Read Time: 1 min 30 sec
Hey — Ryan To here.
In today's edition:
Why operators struggle to ‘crack creative strategy’
Instagram, TikTok, Meta, you name it.
Personas and Outliers
+ Real-life examples (with use cases)
I talk with 7–9 figure e-commerce brands every week…
And one question keeps coming up.
"How do I build a creative strategy that actually stands out?"
One day it's influencer.
next it's UGC.
then it's TikTok Shop.
being able to adapt to new platforms, new rules, and new creatives is exhausting
but I noticed it all ends up following 2 rules:
Persona
Outliers
master these and you’ll finally break 1,000 view jail with your brand’s socials
your boring ugc, product videos, and ‘founder content’ isn’t cutting it
1. Personas
Get investigative-reporter obsessive.
This sounds obvious. It's the most skipped step in DTC.
Founders spend months, years on product development.
Building their ‘idea’ of the perfect product.
‘The one they wish existed’
Then I ask who their target customer is.
And I get: "still figuring that out”……
A bad product sold to the right customer beats a good product sold to the wrong one.
That's the one thing I actually learned in SF incubators.
Saas founders run hundreds of hours of research, customer interviews, and A/B tests before they go all in.
Because the direction the boat is pointed matters more than how nice the boat is.
Sh*tty analogy I know. Roll with me here.
Where to start:
Google Trends. I pulled "peptides" over the last 12 months. 250% growth and the related queries hand you the exact pains people are typing at 2am.
Reddit. Go niche. Not r/supplements. The subreddit with 40K members where people are already arguing about your category. Read the top posts of the year. Read the comments under them.
You're not looking for demographics.
You're looking for positioning, problems, and gaps
2. Outliers
Doomscroll but do it with purpose.
The goal: what products and problems is your ICP already expressing?
Find the gap between what they're saying and what's being sold to them.
Prioritize nano over macro.
When an unknown creator posts a video that rips…
the idea was the only reason it worked.
Then do the boring part.
Write the patterns down.
What angle keeps repeating? What's the sentiment in the niche right now — hopeful, fed up, skeptical?
What is nobody saying?
Then counterposition
Personas tell you who.
Outliers tell you what's already working.
Where those two overlap is the only place worth putting money.
Most brands pick a format and hope.
You pick a person, find the gap, and make the thing nobody in the category is making yet.
That's not a creative strategy trend.
That's just how it works.
Have a great day ❤️
Ryan
P.S. Life updates 👋: I lived in SF for a year working w ecom brands on AI & advertising, thinking of NY next.
Tech bros keeping asking me ‘how much I raised’ ‘from what VC’ and ‘if i’m at the frontier of AI’, I can’t take it anymore.
|
Ryan To
Creator (120K+)
@itsryanto
|
|