Paul Ahlstrom

Find your glitch: be first on an underpriced new ad channel

OraBrush's $500 video worked because YouTube had just launched ads at under a penny per view, letting the company spend $1 to make $2-3. Harmon calls this 'finding your glitch': cheap early traffic buys the data to optimize, so you stay efficient as costs rise, giving you a beachhead (a term he credits to Paul Ahlstrom).

“So it's like the early days of AdSense. And so we were able to spend $1 and bring in $2 or $3 now. a dollar in total costs, both the ads, the shipping, and the brush itself. And so that glitch of being the very first on YouTube is what allowed us to find enough data to take action, to be able to optimize and then become more efficient. And then as the cost of advertising on YouTube started to climb, we were able to just get more and more efficient because we had the traffic coming in now to be able to make those changes.”

Steal thisWhen a platform launches a new ad product, get on it immediately while attention is underpriced, and use the cheap traffic to collect optimization data before prices rise.