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Having been lucky enough to work at Google for 4 years, I have acquired the necessary…
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Articles by David
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Your ad creative isn't dying. You're just killing it too slowly.
Your ad creative isn't dying. You're just killing it too slowly.
I analyzed ad performance data from 89 eCommerce brands spending over $50,000 a month last quarter. The average brand…
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Gross revenue is a lie. Net revenue is what sells your company.
Gross revenue is a lie. Net revenue is what sells your company.
I just watched a $12M ARR SaaS company get valued at half what the founder expected. The acquirer's first question…
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Your CAC isn't the problem. Your retention economics are.
Your CAC isn't the problem. Your retention economics are.
I reviewed pitch decks from 63 DTC brands seeking Series A funding last year. Every single one bragged about their…
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Issue #11: The Creative OS
Issue #11: The Creative OS
How to build an in-house creative system that never runs out of winning ads. Everyone talks about “creative testing.
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Issue #10: Retention Is the New Acquisition
Issue #10: Retention Is the New Acquisition
How smart brands are turning their backends into growth engines — while everyone else keeps chasing CAC. For the last…
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Issue #9: Creative Fatigue Is a Myth
Issue #9: Creative Fatigue Is a Myth
Why your ads aren’t dying. Your testing system is.
3 Comments -
The New CAC Equation (2026 Edition)
The New CAC Equation (2026 Edition)
Your CAC is Lying to You. Here’s the Real Math.
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The 3x Offer Architecture
The 3x Offer Architecture
A Data-Backed Blueprint for Tripling DTC Revenue Here's something I've noticed after auditing dozens of struggling DTC…
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Issue #6: The Founder Funnel That Outperformed UGC
Issue #6: The Founder Funnel That Outperformed UGC
This week's issue is a little different. It's not about data or platform changes.
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The $100K Abandoned Cart Flow!?
The $100K Abandoned Cart Flow!?
Most abandoned cart emails are built to “remind” the customer. Ours are built to convert.
Activity
10K followers
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David Koves posted thisA candle brand ran 25% off sitewide for Black Friday two years in a row. Results were flat both times. They came to R2G for Q4 planning. We removed the sitewide discount entirely. Built a "home scent set" bundle at $89 (vs. $68 combined individual price). Added a post-purchase add-on for $19 reed diffusers. Ran urgency on units remaining. Real inventory limits. Results: → AOV jumped from $52 to $81 → Gross margin held. No blanket discount → Q4 revenue up 67% on the same ad spend as prior year They made more money by discounting less. The offer did the work the discount used to do.
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David Koves posted thisMother's Day is Sunday. Is your offer built for the person buying the gift, or the person receiving it? A 20% sitewide discount is not a gift strategy. It's a margin tax with a ribbon on it. Here's what the data shows: — Brands with gift set bundles in Q4 outperform flat-discount brands by 2–3x on AOV. — Post-purchase upsell acceptance rates spike 25–40% higher on high-intent gift holidays. — Real urgency (tied to actual delivery cutoffs) outperforms countdown timers significantly among experienced online shoppers. The gifter has one problem: they need to give something that feels considered. A discount doesn't solve that. A curated bundle at the right price does. What does your offer look like to someone buying a gift for someone they love?
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David Koves posted thisBlack Friday buyers aren't your regular customers. Your regular offer doesn't work on them. Black Friday traffic is high-intent but deal-driven: a different buyer psychology than your year-round customer. Brands that win Q4 build offers specifically for that buyer: clear discount anchoring, real urgency mechanics, bundle structures that increase AOV without killing margin, and post-purchase upsells that capture the high-intent window. Running your standard offer at a 20% discount isn't a Black Friday strategy. Three things to build now: 1. One BF-specific bundle that increases AOV by at least 30% over your most popular single product. 2. A genuine scarcity mechanism: limited units or a hard end time tied to actual inventory. 3. A post-purchase upsell live immediately after checkout while intent is at its peak.
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David Koves posted thisA wellness brand tripled their Meta spend going into Black Friday. Revenue only grew 40%. They came to us in January convinced the targeting was broken. We pulled session recordings from Black Friday week. Checkout step 3, shipping selection, had a 61% drop-off rate. Almost double the normal rate. Under traffic load, a shipping app was throwing silent errors. Nobody had noticed because it only happened at high volume. Fixed the bug. Two hours of work. Ran a flash sale in February as a test. Same spend as Black Friday week, revenue was 2.1x higher. CVR went from 1.1% to 2.4%. They lost significant Q4 revenue to a bug worth two hours to fix. Infrastructure first. Always.
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David Koves posted thisYour Black Friday "underperformance" was a conversion problem. Not an ads problem. Here's what the data shows: — Average ecommerce CVR drops 34% during high-traffic periods without CRO preparation (Shopify) — A 1-second delay in page load time reduces conversions by 7%. At 10x traffic, this compounds fast. — Most brands don't review checkout funnel performance until after Q4. Then it's too late. You paid peak CPMs to drive traffic into a funnel that converted worse under pressure than it did normally. The ad spend wasn't the problem. It exposed the problem. Did you audit your landing page and checkout before Black Friday — or just before you increased your budget?
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David Koves posted thisThe best TikTok ads don't look like ads. I've tested this repeatedly: brands that win on TikTok are the ones brave enough to let their product look ordinary. A beauty brand spent $60K on TikTok ads. ROAS was 1.2x. Their content team was a professional video producer. Everything looked polished, scripted, strategic. We paused everything. Then we asked their customer support manager to film herself using the product. No script, no lighting, just her phone camera in natural light. One video. Two takes. Cost: $0. That video did 3x the ROAS of the entire previous campaign. Why? Because TikTok's algorithm doesn't care about production value. It cares about whether you keep watching. Polished content feels like an ad. Raw content feels like a peer recommendation. TikTok users are trained to spot and scroll past ads. They're not trained to spot and scroll past a friend's honest review. The insight: on TikTok, authenticity is the targeting. I've watched brands get this wrong over and over. They spend $20K hiring a TikTok creator. The creator makes beautiful content. ROAS is 1.8x. Then they hire an untrained employee to make a 15-second phone video about the same product. ROAS is 4.2x. The employee's video had worse lighting, worse audio, and worse editing. But it had something the creator's video didn't: zero production value. If your TikTok ads are underperforming, your first move isn't new audiences or new creators. It's to make content that looks less like an ad. Do your best-performing TikTok ads look professional or raw?
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David Koves posted thisYour Google Search account is probably bleeding money in the keywords you're not looking at. Most brands obsess over their top 20 keywords: the obvious ones with volume. They ignore the 200+ low-volume, high-intent keywords driving actual conversions. I audited a supplements brand's Search account. Top 20 keywords? 2.1x ROAS. Long-tail keywords (50-200 searches/month)? 4.8x ROAS. They were bidding equally on both. Stupid allocation. We cut the broad, competitive keywords and tripled the bid on long-tail. ROAS went from 2.4x to 3.6x in 30 days. Here's why this works: long-tail keywords have less competition, lower CPCs, and typically signal someone further down the funnel. "Best vitamin D supplement for immune support" converts better than "vitamin D." But long-tail keywords don't have volume. So brands ignore them. That's the mistake. You don't need volume. You need margin. A keyword with 50 searches/month that converts at 8% and costs $0.80/click is infinitely better than a keyword with 5,000 searches/month that converts at 0.8% and costs $4/click. Most brands never do this math. They see "volume" and assume they need it. Your next Google audit: segment your keywords by search volume bands. Calculate ROAS for each band. I'll bet your long-tail is outperforming your head keywords by 2-3x. When's the last time you optimized for margin per keyword, not volume?
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David Koves posted thisMeta's algorithm is not your enemy. Your creative refresh cycle is. I watched a skincare brand spend $300K in Meta ads over 6 months. They got worse every month. Ad fatigue, they thought. It wasn't ad fatigue. They had tested 12 ad creative variations total. Twelve. Over 6 months. We ran an experiment: same audience, same targeting, same offer. We created 35 new ad variations in 2 weeks (mostly from UGC). Cost stayed the same. CTR improved 40%. Conversion rate stayed flat. But because volume was up, absolute conversions increased 35%. It isn't about the audience getting tired of the ad. It's about the Meta algorithm getting tired of the ad because engagement metrics are declining. If you keep feeding it fresh creative, the algorithm never gets bored. The brands doing 4x+ ROAS on Meta share one thing: they're running 50+ active ad variations at any given time. They're refreshing creative weekly, not monthly. Consistent ROAS requires consistent creative production. Not expensive production, just volume. Raw UGC, founder testimonials, customer unboxing videos, product demos shot on iPhone. These perform better than studio production anyway. If you're fighting ad fatigue, your problem isn't Meta. It's that your creative engine is too slow. How many new ad variations are you testing per week right now? If it's under 8-10, you're leaving ROAS on the table.
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David Koves posted thisMost founders don't know their contribution margin. Then they wonder why scaling breaks them. Contribution margin is revenue minus variable costs (COGS, payment processing, fulfillment). It's the money left to cover ads, payroll, rent, and profit. I audited a beverage brand doing $3.2M in annual revenue. They were profitable on paper, but confused. We calculated their margin. COGS was 28%. Payment processing 2.5%. Fulfillment 8%. Their contribution margin was 61.5%. That sounds healthy. But they were spending $1.15 CAC to acquire customers with an LTV of $3.80 (first purchase only, no repeats built in). Their actual blended CAC-to-LTV ratio was 1:3.3. The rule: you need at least 1:3 to scale profitably. But that math only works if you know your real contribution margin. Most founders eyeball it or use the gross margin from their Shopify dashboard. Wrong. That's just COGS. Contribution margin includes every dollar that touches that order. Here's what I see all the time: brands hit $1M revenue, try to scale to $3M with ads, and get surprised when it breaks them. Not because ads don't work, because they were never actually profitable on a per-unit basis. Know your contribution margin before you scale. It's not optional. Do you know yours to the decimal? If not, that's your first task this week. Everything else follows from that number.
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David Koves liked thisDavid Koves liked thisFifteen years ago, I got hired at Google because of football. Not because I could kick a ball. A few years into the job, over a beer, I asked my boss: "Why me? There were other great candidates with even more tech experience.” He paused and said: "Honestly? Football. Not your career of playing for the National youth team, but the comeback after a terrible injury. You lost a dream that defined you and rebuilt from scratch. That's what we needed." Really? 🙂 I sat there a little stunned enjoying the moment of course, but still being a bit puzzled. I had spent weeks learning about Adwords and trying to figure out odd questions that may be coming my way. Then he added: skills can be taught. Resilience, much harder. What I remember most from that interview wasn't the tricky questions. These guys were so decent, so genuinely cool, I simply couldn't bullshit them and oversell myself. At a certain moment I just had to say out loud..”I know my stuff, but I am no internet guru." 😄 Their answer blew me away: "If we believe your values are right, it's a craft. You'll learn." I fell in love with them and the company on the spot. Both. Because that's not something you hear every day. I got the job. Not just because of what I knew. Because of who I was under pressure and the people in that room who valued it. At Google they call it Googliness, that hard to define but easy to spot human energy. I just call it Sparkle. We all have it. Don't let any boardroom bury it. P.S. The hair was real. And I would argue not the famous “fudbalerka” 😀, more of that 1978 World Cup Argentina vibe. Those guys looked cool. That's the story I tell myself to feel better about it. 😄
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David Koves liked thisDavid Koves liked thisWhat began as a passion for the game has evolved into one of the largest social media and apparel brands in the baseball industry. Every piece we create reflects what makes baseball special — the grit, the culture, the community — whether you’re stepping on the field or cheering from the stands. Now, we’re looking for great people to join us. We’re hiring both full-time and part-time roles for individuals who want to be part of something bigger than just a brand — a community built around the game we all love. If you’re driven, creative, ready to contribute to a fast-growing team, and love the game we can't wait to hear from you. Come build with us in Long Island, AL, MS, TX, PA, IL, ATL, KC, IN https://lnkd.in/eGsFrp8y #NowHiring #Baseball #Careers #JoinOurTeam #SportsIndustry Becca Hendricks Josh Shapiro Bill Rom Amanda Heglund
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David Koves liked thisDavid Koves liked this365 days in business. 47% net profit. A short $10k from my year-one revenue goal (which, in hindsight, maybe I should have stretched more). One year ago, I left a VP of Marketing career in tech to become a travel advisor. Yes, really. Here's what I didn't expect: The joy would come from unexpected places. Former colleagues reaching out - "Can you help me plan this trip?" - and suddenly we're catching up on years of life, not just talking logistics. Referrals that start with "I met your client at a party, and she couldn't stop talking about her trip." Texts from clients mid-vacation that just say "Laura. This place. Thank you." The failures would be spectacular. I once booked clients for the wrong month. THE WRONG MONTH. (Thank God for E&O insurance - a very expensive acronym I'm grateful I learned.) The loneliness would be real. You're the marketing person, the sales person, the customer service person. You cringe at your own posts. You feel like a fraud more often than you'd admit. And the unsexy truth about entrepreneurship? Everyone tells you it's hard. You nod. You think you understand. You do NOT understand. Not until you're in it. But here's what my years in tech taught me: set targets, hit milestones, measure what matters. And here's what I had to unlearn: the perfectionism. The "change this word to that word" spiral. At some point, you just have to hit publish, send, done, and move on. Travel With Aura exists because busy professionals deserve to actually enjoy their vacations, not spend hours reading reviews across 100+ open browser tabs. Because they deserve a corporate retreat that doesn't suck. (I've sat through enough painful ones to know exactly what that means.) Turns out, I'm pretty good at making both happen. To everyone who's booked with me, referred a friend, replied to my newsletter, or just cheered me on from the sidelines: thank you. This year happened because of you. If you're dreaming up your next getaway, or you're the EA staring down a corporate retreat and wondering how to make it not terrible - I'm a message away. And honestly, even if you're neither of those things and we just haven't talked in a while, I'd love to catch up! Year two, let's go. 🚀 --- Picture taken last month at the Valley of the Temples in Sicily, on one of those 'is this really my job?' mornings.
Experience
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Education
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IE (Instituto de Empresa)
Graduated Cum Laude
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Consistently among top 5 Business Programs in the world according to Financial Times.
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Languages
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English
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Hungarian
Native or bilingual proficiency
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Spanish
Professional working proficiency
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German
Limited working proficiency
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Hebrew
Elementary proficiency
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Chris Leo
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