Zero to $100m

DeHub was built as an all in one entertainment and lifestyle platform spanning streaming, gaming, browsing and creator funding, with the audience owning a share of the economy rather than simply subscribing to it. Users could vote on what got funded, renewed or cancelled, and earn from their own engagement instead of only paying for it.

It was open source, peer to peer and borderless by design, which made the marketing problem unusual. We were not selling a product with an obvious shelf. We were explaining a new model to a global audience, in public, at speed, with everything we said visible to everyone at once.

I owned a $1.2m budget and ran a function of over 100 people through seven managers covering customer service, developers, video, design and community. The business generated $6m in revenue in a single year, passed $100m in market capitalisation, and won Corporate LiveWire's 2023 Innovation and Excellence Award during my time as CMO.

Creative is the targeting

The best performing thing I have run is athlete footage, shot and cut by me, that does not look like an ad. People watch it, engagement compounds, and distribution gets cheaper. Media cost falls because the content earns reach rather than buying all of it.

Then it is volume and discipline. A dozen variants of a winning idea, changing only the hook and the first frame, tested cheap on TikTok before real budget goes anywhere near it. Winners scale. Everything else dies quickly and without sentiment.

Underneath it, tracking built properly: Meta Pixel and Conversions API, GA4, Tag Manager, server side, so I read contribution rather than last click. ROAS flatters thin margin products and hides the ones that can genuinely take spend. Contribution per order is the number that decides.

RAPZ Sports

A premium fight equipment brand I co-own with UFC featherweight Lerone Murphy and Mike Hales. Everyone else competes on price. We went the other way and built something that holds a £200 tag.

I own the whole commercial result. Store, paid media, creative, tracking, suppliers, stock. I shoot and cut the ads myself.

The problem. My first instinct was to discount. I talked myself out of it by looking at where people actually left, which was fast and near the top of the page, not at the price block further down. They were not weighing it up and saying no. They were arriving and disengaging before they got that far.

What I shipped. Message match first: the hero became the exact footage from the ad they had just watched, and the headline used the wording of the winning hook. Copy rewritten around the outcome rather than the specification. Athlete usage moved above the fold. No discount, because it trains customers to wait and eats the margin that funds acquisition. Instead the page stopped competing against a £40 bag and started comparing against what months of coaching costs.

Result. 3% conversion on a £200 item, £17 cost per acquisition against £100 of contribution margin, and £32,000 in a single month.

China

Over 1,000 product lines built from nothing, working directly with more than 30 manufacturers rather than through a sourcing agent. Some of those relationships are six years old.

I have travelled to Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province three times to meet suppliers on their own ground, and that is where the real work happens. On one negotiation, done in person and built on a friendship rather than an email thread, I brought unit cost down by over 70%. Nobody gives you that over a video call.

Price and minimum order quantities, samples until the product is right, tooling, lead times, quality checked on arrival rather than trusted from a spec sheet, and the true landed cost once shipping, duty and returns are counted.