Sam Posthuma's Guide to Growing a Brand from Zero

HiStrips launched in summer 2024 with one product and no creator budget. Eighteen months later, their affiliate channel is bigger than paid media. 1,500+ creators. $0 upfront spend. One person whose only job is managing the army.

Sam Posthuma breaks down the full system: how they built it, how it feeds the ad account with 100-200 pieces of creative per week, and how it unlocked a partnership with Juan LeBron, the #1 padel player in the world, without a pitch deck or a budget.

Get the free playbook for this episode here: https://www.elevatorgoods.com/talks/sam-posthuma

In this episode:

- How HiStrips recruited 1,500 creators without paying anyone upfront

- The three-bucket system: proactive seeding, inbound interest, direct outreach

- Why they never script their creators and what happens when you do

- How organic UGC becomes paid ad creative and how the weekly feedback loop works

- Why their AI creative performed well on every metric and sold nothing

- How social proof at scale brought Juan LeBron's team to them

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Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

01:00 - What HiStrips is today and where it's going

03:00 - Why creative sits above media buying

05:30 - Keeping creative inside the founding team

08:00 - How the creator army was built from day one

09:40 - The army structure and how it actually runs

13:00 - The three-bucket creator outreach system

17:00 - Why HiStrips never pays creators upfront

21:00 - From organic UGC to paid ad creative

24:00 - The weekly feedback loop between media buying and creative

27:00 - AI UGC: what the data said vs. what the comments showed

30:00 - What the creator army has unlocked beyond paid ads

34:00 - The two moats in e-commerce in 2026

38:00 - Rapid fire

#ecommerce #dtc #contentmarketing #creatoreconomy #histrips #brandbuilding

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Around 1500 creators just live and read high strips in the street video. Every other hour there's someone posting a piece of content about high strips.

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Everyone knows HyScript, the main, everyone knows the product. You're literally wearing it right now.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

You just see a lot of different faces with our brand. It's not the same creators, it's not the same videos. Every time someone new posting a video, doing a workout with high strips, waking up with high strips, sleeping, high rocks, marathon, you name it. We have a really strict values that we do not pay for any creators.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

Are you guys testing AI video creators at all, or is it just literally not even necessary?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Yeah, we tested it and it worked terribly.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Sam bro, welcome to Elevator Talks. Thank you, bro. So I know you through mutual friends, and I know you as men doing many, many different things. But I'd love to hear in 2026 from you yourself, what are you up to mainly right now? What's been keeping you busy?

SPEAKER_01 1:08

Yeah, so what is keeping me busy is uh building out the high strips brand uh we uh been talking about before, going to global expansion, going to global distribution, and building out more partnerships we have been doing, just basically growing every aspect of the brand. And besides that, building some other brands planting the seed in uh like current 2026 D2C branding space, um, which is obviously way different than a few years ago. But right now, mainly focused on global expansion, growth, um, and planting some seeds here and there.

SPEAKER_02 1:41

Has high strips evolved a lot since I mean everyone knows high strips, the name, everyone knows the product. Obviously, you're literally wearing it right now. Has has like the core has the core product or brand DNA changed, or has it really just been growing what you've already established?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

Yeah, so it it definitely has changed because it started one and a half years ago, summer 2024. Also, the name itself says it high strips. We basically only had black and pink nasal strips. That's where we started. Like the black and pink colors were kind of our OG brand collars, and it were just the nasal strips. That's where the name comes from. But fast forward one and a half year later, right now, we have a really big uh product catalog. We recently launched a $250 red light device. Um we have we have launched mouth tape as well, scented mouth tape. We're gonna launch uh some sports supplements as well. Uh, we've been looking into merchandise. We're launching a lot. Um, I would it's safe to say that we went from a simple nasal strip brand to how we present ourselves now is a global recovery brand. Uh, we like our main goal is to become the number one recovery accessory brand in the world, and that's what we're striving to. And with recovery is a lot of things coming as well. We recently launched uh a wrist alarm that wakes you up by vibrating, um, which is better for your morning like flow. We don't wake up by an alarm but by a wrist wristband. We have red light to recover from injuries or just from a long run, you name it. We launch a lot of products around the recovery space, around the peak performance space. So, yeah, we basically grew from a simple hobby product because to be very honest, we launched high strips kinda as a project to throw parties around, do cool stunts, marketing to like a global wellness recovery brand right now.

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Is the majority in bestsellers still the nasal strips, or have you diversified? I mean, I'm talking about like the vast majority.

SPEAKER_01 3:33

The majority is still the nasal strips, but it's really close call with all the other products we have. Um, like we sell a lot of combos with mouth tape and nasal strips. So it's a combination. Uh it's like a race to the top right now. The nasal strips will have a lot of traction from months of marketing, but other products are bypassing that. And we have done some tests with new products we're gonna launch, and we're almost safe to say that they might bypass the nasal strips as well.

SPEAKER_02 3:56

That's huge. That's huge. I mean, that's like any any brand owner's like dream, right? Most people can't do that. So congrats on that, bro.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

Thank you, man.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

So today I really want to get into your creative funnel. I've heard from many people that you are the king of high volume ad creative testing, loopbacks, feedback, process, the whole, you know, end-to-end optimization of ad creative. I'd love to hear from you just what that looked like. You know, and we can kind of go high level and then crack into individual uh parts of your process. But maybe let's just start with like how would you describe your creative process for aid ad creative?

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Yeah, so first I want to start with saying that I I've run my fair share of brands. Uh, I've had some brands, sold some brands as well. And with those brands, we mainly always used to have agencies um like external factors being responsible for creatives. But when I uh sold my latest fashion brand, I kind of broke down the most important pillars of a business. And number one always will be product. If you have a good product, it will sell itself. But number two always is creatives. Like creative for me is even above media buying or above any sort of marketing, because if your creative is bad, there's nothing to buy. With high strips, we have four founders uh in it, and I didn't want like anyone else besides the founder being responsible for the creative side. Why? Because yeah, as a founder, you just always run the hardest, you always run the fastest, you stay up at night, you wake up before your team, you go to sleep before your team. And that's why we kind of diluted the founder roles um in iStrip in these three uh important factors that I just mentioned. One is product, uh, we have a guy full-time on product, logistic operation. Um, he's in China right now doing factory visits as well. One is growth, uh, which is me, uh, buying, making partnership deals, um, making the distribution deals I I talked to briefly about. And the third one is uh creative. His name is Javi, he's full-time on creatives, is a guy that like sleeps about high surf creatives day in and day out. He does nothing else besides that. And that um creates a dynamic in high surfs where we can just all look at one person if something creative-wise does not go well. Because I think within a company, responsibilities are just very important. As beforehands with my fashion company, sometimes we would have bad creatives, or creatives would take long, and everyone would look around like, oh, uh, do we need to pull this agency or this creator, or do we need to shout at the supplier for not sending enough items to the creators? Uh, but right now in high strips we just have one person be fully responsible for that, and that sets an environment where in the company we just have constant eyes on creators. This guy does nothing else besides creative and design of the packagings as well, and that just creates um a big inbound of picture-perfect creatives, actually. And I think that's what's so important in the company to have someone fully on that because it's literally in 2026, right now, the age of time, the most important thing for a brand. Like, if you're creators or shit, there's nothing to buy media with, there's nothing to um promote your brand with. So I think why we are so strong on this is because we just have one like sheaf of creators constantly on it. Like he is unbeatable. Yeah, you can't beat him, he works 12 hours a day on our creative system, and that's just hard to compete with. No agency, no in-house intern would would beat him on that. And he does a very, very good job, which we obviously dive into later, I think, in this talk. But I guess this is for us the most important play that we have done. And everyone always asks, like, how do your systems look like? How does this? I'm like, we just have one guy who manages everything. Like you know, that that's kind of the the environment that sets us uh one step ahead of everyone else.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

I'm excited to get into it. I think for for us and like what we look for on this show, what we really want to crack into is the details. Um I'd love to just get into it, honestly. Like, what does that look like? And maybe just break it down like how do you source creative? How do you edit, are you iterating, how are you pulling data from uh from your meta VM? How are you looping it back? Like start from the the beginning, wherever you're willing to share.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Yeah, so um, as I just mentioned, we are we are like founders with all our responsibilities, and it doesn't mean that uh Javi, our creative guy, um does everything himself. He's responsible, the head of responsible for creatives, but he built a theme below him, uh, which is absolutely blasting. And we divide that team in two um sectors basically. We have one, our in-house um editing team, designing team that designs statics, that designs uh video ads for us as well. And we have two where I would like to start. Um, our I call it creator army, uh, head of creator army. That's basically our strongest thing. Like, if you can, you can pull out your phone right now, go to the high strips Instagram account and check uh the tag, the tagged post. Every other hour there's someone posting a piece of content about high strips, and that's why I think we are very unbeatable on that, and that's why I think that people mention our creative volume a lot because you just see a lot of different faces with our brand. It's not the same creators, it's not the same videos, it's every time someone new posting a video, doing a workout with high strips, waking up with high strips, sleeping, high rocks, marathon, you name it. This first thing is really where I would say almost 90% of our inbound comes from. Um, so we have we have Javi on top, add of responsible for everything that comes out of creative. But we have our I we call it internally our army manager that manages an army of right now, I think if the numbers are correct, around 1,500 plus content creators that just live and breed high strips on their social media. And that person creates a very good relationship with them. We're in group chats with our VIP creators, with bigger creators, with smaller creators, with all creators. We send them our newest products. For example, um, yesterday we launched the the wristband, the alarm wristband I told you about. We prepare this months ahead. We ship our wristband to 100 creators, we let them all make content in their own way. That's very important. We don't really do a lot of scripting, uh, we let them create content in their own way. It's also hard to manage so many scripts if you have so many creators, and we like to diversify it. If we give everyone a script, then we would get like a thousand pieces of the same content. But we like to have people make it their own way because everyone has a different taste of making creatives, of making videos. And yesterday was a very successful lounge because I wake up, this is all planned and said, I check my phone, I open the high strips account, I see 20 mentions in stories. Every creator is posting about the new wristband that is just lounge. One posts how he wakes up slowly in the morning, feels more relaxed. One posting a video creative, how first the alarm was ringing and giving him a headache or a high cortisol spike in the morning, but then with the high strips uh alarm wristband, it was more quiet. Um, so we just get a lot of diversifying creators. I always like to wake up and see what our high strips army made. Um, and that's one point that I think we are very strong in. And how does it look like? Um, we basically have this guy, which I would like to refer to as the army manager, the high strips army manager, constantly going through our followers, our DMs, or doing cold outreach. Um we basically have three ways of outreach. This is inbound. So we we get a lot of inbound, people that want to test out the product, um, checking our engagement in general. If someone follows us, someone likes us, or we see someone like already coming back a few times and it is an athlete, but he didn't ask us yet, we reach out, and just pure cold outreach to people that make gym content, recovery content, sleep content, health optimization content. And we always brief them with our product, and like, hey, we don't put any responsibilities on your side. Here's our product, we would love to see some videos of you. Like, it's not that they are forced to make something or have to send something to us in a good file as well. Um, they just have to post it on social media, and we have a bot that scrapes every piece of content that uses iScripts and put it in a Google Drive. There's no hard system for them, it's there's no complicated scripting or whatever. We build a good relationship, it's like, hey, we love your content. Here's our product, test it out, post a piece of content. If you want, we can give you a referral code, you can make some money, which we do a lot of as well. Our affiliate system, matter of fact, is bigger than our paid media right now. Um and we just let them do their thing. Sometimes if we have a very good creator, like a professional content gym creator, we ask them to like send it to us in Google Drive or we transfer and do something with the content. But mostly we just let people do their thing. We scrape the content and it goes into the ad machine as well.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

Hey, I'm Anish. And I just want to quickly give you more context on the world of Elevator. I'm one of the managing partners. Elevator is broken out into several groups. We've got Elevator Goods, our very own in-house brands and agencies that we're currently building every single day. Brands like Fluffco and Jiggies. Elevator Capital is where we invest in other brands, young founders who we believe are on the come up. If you're one of those people and you're looking for either capital or mentorship or strategic connections, please get in touch with us. The studio is our physical space. Our first location is in Hong Kong, and there are many more coming soon. This is a D2C membership club. If you're in Hong Kong anytime soon, please come check us out. Think founders, amazing conversations, and just learnings left, right, and center. Lastly, Elevator Talks, our newest show where we'll be interviewing the biggest and brightest names in e-com. This is not a show for service level. This is a show for tactics and systems where we get super, super detailed. So last but not least, thank you so much. Please subscribe because that will help us a ton in getting you better guess and more wisdom and more value. We really appreciate it. And back to the show. Bucket one are people DMing you. Very plain and simple. Hey, love you guys. You send them the product for free, basically. You're not paying them, you're not getting into a contract, you're just saying, hey, take it, take a pack, and then letting them do their own thing, right? Would you say that's bucket?

SPEAKER_01 14:17

That's bucket one, but we we must say we cherry pick uh people that we see on Instagram are just daily creators. Like if it's just a guy that posts once a month, maybe less than once a month, we know they're not gonna just make a random piece of content about high strips right now. But if we see creators that post almost daily, like get ready with me, day in a life, we know okay, if we send them a pack, there's a high chance they will say, like, hey, this today I received high strips, let's try it out.

SPEAKER_02 14:42

Okay. Pocket one. And then what percent of all your creators is that? Because that's obviously the I don't want to say the easiest, but that's the most natural, right?

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Yeah. I would say it's a good three-fourths, so like 75%.

SPEAKER_02 14:55

Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Yeah, it's very big.

SPEAKER_02 14:56

That's huge.

SPEAKER_01 14:57

I wanna I want to add to this as well, these creators. We all offer them as well, not everyone takes it, but we offer them an affiliate link and they can make 10%, 15% commission per sale they make, which they love to do.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

And is that just strictly, hey, here's a code, or do you guys use the specific uh tech stack or software for that?

SPEAKER_01 15:16

Like uh whatever the creators prefer. We have a code or we have a deep link. Um we use snowball, snowball.io for this, uh, from Noah, Noah Tucker, good guy. Um yeah, it's just an all-in-one platform where we track our creators' performance, where we can pay them out the commission, um, you name it. But this like this snowball platform is our biggest channel right now, like because of all the it also like it sees the inbound that comes from non-tacked or like no no linked post. It has a a tool inside where you can see like basically everyone that mentions text or names high strips on whole Instagram and meta, and you have like this whole dashboard with all the content that's live, it's updating. Um, so this is our biggest channel right now, actually. And I must add on to that as well. It sounds easy. Um like just start a brand and go reach out to people, but I think with high strips we kind of created an environment where people also want to be part of it, um, because we show so much faces. We like if you go to our Instagram, you see different faces every time. And I think if a brand like us, also backed by bigger names, uh which I would love to dive into later as well, um, reaches out to you, it just kind of feels proud to be part of. We were really inspired by Red Bull. Um, like if Red Bull would now reach out to me to go jump out of a plane for them and promote their product, I would happily do it. Um I wouldn't ask for anything. And I think that on a smaller scale is kind of what we created with high strips as well.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

No, I mean it's none of none of this is easy. I know you're making it sound simple, but it's it's absolutely like one of the hardest to create that file. There's no doubt about that. If you know, if you know the game, which is why this is so impressive. What are the rest? Like, okay, that's three-fourths. What are the what's the other one-fourth?

SPEAKER_01 17:00

The other one-fourth is um, I think divided in two. It's people that actually reach out to us and really want to work with us. Um, that's uh kind of easy inbounds, you know. Like I think every brand has this in their IDM like proposals like, hey, I want to work with you or this and that. Um, we have a really strict value is that we do not pay for any creators. Um, so even if we get inbound of people that say, like, hey, $300 for a story or video, we say no. But if you believe you are gonna be valuable for us, there's an affiliate link. You can even make more than $300. So that's the whole of the other one for it. And the other half of the other one for it is just us reaching out to places we would like to work with. Um, we just have this army manager um that manages all the inbound, but also the outbound. He just reaches out every time. If I open the high-source DM and I refresh it like every other five minutes, there's a message coming in or going out. So that's just basic general outreach: a template. Would you like to work with us? We can send you a kit, you can choose three products. Um you want to see how our videos look like, just simply go on our page. We don't have like an example video um drive or PDF folder. Um, it's pretty well known what what people should make around our brand. And just let them do their thing. What?

SPEAKER_02 18:15

This might seem like a stupid question, but like in this scenario, what's in it for the creator? They're not getting paid. Let's say they don't want to go for the affiliate link. Is it just simply for the product? Or the associate?

SPEAKER_01 18:29

Yeah, it's the association and the authority. Like, oh, cool, this creator is a is a high strips athlete. That's how we call that.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

You're obviously like an established brand, right? Like high strips, we discussed, people, people know that name. It's it's it's big now. But I think maybe even more interesting would be like, how did you get there? Like, what's that journey look like? Because most people watching this would not have a brand the size of high strips. Like, how did you step stone your way to this? Because obviously you didn't have this authority from day one. You know, what was that journey? How long did it take? And was there a moment where you were paying for ad creative and then you stopped?

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah, so basically the first moments of high strips. Uh, I remember you got born in Valencia. We were with the founders in Valencia uh going to a party and we came up with the idea um and ever since that moment we just hustled our way up. Like we are all kind of well connected because we are already in the space. Um, and I must say that's great luck. If I wouldn't have the network I would have back then, it would be way harder and would take very much longer. Um, but back then we just hustled. We just sent everyone packages. We would go at places or or communities or gatherings handing the packaging out. We would go to the sew house and like put all the high strips, like these kind of strips on the wall on the mirror, and like let people be aware of it. And we we would just literally do like real life outreach, talk to everyone, like, hey, these high strips, try it out, put in your nose. Oh, whoa, it works actually. Cool, yeah. You want to make a photo with it, um, make some video with it. That's how we did it, and mainly just through context, like, hey, this football player, can we maybe give him a high strips and make some pictures? Yeah, okay, sure, but what do you guys give my return? We can help with some advice about building a Shopify brand. You know, like we would really hustle through our network, I'd say, um, and like look like we are four guys, obviously, four guys with like a lot of people in their network option, look at like the highest value network we had in this niche. Uh so let's say like athletes we know, uh, people that make get ready with me content. We even would uh hand it out to a lot of girls that always love to do it for free, like just friends of us that we knew. And that's kind of how we started it. We started it already with handing it out so much that the moment we created our Instagram account, we already had a drive folder with like 40-50 videos of friends and family and network of network uh friends of friends that made content with it. Um, so the first weeks of high speech were very much hustling, basically.

SPEAKER_02 20:55

Are you saying you've never really paid for this creator content? Yeah, I mean, put aside like one-offs here and there, maybe something came up, but like as a policy for your company in general, you've never really paid for it.

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, I would have to like triple check that with the with the army manager, but as of all we know and the coach in the company, no, uh definitely not. Obviously, we pay them their commission, their make, but upfront content uh is a hard no. Uh we have done some UGC. We work together with a UGC agency in China if we if we really need fast UGC, because in our product uh shoots from China, it's in the creators' hands within the day. Um we have a very fast turnaround time of our China-based UGC. We have had some where we paid for UGC, but those people don't post it on Instagram. We just use it for ads or explanation videos on the website. Everything you see on socials, uh everything you see someone posting there themselves, I can very confidently say is not paid up front for, besides bigger names and bigger athletes we've worked with that we actually did collaborations with.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

So, okay, that's that's a funnel, right? This is a ton of inbound, organic. It gets posted on your work. And the social makes sense. What's the next layer, right? Like how do you then take that and creative and then qualify it for like your paid addition?

SPEAKER_01 22:08

Yeah, so the next layer I told you we have we have our founder on top being responsible for everything creative-wise. We have the army manager, and next to that, we have um our team of editors, and they basically get to cherry pick which type of content they like. Um, we have a very big dashboard, uh, it looks like a media room with everything that's being posted about high strips uh online, and from there you can just simply download the piece of content and they make edits with it, they make ads with it, they put maybe text over it, like um lyrics uh or some b-roll between of it, and like that we push out hundreds of creators a month coming from that user-generated piece of content. So yeah, it's basically our editors filtering what comes through from the army manager and making pieces of content with that. And next to that, they also make general content like statics, design content, like content that doesn't involve um our users, our iScript's athletes. Um, they also make those, but majority of the videos come from the big filter of uh social inbound we get.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

So effectively all of your organic creative, which is coming through, then goes to layer two, paid. Your paid team has you know hundreds, thousands of content that's coming in just regularly. Then they then take that, edit it, and then push it to your how do you how would you call it routine, your media team?

SPEAKER_01 23:29

No, our team edits it, uh puts it all in batches, um, like the editors and the the site say put it all in batches. Um, like this is batch one talking videos about high strips black, batch two talking videos about high strips pink, um videos showing how to put it on, videos running with it, videos gymming with it. We all separate it in batches as we test creative um batch wise and angle-wise. Then it goes to the founder, um, Javi. He double checks the batch, sees if it is if it's good, um, sees if it according to his standards. He then links the batch to a product, uh, which is obviously quite obvious most of the time. Um he just links the batch we see to a product and uploads it in our creative system. Uh we have a very sleek um Google sheet, actually. That's uh system for us, it works. Every week there's around 10-20 batches of content coming in there, each holding five to ten pieces of creatives, which means like 100, 200 pieces of creatives per week. Um ends up in there, and from there it easily gets uploaded in a meta, get tested, and it it goes on the flywheel.

SPEAKER_02 24:33

I'm now thinking about the loop back. And and again, I'm speaking from experience of how we do it at Fluff and our own brands as well. But a big thing that we're constantly trying to optimize is the loop back. So after some X amount of days of data, the data comes back to the same creative team and says, hey, it's it's doing really well, this is sucking. Have you guys created that loopback process internally?

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Yeah, so this was a uh a thing where I also think we are very strong in and compared to other brands because yeah, how how you look at it is is different per brand, obviously, like it's relationships you have with certain agencies or or buyers, but we like to do everything in-house. Um, as I said, like the founder coach where we have like I'm responsible for media buying and growth. Yeah, like we work with agencies before, but they they sign off at 5 p.m. Uh, they don't go like doing things beyond their job, which is media buying. Uh, they don't revert back and they don't look back. For me, it's very simple. Me and Javi, the the founder that's responsible for creative, we have a talk weekly and I show him what I see happening in the ad account. I show him, like, hey, this CTRs are doing well. I see this creative is not doing well at all. We can maybe put a note to the editors, like, hey, this angle doesn't work. We don't have to test it again. We saw it three times, now it doesn't work. We can put a note that hey, like the angle of allergies works very well. Let's push more on that. And it all gets reverted back to the editors, and the editors refer it back to the army manager. They give their strips to people that make content about allergies, for example, we have had. Like they brief the strip, like, hey, if you have a stuffy nose or or cold, like use strips, the creators make videos with that, it goes to the editor, it gets reverted back into the ad account. Um, so me and Javi, like the two founders, have a short loop on growth, media buying, and creatives. Uh, we talk to each other, I show him what's possible, uh, what's working and what's not working. And on top of that, um, to keep this loop even shorter, because we try to minimize as much contact points as we have, because every time a call has to happen or contact has to happen, we see it as a roadblock. Like we have to wait, schedule a call, you're responsible for someone else. Um, so I just mm like taught Javi how to read meta-ads, and our head of creative is in the meta-ad account himself and knows exactly how to spot the winning creators or bad creatives, and doesn't need me per se anymore every day. We have the weekly call, we have the weekly chat, but he can do it himself to um to keep the loop as short as possible. We do it like that.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

What I mean most founders think ecom are integrating some amount of AI video creative into their paid creative system. But it sounds like actually yours is almost entirely just like pure, raw, real UGC. Are you guys testing AI video creative at all, or is it just literally not even necessary?

SPEAKER_01 27:25

Yeah, we tested it and it worked terrible. Absolutely terrible. Like, obviously, it can be that it's like it wasn't good enough. To me, it looked very good. Like, I'm not an AI specialist, but I could hardly tell the difference. Um, but what we saw happening was getting a lot of spent. Why? Because people like are kind of confused, are they looking at a real human or not? So people stop the scroll. People look at the AI piece of content, like, well, what is this exactly? So it was getting a lot of spend because Meta thought it was getting traction, but it didn't generate any sales. Um, what we do a lot, by the way, and what I recommend anyone in media buying a creative to do, also Javi, our head of creative, does this in the ad account is open the creative in Facebook and in Instagram and see what people discuss under it. See the comments. Uh, like every comment is goal and feedback. It says way more than data and numbers can tell you. Uh because according to data, the AI content looks very good. Like I was looking in the ad account, oh, it has a like a click rate of so much, uh, a few video rate of almost I think it was 60-70%, which is a lot. Uh in ads, like all the metrics looks and looked amazing. CPM was low. Then me and Javi uh jumped into the comment section and was all like, uh, this is AI slope, or uh couldn't you guys be more creative? Or this is AI, it looks bad. People discussing, no, it's not AI yet, it's AI. You can see it in second seven, his hand is like flickering or something. Um, so that's how we figured out like okay, this creative doesn't look like it works good, it's getting a lot of spend, but no sales because people see it as actual entertainment or like discussing. Um, and obviously discussions are one of the best things to have on ads because it it makes your creatives cheaper engagement better, but not this negative type of discussions. Um, so no, we for now um we skipped the whole AI UGC part because we have so much real. It almost is like we we almost cannot process how much real UGC we have, so we do not need AI. Uh plus this scenario I just gave you makes us drive away from it as well.

SPEAKER_02 29:27

Yeah, this is amazing. I mean, of all the things that you said, I actually think this is one of the most impressive because um people are talking about how AI and creative is the future of the cheat code, but like at the end of the day, I think the consumer sees right through it. Honestly, like it there's nothing more authentic than real human reviews and contact or content. Um and yeah, I mean this is I I think a huge insight uh in terms of what you guys are doing right now. Um question, what in your system I would say I would ask breaks the most? Like when you when you kind of look at what you just described, what is the most vulnerable part of that system to breaking? Is it you know a bottleneck in in editing? Is it uh a bottleneck in you know, somewhere along the line?

SPEAKER_01 30:21

Yeah, so to be honest, um everything is so systemized that it's almost unbreakable. Like editors are replaceable, um, the batch uploading is replaceable. Like if Javi is out for a week, I can manually review batches if they're good enough and upload them. Uh visa versa the other way around. Uh, we have a junior media buyer that can upload it. The only thing that's very breakable, and that's a very, very strong position, and that's why we also treat this team member very well, is the army man, the community manager, the army manager. Like he talks with the creators on a daily basis. Obviously, he doesn't log every chat he makes, but he knows with which creative he was talking to, which one wants what. He is like a database on his own. Like he knows if we need new content, for example, the camo nasal strips. He knows exactly, oh, this guy and this guy need to reach out, they like to make content with him. That's a very vulnerable position, I would say. If we would lose him, we would be uh not happy because we would need to have somewhere new and like remake all those relationships. But furthermore, um yeah, we just really work as a close team. We all very happy. Um, we all very work very slow together, close together, and um the systems are just so good in place that it's almost very hard to mess anything up. Like it's generally hard to break something in our systems.

SPEAKER_02 31:36

I guess from your POV, like at the end of the day, you have this, right? This is your superpower, this is your biggest engine. What has this enabled you to do? Is it scale? How would you describe this superpower? Like, what has this given you?

SPEAKER_01 31:48

Yeah, so it has given us a lot of authority. Um, like everyone we reach out to or work with, um, they see our brand as wow. There are so many members in the we also have very good reviews, um, public reviews. So every door we knock on is kind of easier to open, I would say. Like um, we are just on the verge of going big into retail, um, into actual brick and mortar stores. And you would not guess it, but even those stores are like, oh, hey, high strips, I've seen it online everywhere, everyone is wearing it. I want to sell this in my physical store because customers could also go in, like, oh, well, cool, iStrips. I saw it on Instagram, I didn't know I could actually buy it here. So that is an easier door to knock with this, and it besides the direct, better CPA, better revenue, more uh money to spend on ads, these are very important doors it knocks. Uh, like just the authority we have at any new partnership we do, any new retail deal we make, and we also um did some collab launches with big athletes, like really big athletes. Uh, we recently did a very successful drop with Juan LeBron, he's the number one pedal player in the world uh for a long time. And yeah, his team was instantly like, okay, you guys look super authorized. There's a lot of people using your product. We feel safe working with you. There's so many people feeling safe around your brand, so we feel safe working with you. Um, and that was also an easier door to knock. If we would have we if we would be a brand that would say, let's do 200k days on meta uh revenue, highly profitable, but we wouldn't have had this army, it would be way harder to come into sort of like, okay, the numbers are nice, but which brand are you exactly? Which phases are behind the brand? Would we be at risk working with you? Uh, but having this yeah, huge pile of content and huge pile of user-generated content allows us to gain more trust with partners. And this athlete Juan LeBron was like, okay, guys, design a collab for us, you can put my name and face on it, I'm on it, we work together. Um, and that was a very successful launch we did.

SPEAKER_02 33:56

I think what's so crazy is in 2026, people obviously know AI tools are are available. You know, name the brand. There's so many. But you can effectively build an e-com brand zero to a hundred using Claud, Claude Code, Manus, whatever, the branding, the website. You can really stand it up, and everyone is kind of oh, feeling a little bit existential about that. I would say there's two real motes in e-commerce. And let me know if you agree with this. But in the age of AI, there's two real moats. The first is brand, which we just discussed, like real brand moat, hundreds of thousands of people engaging with you, talking about you, testing your products. And then the second is supply chain. Um at the end of the day, you you're the relationship with your supplier, the way you control the flow of your goods, the flow of your cash, even again, a moat, right? No AI tool is physically making high shirts products, right? There are human beings in China making those products unless Optimus takes over, which let's just let's just put that in the future for now. That's not happening at least for a while. Like we're we're not there yet. Like, in my opinion, it's gonna happen one day, though.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Not for a while.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

And we'll talk about that sort of uh maybe in five years. I could be wrong with that number, but it seems like that's at least the correct number for now. But do you see any other modes? Or would you agree with those two?

SPEAKER_01 35:30

I 100% agree with you, and I I'm glad you're saying because right now we have a team member, the operational member Carlos, is that's responsible for product operations and relations with the factories, going through all of China right now, having dinners with the supplier, discussing better payment terms, because you say like most of the cash flow comes from your supplier, uh basically, like the payment terms and credit lines you have with them. Um so, like, yeah, it's 100% the most important thing. And AI couldn't send the founder of us to meet a founder of a factory and go sit and talk together and build that relationship and build that strong trust and bond. So, yeah, I 100% fully agree with you. And yeah, brands is obviously everything under the brand umbrella. So the faces behind your brands, the the customer, like your customers are your brand. The customers is the people that build your brand. Like the customers of Nike are what Nike is.

SPEAKER_02 36:20

It's just so funny. In in its simplest terms, you know, you're taking products from China, which are not, you know, it's it's not like rocket science creating these no strips, but what you've done is you've created such a mode in the quality of your customer engagement and sort of like the authority that comes with the name high strips, that anyone who's got supply chain background alone, like let's say of the two modes, someone had extensive supply chain background, they would still not be able to compete with what you've created. You need both. You need brand and you need supply chain.

SPEAKER_01 36:57

And then strategy, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 36:58

Exactly. And I think there's a third bucket as well, which people don't talk about, which is just like critical thinking skills, because in any e-commerce brand, there's 500 other variables that you just need a very good founder to stay on top of anything from accounting to customer service to taxes to you know logistics to uh operations and and you know everything that happens in between. But at the end of the day, I do think a lot of these AI tools will effectively take over those those workflows. But the two main modes which cannot be taken over, at least not yet in present-day March 2026, is these two things brand, moat, and authority, and then supply chain.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

Yeah, and I would like to add to brand as well the emotion uh a brand gives you. Because like if you get our product like super sleek, black with stickers, it kind of gives you a feeling. But that that obviously goes on in the brand umbrella. But I think which is important as a brand to do is like to translate an emotion uh with your product.

SPEAKER_02 37:57

So if you could give advice to guys or girls starting out today, you know, either pre-launch or your zero to one, what would that be?

SPEAKER_01 38:09

I think that would be be the number one fan of your brand yourself as well. Because no one else is gonna do it besides yourself. Uh, if I wouldn't like the strips and if my founders wouldn't like the strips, we would not be able to grow so big. As I mentioned, in the start, we really did a lot of hustling, and this required us to be enthusiastic about the product as well. Like I'm wearing it on every call, every meeting I do, I sleep with it, I gym with it. Um so I think the most important thing is to be an absolute fan of your brand, and you yourself should not be able to stop talking about it. And that's how you will push it through. Because if you are not the one that does that, no one is gonna do it. In the start, you just have yourself, your founder team. If you're not the one pushing it, no one will do it, and it will not become big. It's as simple as that. It will the product doesn't sell itself anymore. Uh, as the product is like, at least if you don't invent something super cool, new, patented that hasn't never been done before. The product is every product is almost buyable everywhere. Um the product is not really selling itself if it's not in people people's hands yet. Uh so you need to push it in people's hands by being an absolute fan and an absolute enthusiast about the product yourself.

SPEAKER_02 39:20

How do you um look at product framework? Like, you know, obviously I think something that actually maybe it's not even obvious, but something that to me stands out with high strips is like you can seed it, right? In the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands. The product is small, it's cheap to ship globally, it's not super expensive cogs. That's to me a big superpower. You know, if you were selling furniture, you would not be frickin' seeding the the way you are right now, or even anything, you know, medium-sized. Is was that part of the playbook, or did you kind of just stumble onto that, or was, or was it just very intentional from the get-go?

SPEAKER_01 39:59

So it wasn't necessarily part of the playbook and intentional, but it would definitely unlock easier skill, uh, an easier giveaway of the packages, and easier, like let's send a hundred packages to my house and give it all away to people on the streets, uh, kind of thing. I would just say it's not per se about the size or price of it, but it's about the margin. If you have a high margin, um, in general, there's a lot of things you can unlock, like fun marketing, fun collabs, um, more space to do cool things, then be very tighty and be very um like watching the things you do and watching the marketing you do. Uh for example, Red Bull, it's another example, like they they have a high margin, they are able to fly a plane and land it on the Bourjol Arap, for example, and do that kind of stunts. Yeah, those things just unlock to create your brand culture around it. If you don't have that, it's very hard to do things outside of the box. Uh so I think that's an important thing. But we didn't do it intentionally, we just love the product, it's super good.

SPEAKER_02 41:03

Sam, I always do this, but at the end, um I do like these rapid, fired questions. I'd love to get your quick takes. Um, so I'll just quick question and then hit me back one word answers or one sentence answers. First one, favorite brand that's not yours.

SPEAKER_01 41:20

Um, favorite brand that's not my I think ASleep. I really like A Sleep. I recently bought one. The unboxing experience, the instructions of it, like the whole buying experience as well, is just amazing.

SPEAKER_02 41:33

Favorite operator or founder that you learn from?

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Yeah, I must say I'm not really in the space, as in I don't watch a lot of founder content or anything, but I really uh I've been in fashion myself and I know how hard fashion can be. So I really admire uh the guys from 24-7 and represent how like locked in their launches are always so tight and sleek. Uh whenever they launch something, it's all done perfectly. The content is done perfectly, and I know how hard it can be to launch something in fashion every other month. Uh so I really like to look up to them. Like that their operations must be super, super sleek.

SPEAKER_02 42:09

I always say this. I think George is the goat in consumer generation.

SPEAKER_01 42:13

100%, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:14

The tool or software you cannot move without.

SPEAKER_01 42:17

We run the whole company in Notion.

SPEAKER_02 42:19

Best investment you've made in your business.

SPEAKER_01 42:22

Collapse with big uh celebrities or brands. There's a like also a very, very big collab coming this summer, uh, which everyone will hear about that's into sports. But those investments are the best ones we've made.

SPEAKER_02 42:36

Ideal revenue range for maximum personal happiness. As in company revenue? To maximize personal happiness.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

Yeah, to maximize personal happiness, I would say a million or two, three a month. Everything above that becomes stressful.

SPEAKER_02 42:50

So, like say 10 to 20 a year.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Yeah, but it depends because it really depends on margins. If you have a lot of margins, uh like net net margins, any profit is fine as long as you have the systems in place. But if you're gonna have to play around with cash flow, um things just get stressy and not fun.

SPEAKER_02 43:07

Um, last one, best perk of being an e-commerce founder.

SPEAKER_01 43:12

Best perk of being an e-commerce founder, I think, is that your whole life gets interesting. Like every product you touch or see can inspire you. Every content, like, for example, scrolling Instagram even is not just consuming, but it can actually be learning. Going to the store, like if I go uh to a store with my girlfriend that sells sporting goods. Yesterday we went to buy a pedal racket for her. I'm telling the cashier, like, hey, you know, like we have a product that can help people improve playing pedal. Do you want to like put a box here? Yeah, yeah, give me the number. Um, I think as an e com founder, your whole life becomes a business, which makes it fun to me if you like it.

SPEAKER_02 43:52

Thank you, Sam. Super, super insightful. I learned a lot. Can't wait to share it.

SPEAKER_01 43:56

Likewise, man. Thank you so much. Good questions.