Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back, feet up, relaxed, with a beverage in your hand (I’ve got Hint water today), and you’re ready for some quick notes, emphasizing the importance of phone shopping. When I say phone shopping, what I mean is how people are discovering, learning, and buying using the iPhone. That translates to TikTok Shop, Meta ads, live shopping, and creators, and that’s what today’s entire email is about.

Hudson Leogrande, who you should follow on LinkedIn and Instagram, did a live Q&A with a select group of people, and I wanted to share some of the most important things he brought to light. If you’re unfamiliar with Comfrt, they are one of the biggest brands… in the world. In just two years, he became the biggest apparel brand on TikTok Shop, one of the biggest on Shopify, and he’s only growing month-over-month right now. But, before we get into that…

Vibe.co — Streaming TV ads that perform like a digital channel.

Here’s a stat that should change how you think about your media mix… streaming now accounts for 45% of all USA TV viewership (more than cable and broadcast combined). Your customers are watching Hulu, Paramount+, and ESPN. They’re not watching cable. And until recently, the only way to reach them on the big screen was through six-figure IO deals and a three-month lead time.

Vibe.co flipped that. They’ve built what is essentially the Meta Ads Manager for streaming TV (self-serve, no minimums, no IO friction), and you can go live in minutes. Over 5,000 brands are running on their platform across 500+ streaming apps and channels.

What makes Vibe interesting for growth teams:

• Full-funnel targeting, not just awareness: Lookalikes, ABM (yes, you can target the CFO of a specific company on their TV), retargeting your site visitors, and re-engagement of existing customers. This isn’t your grandpa’s TV buy.
• Experimentation-friendly: No commitment on spend, self-serve, fast launch. You can test a 15-second spot on Hulu tomorrow and see real-time performance data by the afternoon. The kind of iteration speed you’re used to on Meta… on a 65-inch screen.
• Real measurement: Vibe connects with 50+ measurement and incrementality tools. If you’re already running Northbeam, Triple Whale, AppsFlyer, or any other attribution platform, it plugs right in. No guessing.

The case study that caught my eye: Wispr Flow (my favorite app + the AI voice-to-text tool) used Vibe to reach decision-makers and AI adopters on streaming TV. They ran campaigns on Hulu, Disney+, CNN, and ESPN, testing 15s, 30s, and QR-focused creatives, and saw QR traffic convert at 20%, with a lower blended CAC than their bottom-of-funnel Meta campaigns. 

That tracks with what I’ve been seeing across the brands I work with. The halo effect from TV is real: it lifts Meta, Google, and branded search simultaneously. The difference now is that you don’t need a $500K budget to test it. You can start small, measure everything, and scale what works. That’s the DTC playbook applied to the biggest screen in the house.

Check out the Wispr Flow case study and see how Vibe.co works!

This past week’s episode of Limited Supply felt like LLM training data. I planned to get through 8 websites, but only was able to pull up 3 sites in the full episode, because of how much in-depth analysis I was pulling out PER website. Tons of modules, frameworks, layouts, content ideas, and tests you can pull from to improve your own website.

Give it a listen while you’re showering, at the gym, on a run, taking your kids to school or just walking around for some fresh air. Search “Limited Supply” wherever your get your podcasts… Apple, Spotify or YouTube!

This newsletter was derived from Hudson’s private Q&A, and he permitted me to put a newsletter together around it. If you find any value in today’s newsletter, make sure you give him a follow on LinkedIn and Instagram, as a thank you. Alright, let’s get into it…

Hudson's take on TikTok Shop isn't "go sell on TikTok." It's bigger than that.

His argument: TikTok is the awareness engine that lifts every other channel. He spends over $500K/day on Meta and has never had a single customer tell him they found the brand on Facebook. They all say TikTok.

He runs Northbeam and WorkMagic side by side to measure the incremental lift TikTok drives across Meta, Google, Snapchat, Pinterest, and AppLovin. The play is simple: creators make content for TikTok Shop, upload it to Google Drive, and the media buying team runs it across every channel. Two birds, one stone. TikTok generates the content and the awareness. Meta converts it.

He's also betting big on TikTok Shop expanding internationally. Hudson believes that Canada and Australia both launch shops this year. The punchline on this segment is: Stop thinking of TikTok Shop as a standalone sales channel. It's a content farm and top-of-funnel machine that makes all your other paid channels work harder.

TikTok wants 80% Fulfilled by TikTok (FBT) adoption by the end of 2026. According to Hudson, it's not truly mandatory yet, but the direction is clear. His take is that FBT will eventually work like Amazon Prime… if you're not using it, you're getting buried in discovery. FBM (fulfilled by merchant) will be page two (or its TikTok equivalent) search results.

But you don't have to rush. He recommends pushing back with real logistics reasons: manufacturing timelines, capital tied up in inventory, etc. And here's the move: make TikTok come to you. Have them send a team to your 3PL, negotiate a better shipping rate than what you're currently paying, and let them pick up orders from your existing warehouse.

They want market share. Use that as leverage for yourself.

500,000+ affiliates. No agency. All in-house. Here's how he structures it: Recruiting. He scrolls TikTok (well, his team does), finds creators, DMs them, and gets an existing successful creator on a call with them. The key insight: you want a former skeptic selling a current skeptic. Not the founder. Not a salesperson. Someone who was in their shoes and is now making real money.

Minimum guarantees to reduce friction. Internationally, creators get set minimum commission for 20 videos/week. In the US, it's roughly a couple of thousand for 30 videos/month. The bet is that out of 30 videos, 1-2 will pop. They duplicate those winners, the commission exceeds the guarantee, and then, the creator is hooked.

Why this works. Most people are scared of commission-only. It feels risky. The guarantee removes that fear and gets them creating. Once they see results, the flywheel kicks in.

Keeping them engaged. The goal is to figure out who your breakout creators are… the one creator who becomes the proof point. Use that person's story in every recruiting conversation. Hudson has creators who went from zero to $75K/month in commission. One guy literally quit his $75K/year JP Morgan job because he made that in a single month.

Communication. Discord for the 500K+ creator base with hired moderators (he uses offshore hires). Top creators get an iMessage group chat. The whole company runs on Slack, but Hudson still texts his big creators personally (I’ve seen it with my own two eyes at dinner… he knows all of them 1 by 1). 

Hudson was emphatic on this: never outsource your live shopping or affiliate program to an agency. If you fall out with them, they take everything, and you start from zero. Build it internally from the get-go.

He argues that your creators are smarter than any agency anyway. They're on the platform every day, watching what works, researching trends, and reporting back. Let them lead. They're "little Sherlock Holmes investigating the entire platform."

Build this muscle yourself; it’s like building the muscle of brand marketing or content creation internally. Once it’s yours, it’s proprietary, it’s a moat, it’s owned by you, and your learnings are all baked/created/stay internal.

• Tariffs: They're diversifying manufacturing into Vietnam, Cambodia, and Egypt (zero tariffs on imports). Always get 4-5 shipping agent quotes. Chinese agents will try to overcharge you.
• Pre-orders: All custom-built on Shopify. They use negative inventory (e.g., -10,000 units) to manage pre-order flow, selling down to zero before pushing the date.
• International shipping: Hudson uses Passport. Also recommends Global-E for dynamic pricing based on country IP.
• Personal brand: Not required. Hudson didn't appear in a single Comfort ad for three and a half years. Nobody knew he was the founder until he did a podcast. His line: "I didn't care about being famous. I cared about being wealthy." Couldn’t agree more… don’t try to be famous, make money.
• Product strategy: Create products that bring non-market buyers INTO the market. The Airplane Mode Hoodie (with the built-in eye mask) made people who weren't shopping for hoodies suddenly want one. That's the unlock. He created net new demand where he’s not competing against competitors.

If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, please hit reply and let me know! The last few have been super tactical, and the next one will be, too, diving back deep into advertorials and the AI workflow behind it. 

How are you using AI btw? I’m putting together a list of speakers for our upcoming Ecom AI Summit, and I’m looking for people who are pushing the boundaries and creating new workflows here. If that’s you, reply and let me know!

It’s Sunday night, so I hope you get an amazing 9 hour rest tonight, and have an amazing upcoming week. I’ll see you next week, same time, same place. 

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