Validating a new offer fast

TL;DR

• 1. Research: pick the products to push by margin and merchandising, and the offers that win in your industry.
• 2. Landing pages, many of them: keep testing until conversion rate beats the industry average CVR at your AOV. CTC uses a Statlas table of conversion rate vs AOV. Make enough variants to message-match personas and angles.
• 3. Validate with statics: cheap “branded” static ads are the fastest, cheapest way to prove the offer.
• 4. Scale with creators: put whitelisted creator video on the winning offer.
• Speed is the product. A typical brand takes ~a month for this. CTC claims 7 days. Compressing time to a winner matters most for subscription brands, where each month without new customers compounds against you.

Details

Why speed. Joy Sharma’s offer adds speed to CTC’s usual pitch of value. He asked where speed is worth the most and landed on subscription businesses: if they don’t acquire, the business “compounds in the opposite direction”.¹ Finding a winning offer in a week rather than a month, then scaling it in two weeks rather than another month, concentrates the return much earlier.²

The sequence.³²

1. Market research on what sells, which products sell best given margin and merchandise, and the best offers for them in the industry.
2. Build landing pages and keep going (“as many as I need to win”). Statlas’s log table of conversion rate against AOV gives the benchmark CVR at your price point. Once a page beats it, move on.⁴²
3. Launch static “branded ads”. They’re the cheapest thing to produce and the best thing for validating the idea.²
4. Add creator videos from Refunnel’s curated network, whitelisted as partnership ads.⁵

Offer design inputs (Taylor Holiday). Position the product against the market and its gross margin and LTV. There’s a right relationship between conversion rate, price and margin and the CAC you can afford. Test the bounds in every direction, and keep watching price per unit against alternatives (Price testing DTC and info offers — when higher wins and when lower unlocks scale).⁶⁷ Landing pages, like ads, need variety and scale so you can message-map each creative to a matching lander and persona.⁸

Strategy and production are one job now. Taylor says the idea that an agency hands over strategy and an in-house team executes is “a bygone fact”. Execution barriers are gone, and one person, with tools and AI, should carry both.⁹ Joy says he’ll happily compete against a client’s in-house team on execution.¹⁰

The guarantee. CTC’s “marketing moments” service promises that if a moment doesn’t make back the fee, CTC refunds the difference. Joy frames that as the stick that makes an agency care like an owner.¹¹¹² Taylor’s reasoning: if you want credit for good outcomes you must own the bad ones, because the client’s reality is simply “I have money or I don’t”.¹³

Disagreements / caveats

• This describes CTC’s own paid offer, recorded as a pitch. The “7 days” figure comes from only a few test businesses (two, now three), with no published results.¹⁴
• Benchmarking CVR at your AOV needs cross-brand data (Statlas or similar). Without it, use your own historical CVR, or peer benchmarks from a mastermind as Stefan Georgi does (Funnel economics "dirty math" — day-zero gross profit and the four levers).
• For how to write the pages themselves, see Persona landing pages, listicles and promo assets. For product-level guarantees (not agency ones), see Guarantees and offers that remove purchase anxiety.

See also

• Creative economics — the median ad loses money, so cut the cost per ad (CTC's 1.3M-ad study) — why creator volume at low cost matters for step 4
• Marketing moments — building Meta creative and email around a dated calendar

Footnotes

1. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 07:25 — Joy Sharma ↩

2. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 16:19 — Joy Sharma ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 14:47 — Joy Sharma ↩

4. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 15:32 — Joy Sharma ↩

5. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 17:13 — Joy Sharma ↩

6. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 18:01 — Taylor Holiday ↩

7. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 18:57 — Taylor Holiday ↩

8. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 19:44 — Taylor Holiday ↩

9. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 26:40 — Taylor Holiday ↩

10. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 25:54 — Joy Sharma ↩

11. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 06:38 — Joy Sharma ↩

12. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 17:13 — Joy Sharma ↩

13. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 02:27 — Taylor Holiday ↩

14. Ecommerce Growth With a Money-Back Guarantee @ 28:12 — Joy Sharma ↩