Happy Thursday!

I've spent the last four or five months deep in the VMS space (vitamins, minerals, supplements) working with and studying the brands that are actually ripping right now. Grüns, IM8, Momentous, Arrae, Lemme. I took 40 pages of notes. Today I'm giving you the framework. I pulled the 7 biggest things below.

Vendor of the Week

Viktor — Stop staring at the blinking cursor. Just @mention it.

The hard part of AI tools isn't using them. It's knowing what to ask.

You sign up, you stare at the empty prompt box, you type something generic like "help me with marketing," and the answer is useless. So you close the tab and go back to doing the work yourself.

Viktor is the AI employee that lives inside Slack or Teams (if you use that), and it just raised a Series A to keep building exactly that... a teammate you talk to like a teammate, not a chatbot you have to coax with the perfect prompt.

Here's the unlock. You don't need to know what to ask. You just @mention Viktor with whatever's actually on your plate. "Audit my Klaviyo flows." "Pull last month's Shopify revenue by channel." "Find every site running a leaked coupon code for us." "Chase the three invoices we're owed." "Draft a cease-and-desist for the worst offender." It runs the work end-to-end, then drops the answer back in the channel.

That's the use case. Founders aren't short on ideas... they're short on the time to translate ideas into instructions. Viktor removes that step. Over 30,000 teams use it to operate like a brand twice their size, without adding headcount they don't need yet.

Get started for free.

7 Things the Best Supplement Brands Are Doing Right Now

The brands that are being funded, acquired, and scaling without burning VC money have one thing in common: they're playing for LTV, not just CAC. The entire space went through a decade where the metric that mattered was acquisition cost. Now look at who's winning. It's the brands that treated the customer relationship as an asset, not a transaction.

Five of seven and you're in good shape. All seven and you're operating like the brands getting acquired.

Listen here: YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

The Biggest Takeaways

1. The PDP is a classroom, not a checkout. Stop trying to rush people to add to cart. The best pages educate first. What's in it, why it works, what you can expect by day 3, day 10, day 30. Brands that do this don't just convert better — they churn less, because customers understood what they were buying.

2. The 90-day subscription is the new default. Monthly subscriptions triple your processing and shipping costs. A quarterly subscription ships once, costs less, and locks in a higher AOV. The economics of paid acquisition change completely when your AOV doubles. Some brands are pushing annual. The ones doing it well are giving enough offer incentive that it's a no-brainer.

3. Ad-lander-offer congruency. Meta's Andromeda update changed everything here. You can't run one ad to a generic landing page anymore. The ad for menopause support has to go to a landing page about menopause. The ad for athletic performance goes to a page about athletic performance. Same offer, different frame, different landing page. Full congruency across the funnel.

4. Quiz funnels are back. They went quiet post-COVID but they're converting hard again, especially for brands with multiple SKUs. Octane just got acquired by Meta, which means the product is only going to get more native to the platform. If you've got a catalog of options, the quiz is the best tool to route someone to what's actually right for them.

5. Industry-level endorsements. Not just a random UGC creator. Not just a celebrity. Actual doctors, scientists, clinicians. IM8 has Mayo Clinic. Momentus has Andrew Huberman. Graymatter has FrontRow MD. The credibility isn't coming from fame, it's coming from expertise. If your name shows up on PubMed, you're worth more than any influencer to these brands.

6. The offer is 40-50% of the conversion. First order welcome kit, free gift, discount, exclusive bonus. The brands that crack the right offer first and then build their funnel around it win. I've seen the exact same product fail and succeed based on offer alone.

7. Make subscriptions easy to manage. Skip-before-cancel, exit surveys, and a subscription portal that doesn't look like it was built in 2015. Seed does this better than anyone. You're not making it impossible to cancel. You're making it easy to manage. The difference is massive in terms of churn.

That's all for today

It's Thursday, and it's all downhill from here. If you're in the supplement or subscription space and you don't have all 7 of these in place, you know what to do this weekend.

Nik