They asked for a media buyer. The account did not need one.

The challenge

A single unit at a single price, sold to a market that buys in courses of three months. Every efficiency the previous team found was immediately spent covering a first order that could not pay for itself. Bidding harder on that offer would have made the problem arrive faster.

The approach

1. Fix the arithmetic first

   Sixty days went into the offer rather than the account. A three month starter, priced so the first order clears its own acquisition cost, and a subscription that does not punish the customer for committing.

2. Then buy behind it

   Spend restarted against the new construction from a deliberately small base, and only widened once payback held at volume rather than at a test budget.

3. Say the quiet part in the ad

   The creative leads with the course, not the bottle. That single change did more for cost per acquisition than any audience work we did in the same period.

The results

First order payback landed inside a month, which is what made the rest of it possible. The account has widened four times since, and each widening has been a decision about margin rather than a hope about scale.

The constraint was never in the ad account. It was on the product page.