This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL.

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.

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In this episode, Olly and Loukas go deep on the AI systems they've spent the last few months building inside Soar Group - the personal operating systems, the creative production infrastructure, and the internal tooling that's changing how the business runs.

This isn't a conversation about AI tools. It's about the architecture underneath them.They cover:
How Olly built a personal operating system based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern — using Obsidian connected to Claude Code. Call transcripts categorised automatically every day, Slack piped in, reasoning traces stored against every decision made in the business.

How Loukas built his own version in VS Code connected to Claude Code with in-depth context on every brand, every direct report, and every specialism, plus a reinforcement learning loop built into the content pipeline.

The Club Neuro AI operating system - a full web app built as a test case before rolling into the Control Room. Best performing frameworks dashboard, hooks database, one-click reporting, weekly Reddit scrape, and a UI designed to capture operator intuition at the moment it happens.

The four learning loops: performance into hypothesis, hypothesis into correction, correction into rule, decision into outcome.

How they hired an AI videographer targeting 60 unique concepts a month — the equivalent of 15 shoot days replaced by one person.

A mass static generation system with 40-60 framework prompts, brand DNA and personas pre-loaded, ready to generate at scale.

The principle that ties it all together: context compounds. Models don't.

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00:00 Intro
02:05 Our sponsor: SARAL
03:00 Our personal operating systems we've built
21:00 AI as a feedback loop
24:14 Our sponsor: SARAL
25:10 Our foundational context and data engine
30:20 Club Neuro: creative intelligence operating system
35:00 Best in class forecasting process
39:50 Our internal creative processes
47:28 Business intelligence platform

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
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This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business.

There's a better way.

Incard is the financial platform built for the way modern digital businesses actually operate. Multi-currency accounts, corporate cards with real rewards, and a fully connected banking experience - all in one place.

This dedicated offer gets you:

• 1 month free trial Incard Plus
  
  
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• 2% cashback on Ad Spend, Saas, Travel for year one
  
  

This is a time-limited offer valid till the end of this month, April 2026.

Take control of your finances with Incard today: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

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Most people think growing a DTC brand is complicated. It doesn't have to be.

In this episode, Olly and Sam break down the Growth Compass™ — Soar Group's trademarked framework for diagnosing the #1 constraint holding any ecommerce brand back from profitable growth.

4 pillars. 20 sub-factors. One binding constraint. Fix that one first. Everything else is noise.

As promised in the episode — the full Growth Compass™ cheat sheet covering every sub-factor across all four pillars https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ3_v0

If you want us to run the full Growth Compass™ audit for your brand - scored across all 20 sub-factors with a prioritised roadmap - book a call with the team 👉 Book a call https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ4SL0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
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We're back. After a month off, a new office, two London events, and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 ads launched... there's a lot to catch up on.

In this episode, Olly and Loukas do a full Q1 2026 debrief across creative strategy, Meta attribution, offer positioning, and the frameworks they've been running across 250+ brands.

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This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/3caahj4w

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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tvkYy0

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Resources mentioned in this episode:

Brad Jacobs: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Few-Billion-Dollars/dp/B0CHTQP25T

Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/1838858636

Jason Cohen: A Smart Bear: https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/

Oren Johnson (organic content & creator trends): https://www.youtube.com/@orenmeetsworld

The GLP-1 $1.8B four-person business: https://x.com/jonoringer/status/2039759594461839599?s=20

Creative Testing Playbook: comment TESTING below and we'll send it to you

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Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
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🚨🚀 Your creative strategy was built for an algorithm that doesn't exist. In 4 weeks, we'll identify exactly where your creative is leaking money and hand you a roadmap on how to fix it using a persona-driven strategy that reduces CAC, beats creative fatigue, and scales spend profitably.

4 week sprint. 3 hours of your time. No retainer commitment: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQ-p0

Most brands respond to reach problems by producing more creative. More hooks, more formats, more volume. But if you're speaking to the same emotional states in the same way, more output isn't going to move the needle.

The real unlock is persona diversity — and not just at a demographic level.

In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact micro persona framework Hambi use across seven and eight figure DTC brands to drive incremental reach at scale on Meta. This is the internal process — from macro persona to micro persona mapping, through to how psychological diversity in your creative signals to Andromeda who to put your ads in front of.

If you're managing serious Meta spend and incremental reach is a constraint, this is the framework to fix it.

Download our persona breakdown board here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQTw0

Loukas published an article on micro personas, you can read that here: https://x.com/LoukasHambi/status/2028854922209374604

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0slb_f0

Most DTC founders have a number in their head. A valuation. An exit. A moment where the work pays off.

What nobody tells you is that the decisions killing that outcome are being made right now, long before you ever sit across from an acquirer.

In this episode, Olly and Loukas sit down with Paul Hanley from the Fortia Group, one of the UK's leading e-commerce M&A advisors, to pull back the curtain on what the exit process actually looks like from the other side of the table.

Paul and his team have seen hundreds of DTC businesses come through their doors — from £400K startups to £50M+ brands — and the same mistakes keep showing up. Paul breaks these down.

Plus Paul launches Beauty Value Labs — a new network built specifically for beauty founders who want to understand where their valuation stands today and what it could be.

About Beauty Value Lab: For beauty brands doing $10M+ in revenue, the most important exit decisions are already being made, without you realising it. Years before a banker gets hired, through operating choices and reporting discipline.

Beauty Value Lab is a pre-exit value engineering platform built by career investment bankers at the Fortia Group, working with founders 12 to 36 months ahead of a transaction. Membership includes quarterly Buyer-Grade Valuation Memos, ongoing decision support grounded in buyer logic, and direct access to active beauty acquirers through closed-door sessions.

This is not a founder community. It sits upstream of advisors and bankers, engineering the conditions under which future transactions succeed.

If you're a beauty founder building toward an exit in the next 1 to 3 years, find out more at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfEGtuaRTYMsFYeVoK3CBQf8GH0GJ1dV/view

https://thefortiagroup.com/

Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hanley-4ab64592/
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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0s7Jtp0

AI UGC has come on leaps and bounds. In this episode Loukas breaks down the exact workflow he's using right now to generate hyper-realistic UGC style ads, without booking a creator, running a shoot, or spending a fortune on production.

We cover the full tech stack: Claude for prompt writing, Sora 2 for hook footage, ElevenLabs for voice cloning, ChatGPT for subject consistency, Nano Banana for B-roll generation and Kling for bringing static images to life.

Then Olly and Loukas go deep on Claude skills, recursive self-improvement loops, and how they're using AI to grade scripts, review landing page congruency and build self-improving creative workflows across the agency.

Comment PROMPT below and we'll send you the Claude template we use to generate Sora 2 prompts.

Read Sarah's article here: https://x.com/SarahLevinger/status/2021281038895546761

Recursive self improvement loop: https://x.com/vibemarketer_/status/2019435524532904205?s=46

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rNf_N0

For this episode, we’re joined by a Meta Creative Strategist working directly with some of the most disruptive brands on the platform. This is someone inside the system, helping fast-scaling brands rethink how they approach creative, performance, and growth.

We unpack how the algorithm actually works in 2026 and why so many brands are still optimising for an outdated version of Meta. From the shift away from interrupting attention toward earning it, to Andromeda acting like a “super intelligent librarian” that reads the entire book rather than judging the cover, this conversation reframes how creative is interpreted at scale.

We dive into why small iterative tweaks stop unlocking growth, how creative diversity fuels learning, and what really separates the top 1% of brands from everyone else. We also explore the real role of partnership ads, why identity changes how the algorithm understands your message, and where brands are over-relying on AI instead of strengthening creative judgment.

If you run Meta ads, lead a DTC brand, or oversee creative strategy, this episode will likely challenge a few assumptions you didn’t realise you were making.

You can download our 2026 Partnership Ads Guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rNfZb0

Read our Meta campaign study here: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/creative-customers/1942172

This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/msm5ak8c

Follow Maxime: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxime-menant/
Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rw0Jc0

From the team behind Soar With Us and Hambi Media: http://www.soarwithus.co/

In this episode, we break down Meta’s latest algorithm updates — including UTIs and the next phase of Andromeda and what they actually mean for reach, creative strategy, and performance.

We explore why Meta is moving away from engagement-led optimisation toward interest alignment, how organic content is increasingly training paid delivery, and why generic, broad hooks are losing effectiveness. The conversation digs into creative diversity, persona depth, and how brands should rethink both organic and paid as part of the same system.

We also share how we’re experimenting with Claude Skills, Co-worker, and Claude Code inside our creative strategy team, moving from prompt engineering to codified inputs, context-driven workflows, and structured delegation.

This is a practical, operator-level discussion on how platforms are changing, how strategy needs to evolve, and where AI genuinely creates leverage without the hype.

Read Olly's Meta GEM article here: https://x.com/oliverwhudson/status/2016142894504047008

You can download Olly's Partnership ads guide here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0rw5St0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
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Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
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