking, they suggest to cut costs to do that. And I always use this example. If you’re in the middle of the ocean and your boat is about to sink. What are you going to do? Are you going to put more gas to reach the island? And if you couldn’t, then you swim the rest. Or are you going to save the gas? The answer is pretty much easy. You just put more gas when it comes to in practice. Not everyone do that. Most people want to save the gas. Saving money will never help your scale. In order for you to scale, you need to spend. It is not rocket science. No, but what if I save? Is that bad? No. Saving would maximize your contribution margins. That’s the only thing you will get. If you make $10. Then your cost is $4.

Mo 00:08:31  So basically, gross profit is $6. Okay. If we save the $4 and we make them $1, that will not change the $10. Still $10. They’re not going to make a difference. And you’re here because you want to scale, not to save. So usually the first solution is that they need to spend. Second solution is we need to look at data holistically, meaning what most of them do. Most of them, of course, do run ads. So even if they do it organically okay. How are we doing with your media buying strategy? Well, meta is not doing good. So we are shutting down our ads and we’re putting more gas on Google. How did you know that? Because most of my sales are coming from Google. Right. Who told you that? Most of those sales are not influenced by meta? One of my case studies are doing we’re doing really great on Amazon. And they decided at some point to turn off all of their meta ads. Instantly their Amazon sales shrink by 35% innocently.

Mo 00:09:46  Why? Because what you do not know. In the arena where we live. I might see your ad on Facebook and buy from Google and buy from Amazon. Buy elsewhere. Come again and buy back later. Even with the referrals. So we need to understand things holistically. These are usually the main two points I focus on, followed by creative strategy, which we will talk about as we go.

Josh Hadley 00:10:13  I love that. So what you’re saying most of the time is if people want to scale, you’re saying they need to spend more money. Okay. So if they want to spend more money, Mo, where is the best place to spend more money? Let’s say you’ve got a $20 million brand right now that wants to be able to scale to 100 million. What’s the thought process that you walk them through to know what are the levers that they should pull, or where should they invest their money in order to scale up to nine figures?

Mo 00:10:45  I would ask them. Tell me more about your customers. You tell me about your customers.

Mo 00:10:50  I tell you where we can expand. Let me tell you why. The usually spend the $20 million on one place. When they start the business, they are very happy that they’re having sales. It feels great when you do that. So if, let’s say you started with Google at the beginning and Google was crushing it, and then you decided to give meta a try and it didn’t work. For the first week or two, you’re going to absolutely pose meta for now and put more guys on Google, which by the way, I love this approach. No questions about that, but it is not a scalable approach. Your scalable approach should be 70 to 80% towards what’s working, 20 to 30% towards testing. Very simple rule. And I did not invent this rule. I learned it. So 20, 30% more. Are you telling me 2,030% should always go towards testing? Yes. With anything, with your creative, with your budget, with anything, you should always have 20 to 30% towards testing.

Mo 00:12:00  Now my thought process to do that is to ask them about their customers and most of them. They fall within or under the 60% that we talked about earlier, which is don’t understand the numbers or the data. Josh, who is your ideal customer for your business? Women. Okay. Carry on. Women age 20 to 70. Yeah, I know this is usually the age that anyone is legally allowed to make a purchase, but can we narrow that down? Yeah, 40 to 70. 40 to 60. They don’t have data. So that’s the first thing they usually do is to dig into their personas. And how do I do that? By trying to understand the pain points that the customers have, trying to understand the sociology behind their customer, the psychology behind their customer. And more importantly, and I will tell you why this is very important later. More importantly, the deep, deep reason why people buy your product if you type on ChatGPT, apply or exercise the five Whys strategy chatbot will help you with it.

Mo 00:13:14  Because what happens is ChatGPT will tell you Josh buys your product because of that. Why? Because of that. Why? Because of that. Why? Because of that. Why? Because of that. So I understand the core value. Why do you buy my product? Because they want to lose weight. I do look pretty white or pretty. Because they want to look attractive to their partners. Why do they want to look attractive to their partners? Because their partners are about to cheat on them. and why their partners are going to do that. Because of that. okay. So that’s why we need to start targeting. That’s exactly what I can tell you. Where where we can go. If I know that most of your customers made the purchases at eight in the evening. And you said, woman. Why is that? I don’t know. Well, let’s find out. And then we’ll find out that most of them, excuse me, are women who are, let’s say, mothers or full time moms or whoever that is.

Mo 00:14:12  Okay, now I understand. So I understand why she makes the purchase at 8 or 9, because maybe she’s working all day from 9 to 5, pick up kids, drop off kids and then assist with homework, cooking, etcetera, etcetera. Right. And then this is the only time which is available. Okay. Now I know more about your customer. Can we know exactly how the they look like in more details? Does she have access to a vehicle? Does she use public transportation? Because all of that affect her moods. What does she actually do for a living? Of course, we don’t do this for every single customer. When we talk about someone who has a budget $20 million budget. But you will be able to have an idea or a theme of your customers. You will be able to understand well their age vary between 45 to 65. See, we narrowed from 20 to 70 to 45 to 65. They have professions. Great. Most of them are full time moms. Fantastic.

Mo 00:15:16  And the reason why they do it at 8 p.m. is because this is the only time they have time, which will tell me that this type of customer or persona, most likely the way she communicates with her kids, is not by having iPhone or phones or messages now, mostly through sticky notes. So this is usually how she would be communicating with her kids. So that means sticky notes is part of her daily routine. So if we ever want to make an ad, we should make sure that we use sticky notes. If most of the customers, let’s say, make the purchase from Amazon at 8 p.m., then I need to know this is what I need to expand. If I find out that most of my buyers first know about my product or matter, and then using retargeting techniques, they go to Amazon. Then this is what I need to consider as well. Using analytical tools that we can go through as we go.

Josh Hadley 00:16:19  I love that. So really what you’re saying is like you’re just trying to dive deep to understand who the actual customer is so that you can create better, like content for them.

Josh Hadley 00:16:30  Is that is that it? And then it’s the same thing for the sales page, right? Whether it’s on Amazon or Shopify. Like you’re just trying to speak to that specific customer avatar. So if if that’s the case, like what tools are you utilizing Mo to like really get inside like the the mind or how are you analyzing data to say like, no, this is exactly the customer we have. And you know, like you mentioned like sticky notes need to be included there. So like, people can like, self-identify or see themselves in that product. Give me your like what tools are you using to do that.

Mo 00:17:05  Great. So there are many tools, loads of tools. Like if we’re talking attribution model, you have North Beam, you have high risk, you have triple Wale. If we are talking creative strategy, you’re talking motion, you’re talking triple veil. If you are talking understanding what your competitors do, we have foreplay. So there are loads of tools to be honest with you Josh.

Mo 00:17:31  The issue is never with the tool. That’s never been the issue. You know what it’s similar to ChatGPT. ChatGPT can always do what you ask it to do. But chatbots, you will never be able to know why you want to do that. Never ChatGPT will never understand your intentions. So for me to dig deeper into personas, most of the time I have to do what I call first hand research. So I have to go through the comment section and start saying basically what people say and start exporting those comments. Feed that GPT. This is my actual process to do that. So if I will go to the Facebook ads or Amazon Trustpilot, wherever I can find their customers, I’ll try to screenshot all of their reviews, feed it to ChatGPT, then tell me, what did you understand from that? What is the exact language that people use? Do they talk formal? Like honestly? Frankly, to be honest with you, sir. Is that the language they use? Or do they use more of a dude’s language? What language do they use? Tell me more about them from the reviews.

Mo 00:18:45  And then, as much as I can, try to dig into their profiles. Blend all the data together and then have better insights about them. Reviews can tell me everything and this is very important. Reviews can tell me everything about their pain points, can tell me more about benefits that I do not know that I have, can tell me more about opportunities that I can leverage. Can tell me about threats that I’m not aware of without going deep into multiple channels. Just by leveraging and utilizing reviews, I can know everything. And why you would find most brands really keen to pay money to have the best reviewing system that they can have on, let’s say, on the Shopify. Also, there is what we call post survey applications. I assume if most of the listeners listening to this now, if they’re on Shopify or WooCommerce or WordPress, if possible, they will find the survey. If you’re an Amazon, this might be a little bit of a challenge, because this is one of the things that usually Amazon doesn’t provide is give you more insights and data that you cannot access.

Mo 00:20:01  So where possible, you can rely on email marketing to get people thoughts. Once you have people thoughts, then you can break this down into the pain point, benefits, features, objections, etc. etc..

Josh Hadley 00:20:15  I love that and I love your mindset of hey, look at like the comments on any of your social media posts or somebody posting about your products or any of your ads that you’re running. But I also love the like analyzing of your reviews. Are you utilizing like a custom GPT or anything like that where you could like, I know for many of the listeners, they’re Amazon sellers and so like, they could go download all the reviews for their product and then dump it in there. So let’s say that’s the use case. They have thousands of reviews on Amazon. What’s the next action that you take? Like do you dump it into ChatGPT. Do you start asking it questions? What are the types of questions that you would recommend you ask the the GPT?

Mo 00:21:00  So first thing I will do exactly is that that once I upload everything to ChatGPT, then I will ask ChatGPT to do what I call one star mining review and five star review.

Mo 00:21:11  So with one Star mining review from my competitors, then I can take advantage of that. I know my people hate my competitors and then I can mention those lines. This is a very useful technique that everyone can use, by the way. Usually when it comes to drafting hooks Or drafting ad scripts. People try to reinvent the wheels, trying to come up with something novel, something nobody has done before. Whereas the simple the better. If you can take the exact words. And this is one of my strategies with chat DVT delta DVT. Listen, once we do the one star mining review, the five star review and everything, share the reviews with me again. The top ten comment phrases and bold the lines that I can use as hooks. And then ChatGPT can help me build the lines that I can use as hook. I can do anything with those lines. I can use it in my email subject because I tell the customer this way, I know this is an actual pain that you have. I’m not trying to create a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, which is one of the awareness stages.

Mo 00:22:25  No, I’m trying to provide a solution to an existing problem that you have said it. And you might have come across those in your emails. When you open your emails and you hear this, you see this subject line that says, you said we did or we heard you out loud and we applied. Well, how does he do that? From feedback and reviews. And once I fetch all of these information, then I start building my what I call standard persona and reverse engineer persona.

Josh Hadley 00:23:01  Okay, so you’re saying like the some of the best hooks to use is like analyze your reviews, see what the common phrases are for, like your five star reviews and even like your one star reviews to say, hey, maybe let’s avoid these things. Or we could talk on them and say, hey, how to, you know, not do x, Y, or Z, right? Because that that is their pain point. Is that kind of what you’re summarizing there?

Mo 00:23:26  Yeah, exactly. And let me give you an example.

Mo 00:23:28  So it would help better imagine. Imagine I sell hoodies and a few of my customers, they say, oh, looks good on the ads. Pay attention to that. It looks good on the ad, but it feels sucks when I received it. So I want to address that. Someone said that to me and not to my competitor. I’m going to have a UGC creator start the ad with that. Okay. Because I want to address it. I want to say no, no no no it doesn’t. It doesn’t feel as you think. Or maybe it used to be. And then we change the factory rather than replying, which I can do. I can reply to the comments. I can explain my point of view, which is great. But if many people saying that, then I need to address that and how to address it. Like I said, I would have a UGC creator start the hook by saying that because everyone had the same pain would resonate with that. Yes, exactly. I didn’t like how it tasted.

Mo 00:24:29  That’s exactly the exact feeling that I had when I purchased this item, or that was my concern prior to buying the item. Now I want to know, what do you have for me, Mr. Brand or Mrs. Brand? And then the creator can explain. So we’ll have that as a hook and then talk about the products, talk about what we have done as founders to renovate that, to improve that, to implement that. It was just maybe a peak season. Now we offer, let’s say, a 60 day money back guarantee, which are great pillars to use but will not have the same value as much as we link them to something people say. So I can talk about the product. I can talk about social proofs, like number of reviews that we have money back, guarantee the quality, etc., etc. as a standalone. But if I connect it to an existing pain point using verbatim language that will take it to another level.

Josh Hadley 00:25:31  I love that. That’s a great idea. And for the listeners, those that are trying to do anything on TikTok shop, right.

Josh Hadley 00:25:38  And if you want to try to get videos to go viral or you need to provide like a creative brief to those that you’re giving product samples to like, what a great way to like if if you’re starting from scratch, you can build your creative brief based off of the reviews from the one star reviews all the way to the five star reviews. Finding the common phrases and utilizing that as your hooks to begin with. So well, I’m curious to get your take on this, but I actually love kind of this strategy. And one thing that’s been like, super enlightening for us is that as we’ve been utilizing like social commerce and we’ve been giving out samples to thousands of creators and as we see them, Kind of like create content. Originally we didn’t provide them with very like. We didn’t provide them with any creative brief. Instead we just said, hey, talk about our product. What ended up happening over 12 months is like, wow, we found a lot of very consistent patterns of the videos that went viral and things that people liked about the product, which then allowed us to then piggyback off of all of that to create our meta ad strategy to update our Amazon listings accordingly.

Josh Hadley 00:26:52  so I actually love it, like you talked about, you know, hey, how do you identify the mom that’s using sticky notes? I think that with the advent of social commerce and TikTok shop, where you’re able to give out thousands of samples to creators, you get to see what their day to day life looks like. You get to actually see them interacting with the product. And so I think one of the biggest things that somebody can do is like actually dive deep into those videos that are being produced. And if that’s not something that you’re doing right now, whether you are trying to pursue TikTok shop as a growth lever or not, I think the data that you get back from that and having like your ideal customer audience, like review the product and create videos is is more than worth the samples that cost a few thousand bucks that you’re going to send out. You will get you will make that return tenfold over the next few months. So Mo are you using is like social commerce TikTok shop. Where does that fall into? Like your playbook for helping these brands scale to nine figures?

Mo 00:28:01  I personally rely mainly.

Mo 00:28:04  I’m a meta guy, so I rely mainly on Meta and Instagram when it comes to creative strategy. TikTok usually, as you said earlier, it requires different techniques. It requires people to specialize into content because it’s completely different game. With Tik Tok. It’s all about, as you said, shipping samples to UGC and affiliates. So it has to require both. Plus, it requires you to have a very long brief. You have to be patient, massively patient. And it’s not a guarantee that you would be able to see results within the next 3 to 6 months. On top of that, you need to make sure that you have the best margins ever. You have great margins because every affiliate and everyone is listening to that. They know that every affiliate will take a cut. If you have an agency, they will take a cut. Take two takes a cut. So usually end up paying almost 20 to 30%. So if your margins are below 60%, 70%, it is not the right platform for you.

Mo 00:29:09  So it has nothing to do with how big or how small you are. It requires budgeting. It requires that you have samples that you are willing to do, and it requires you to be patient. And now one thing that you mentioned earlier that stood out to me is how you ask creators not to be briefed. I found pros and cons to that to be very transparent with you. And yes, everything you said is absolutely valid. You have diversity. You have authenticity, though you also have the other side. Those who have no creative taste and those are the ones usually you’ve been. So you got the videos you don’t really like, and then you bin it because it didn’t match what you expect. And that taught me one thing only common sense that exists when it comes to content is there is no common sense. Everyone has their own common sense. So what I have been doing, which you’re more than welcome to steal, is I liked when I speak to creators. I tell them, listen, we’re going to do the A and B ways.

Mo 00:30:21  The A way you will follow everything as it is the B way. You will say it freely as you wish and share the content back to me. And then it’s up to the me to do. And then usually editors know how to take the perfect line from here with the perfect line from there, so you do it however you wish. Just give me what I wanted, and then I will put the puzzles together and I will produce the best content and that will take me the second part. Creators are not editors by default, and they’re not creators by nature. Some of them are accountants, full time dads. Moms have nothing to do. Take this as passive income. So again, they do not have that taste. Expecting them to do everything for you. thinking that they own the kitchen and they know it all? No, not with creators. I worked with over 2000 creators and I can tell you this right off the bat, everyone have their own common sense because they work with zillion brands and every brand likes to play differently, so they do not have that fine line that fits everyone.

Mo 00:31:39  Same with editors. When it comes to hiring editors, I always say try to find UGC editors assuming that we’re talking direct response ads, not general video editors, because those generic video editors will show you how they made stunning Instagram Reels, which not necessary, would help with direct response. So with creators, I always like them to upload and submit, and this is just a technique. Submit your footages, raw footages and I will play with the rest.

Josh Hadley 00:32:13  So is your expertise then being able to scale up those ads on meta. So like walk me through, what does that look like? Let’s say we do have a bunch of like creators that are creating content for us. Is your strategy to then have a video editor that’s a UGC editor then like creates a really good hook, tells a quick story that gets people to like want to click on the ad there from Facebook or Instagram.

Mo 00:32:40  My strategy is what we call back home. Give the bread to the baker. So what is your job title creator? So do one thing, which is upload the B-roll shots and the aerial shots as instructed and feel free to do in addition to it.

Mo 00:33:01  Not instead of your job is done. Then there is the creative strategist role, who is required to include the hooks and to brief both editors and creators. Once this is done, I pass it to the editors. Editors already know the hooks already know and have access to the B-roll shots, the aerial shots, some of the editing techniques that they follow, and more importantly, references. And I like to have it tell them, like what to do. Line by line. And at the end, I show them that you have the creativity in case you wanted to do this, in case you wanted to do that. To be more precise, with numbers, I like to give editors 20% room of flexibility, creators 40%, because editors usually work with more products compared to creators. Creators work with brands that could be the same product. I could hire the same creator again and again, again for the exact same product. But when it comes to editors for the same brand. They could be editing 30 different videos or 30 different products, different variants, different techniques.

Mo 00:34:18  So their common sense usually is way below compared to creators. That’s why I like to give them only 20%. Once this is done, I go volume. And this is the pretty much the secret tip that maybe everyone knows, but not everyone applies. They have to go volume, volume like there is no tomorrow. Volume volume volume back in the day is 4 or 5 years ago. I used to be very fussy and picky with the quality of the ads. It has to be like a Rolls-Royce quality. Nowadays no 7,080% bake and cent I’m happy with that because this is now how the algorithm is behaving and I have to interact according to the algorithm.

Josh Hadley 00:35:03  So like what amount of content. So basically, to boil that down, you’re saying, hey, you have a creative strategist that understands like the hooks. They also know like the offer, right. The product. They they are architecting what is the kind of the landing page look like. And what’s the hook that I’m going to use to entice people with the video to ultimately get to that landing page, right.

Josh Hadley 00:35:26  So that’s your creative strategist, then your video editor is going in there and just like splicing and dicing, how much volume are you talking about? If somebody is an eight figure brand they want to scale on meta. Like, are you talking like a thousand pieces of content being uploaded to meta every week? Are you talking 100? When you say volume, give me some rules of thumb here for volume.

Mo 00:35:48  Great. It depends on the ad spends that we have it. This is pretty much the number one reason. Number two reason is how patient are you and willing to spend to find winners? Because before I share the number with you, I always make it clear for brands that it will take a lot of time. It’s like a tree. Imagine basically that you want to get apples out of those trees. Rule number one is you need to have as many trees as possible so you can maximize your odds. And to have more trees, you need to have more water, which is ad spends. So you need to have water which is ad spend to feed the trees.

Mo 00:36:29  The issue is it’s not a guarantee that every tree would produce apples. Even worse, not every tree will produce the same number of apples and cannot hold the same apple for a long time. Like maybe you can have winning ads, but this winning ads are only going to last on the tree as a winning ad. Only for six months, only for one week. Then what are you going to do? That’s why you have to keep feeding and feeding and feeding and feeding and feeding. If we have the budget, then absolutely. I would go with between 500 plus. Like for one of the brands that I have worked with, we were producing 500 pages of content every single five days. Every day. Hundreds. Every day 100. Every day 100. And push push push push push. But you have. The thing is, you have to give it. It’s time. It’s like a cake. When you put it in oven, you have to give it. It’s time to be baked. And when you bring it out of the oven, you have to give it some time to rest.

Mo 00:37:27  Same with the creators. You can all like push, push, push, push, push. And every single day you kill. No, you have to be patient. Yes. If you’re telling me that we spend 100 K a day on how to spend, then maybe I would be able to get results within 2 to 3 days and then kill quickly whatever is not working and push whatever is working more, which is a media buying roll.

Josh Hadley 00:37:49  Okay, so you’re saying it ultimately comes down to the ad budget that you have. So like let’s let’s say you have a general eight figure brand that’s doing 20 million like and they’re spending, let’s say it’s 100,000 a month right now on meta. What? like, how much ad creative would you recommend that they’re dumping in to their ad sets every month or every week?

Mo 00:38:13  I would start with a minimum of 250 a week. That would be my minimum recommendation to go with 250 unique concepts, 250 a week, unique concepts excluding iterations, mash ups, all of that.

Mo 00:38:35  There are 50 unique concepts every single week. That will be my benchmark because literally as you, as you speak, there is a brand, in my mind that has the exact budget and the testing was around 250 to 300 ish a week. Unlike 4 or 5 creative shows, just working on that.

Josh Hadley 00:38:59  Okay. And are most people doing this with an agency or are they doing it internally? What’s your recommendation there?

Mo 00:39:06  Great. Ironically speaking, nowadays most DTC brands, they work with me directly because they no longer like the agency model. Like I would say, most of them now are dropping their agencies and hiring full time creative strategists in-house. Even if they’re going to use an agency, they still want to have their team for two main reasons. Reason number one, they want to have more control towards what is working, and they want to make sure that they can access that without relying on external or third party. The reason to which many brands do not know until they face the situation is seeking investment.

Mo 00:39:55  There are so many eight eight figure brands. All they do is just bootstrapping. But when it comes to seeking investment, Mint. One of the main requirements that investors have is do you have your own internal marketing team who runs everything for you without relying on an agency? If the answer is no. Usually they do not get the investment that they need. So that becomes a very important key thing for investors, which is something I just learned about literally like six months ago.

Josh Hadley 00:40:29  Interesting. Awesome. Very good insights, Mo. What else have we not talked about that you think our listeners, if they’re looking to scale to 8 or 9 figures, need to know if they want to take their brand to the next level.

Mo 00:40:42  Something you touched on earlier, which is landing pages. Creatives cannot work without landing pages. Most of the time, you need to make sure that you have a good offer that resonates with the creative, and it takes a lot of time to crack the code to find the best offer that matches the best creative angle.

Mo 00:41:06  Speaking of angles. Believe it or not. Do you know what is the number one angle that almost always works across any brand, irrespective to their budget?

Josh Hadley 00:41:19  I would love to know.

Mo 00:41:21  Founder angle. The founder angle. Nothing has beaten the angle. Nothing. Whether it’s a new brand, whether it’s a nine figure brand, whether it’s a nine figure brand that used to make its money from, let’s say, affiliates and trying to join the online arena. Nothing can outperform founder angle for one simple reason. Anybody on earth will talk about your product based on their understanding and based on the information they gathered or received about your product. Founders are the only ones. If you wake them at 2 a.m. and ask them about their product, they will be able to tell you everything. Everything. 2 a.m. sleeping, dead. Sleeping. And then, hey, wake up, wake up, wake up. Tell me, what are you doing? Selling points about your brand. They will not think about it. Yeah, they will call the cops later for you.

Mo 00:42:17  But in the current stage, they will be able to tell you everything about the product. Founders talk from their hearts. Naturally, they do not perform. They have the passion. You cannot buy passion. I can buy anything, but I cannot buy someone’s passion. With that said, if you want to scale, you need to make sure that you are able to leverage the founder angle. Understand not everyone feels comfortable with cameras, I get that, but that’s up to you. If you don’t want.

Josh Hadley 00:42:50  To put the yeah, with the with the founder angle, what are you recommending these brands like what are the founders saying in these videos?

Mo 00:42:58  Three things, usually videos and static static images. So with videos show you the story. Share why you came up with this product. What have you spotted? Like let’s say you’re coming with a suitcase product. You’re a traveler, a frequent traveler fed up of airlines charging you ridiculous money for overweight luggages. And then you came up with this product, which all which solves one, two, three, four, five, six.

Mo 00:43:29  Why? Because you felt the pain yourself. You made it yourself. Show me the factory that you use. Show me the people behind this product. Even if it’s just you and your brother. Show me. Show me the engineers behind that. Show me the technicians behind that. Tell me the story that would make people want to buy and invest. If you watch any end like investment program, like Shark Tank. And then whatever that is, you always hear the sentence that these guys invest because of the person. This is the number one. Yet many people ignore it. It doesn’t matter what his skin color is. It doesn’t matter what your accent is. It doesn’t matter where you are coming from. It doesn’t matter your financial situation. It doesn’t matter if you have red spots on your face or black spots in your face. It doesn’t. Nothing matters. Yeah. Practice. You need to practice, but then talk with practicing. You will perform better, but everything else will happen flawlessly. So this is usually what I like to focus on.

Mo 00:44:34  What comes to founder angle? Just share the story. Tell people why you came up with that. Tell people the pain points that you spotted even with your competitors. Because before you come up with that, what was he doing? You were using your competitor’s products. That’s very obvious answer. You’re using this, but you didn’t like it, so you decided to make it and then you made it. For static images, show me lifestyle images on the page. Working with family. People love that. That’s why people love vloggers, by the way. Because they take you into their life. People want to be part of your life, whether they like it or not.

Josh Hadley 00:45:19  I love that. That’s a great synopsis. And I think it like, comes down to the overall brand message. Right? Like, what makes you unique? What makes you different? What is that brand story. So like, the messaging you convey becomes that much more important. So Mo really well said there. you know, Mo, as we wrap things up.

Josh Hadley 00:45:39  Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you feel like we need to talk about?

Mo 00:45:43  Nothing in particular. I believe we have covered insights regarding numbers, creative strategy, techniques, how to find winners. So nothing on top of my mind.

Josh Hadley 00:45:55  Awesome. So, Mo, as we leave the audience, I love to wrap up every episode with three actionable takeaways that somebody can implement in their business today. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something, but action item number one you need to know your data. That’s why we started this at the very beginning. You need to know what your gross margins are. You need to know what your gross profit is. You need to know what your contribution margin is. You need to know what your EBITDA is. You need to know all of these metrics. Because if you want to scale, as Mo said, it’s going to require some testing and that testing is a 20 to 30% of your ad budget.

Josh Hadley 00:46:36  So the question you need to ask yourself is, can I add on an extra 20 or 30% to my existing ad budget and still remain profitable? So I think that’s an important aspect. So like know your numbers and also know the data being able to utilize Amazon brand metrics, and under an Amazon Marketing Cloud, it will tell you who your customers are. If you look at the data. So that’s number one. Analyze your data, both financial and your customer data. Action item number two is bring on UGC affiliates or creators at the end of the day, because these are the people that A it’s going to help you narrow in your audience a lot better. But it’s also going to allow you to see, like, what do these people look like and do on a day to day basis, and how do they naturally speak? And so my biggest recommendation is if you’re going to use UGC creators, you might as well be on TikTok shop. So rather than going to an agency that has a bunch of UGC creators, I would recommend get onto TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:47:41  There are thousands of creators that will literally take your product for free and create videos for you. so it’s a very cost effective way to be able to get good content, and then you’re able to then mix that up. Spin that into your meta ads. So that’s action item number three, which is when it comes to scaling on meta. And you want to be driving traffic to your Shopify storefront. You heard it from Mo. If you have $100,000 a month budget, you should be testing 250 pieces of content or creative every single week. And it truly is a volume game, and most people chicken out from the UGC side. They’re going to send samples out to 50 creators and think that that’s enough. And my recommendation is like, no, you need to try a thousand creators. And on the the meta side, right? You’re saying most people don’t allow it time to bake. They throw one meta ad out and then they say, oh, it didn’t perform. So meta mesa and it’s like, no, how about try a thousand pieces of content this month, then tell me meta doesn’t work After letting that data run for a month or two and seeing what happens.

Josh Hadley 00:48:54  So my overall recommendation, third and final action item is just like test at scale and volume. And that applies to everything you’re doing, whether you are launching new products into the marketplace. If that’s your biggest growth lever, then do it in volume, right? If it’s TikTok shop that you want to grow in, then sample thousands of units. If it’s meta that you want to grow in, create thousands of new pieces of content. It’s in the volume game that allows you to be able to scale and identify what’s winning before you throw in the towel, before it’s too, too early. So, Mo, anything else you would add to that?

Mo 00:49:33  I said, say no more. All is perfect.

Josh Hadley 00:49:37  All right. So as we wrap things up, I’d love to ask every guest the following three questions. So number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?

Mo 00:49:45  The most influential book was The psychology of money. That was the number one book, I would say, apart from business.

Mo 00:49:57  You need to understand how to use money. I know it sounds very naive. It sounds like, oh, everyone knows how to use money. But understanding the psychology of money, understanding the difference between saving and investing. Believe it or not, loads of eight and nine figure founders do not know how to deal with money. They get shocked when they see money pouring into their account and then they stock. They know what to deal with it, how to deal with it, why to deal with it? What can we do with it? Should we make invest, save? No wonder why you will find so many sports people or singers or artists, whoever they is. They were making loads of money as soon as they quit, for whatever reason there is. You don’t hear anything about them. On the opposite side you find people that are still smashing it, Not as they used to do as professionals, but now as investors. They know how to use money, so understanding numbers and knowing what about money is really crucial for me.

Josh Hadley 00:50:58  Yeah, no, that’s a great book recommendation. Question number two. What is your favourite AI tool that you’ve been using and how have you been using it?

Mo 00:51:07  Nano banana. Have you heard of it?

Josh Hadley 00:51:09  Yes.

Mo 00:51:10  Nano banana is my secret tool. I’m not a great editor. I’m not a great designer. I’m a rubbish designer, to be honest with you. But with nano banana, I’m able pretty much to come up with any concepts in my mind. With few explanation, I know how to explain really well. I don’t know how to design it. I don’t need now. Graphic designers using nano, banana and alike massively helps me also. There’s an app called captions. Perfect, Perfect if you are trying to leverage AI. Ulysses.

Josh Hadley 00:51:49  Awesome. Love that. So, captions. What’s the app? It’s just. Is it captions? Com or.

Mo 00:51:54  Just captions? You type on your app store or Google sort of captions. Okay.

Josh Hadley 00:51:59  Great advice. All right. My third and final question for you.

Josh Hadley 00:52:03  Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Mo 00:52:10  Julian Hearn. Who is this guy? He is the founder of Huel. What makes him to me unique compared to other founders? Pretty much one thing he said, yeah, the product is great. Every brand has their own story. I understand this guy. He is the founder. He is the CEO. At one point he asked himself, do I really want to be a CEO? No, I do not like the role of CEO. It’s a big word. Yeah, it looks good on LinkedIn. It makes you have this prestigious thingy that you’re looking for. Yeah, I understand, but I said that’s not what I want to do. If you check your website, if you check him now, what does he have? Founder and CEO of the company. He said this is not a downgrade. This is not an upgrade. It’s where I truly believe I add value. I’m not a CEO.

Mo 00:53:17  I don’t know how to hire people. I do not know how to fire people. I hate managing people. It’s not in my DNA. I love making my products better and in the sun. Marketing. Anything else I’m really bad at? So this mindset is what caught my attention about him. That everyone wants to be business owners. Everyone wants to be a CEO. If you’re an event, what do you do? I’m the CEO of this. I’m the founder of. That makes it look good. But this guy like, no, I don’t I don’t care about that. I just want to do what I really believe in and what I really love doing. And that’s it.

Josh Hadley 00:53:53  I love it. Great. Great recommendation as well. All right Mo, this has been awesome. Thanks for joining us on the show. If people want to follow you, they want to learn more about you. Where could they do so at?

Mo 00:54:05  Just type my name in Google. Type a name m o h a m e d space l e e l h a w a r y on LinkedIn, and then you will find me.

Josh Hadley 00:54:20  All right. Well, Mo, thank you again for your time and join us on the show today.

Mo 00:54:25  Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Josh. Thank you.

MC 00:54:27  Thank you for listening. Visit Ecom breakthrough Com for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review. See you again next time!