48 months solo is impressive. That marketing line is 100% true.
I'm building a tool that auto-generates ad creatives from a url (img-pt.com). Happy to run it on zigpoll.com and show you what it comes up with, if you think it can help you out.
Really cool project. That cold shipping problem you mentioned sounds like a massive headache. I actually had a friend who was dealing with the exact same thing a while back . I remember him saying the game-changer for his business was looking into specialized cold chain 3PLs. Apparently they have all the refrigerated warehouses and get way better rates on overnight shipping. Might be a dead end, but could be worth a google. (not an expert in this stuff, just something I remembered)
On another note, it's cool to see another sibling team at it. My brother and i are also building a startup together (https://www.img-pt.com/). Our tool helps generate ads for products just like yours, without needing an agency or a huge budget, using the information on the website you already have.
Since you guys are in growth mode, would you be open to us making a few ad concepts for drinkiso with our software? I could send them over here for you to see if they're any good or useful. No pressure or strings attached at all.
Re: shipping -yes that's where we're trying to get to. Right now going through traditional distributors is what we are doing because that helps us get retail footprint but one day, yes, we want to be D2C.
Re: siblings - oof, it's tough my man. Some days can be easy, others hard if not impossible. Not everyone gets to be as simpatico as the Collison brothers.
Re: ad concepts, yes absolutely - I'm more than happy to discuss. Did you have something specific in mind? What about costs?
For the last year and a half, maybe 2 years, i've been working on a 2-man project with my brother. We're trying to make an AI marketing tool that hopefully isn't complete slop: https://www.img-pt.com/
About 2 years ago we were trying to get a marketing agency off the ground. For context, Dall-E 3 was brand new and the AI hype was just starting. We thought, why not try making ads with it? It obviously went terrible. Those old models are junk now, but the idea was there, and we just kept at it.
A big part of the journey has just been getting constantly outrunned by new tech. Just when we'd get close to a decent workflow, a better LLM or image gen model would pop up and we'd be playing catch-up.
We've managed to somewhat keep up and are now focused on image ad gen. what we're working on now is video ads. Not the usual UGC-style stuff other startups are doing, but a more cinematic, polished style of ad. i've seen these made manually on IG, but haven't seen anyone automating it. We'll probably try to ship this in a week or two.
We're also working on a campaign management thing that can take a meta ads campaign, spit it into ad sets for the funnel, and create the right ads for each. it'll also be able to shift budget to the ads that work and swap out the ones that don't, all automatically in your meta account. that'll probably be rolled out in 3 weeks, fingers crossed.
We'd be glad if you could test it out and give us some feedback. i'm mainly interested in whether the ads are actually usable in a real-life campaign. A lot of the ad-gen tools i've seen feel like a nice proof of concept, but they're a bit sloppy and not something you'd actually use. i'd be very glad to know if you find it practical.
I'm building a tool that auto-generates ad creatives from a url (img-pt.com). Happy to run it on zigpoll.com and show you what it comes up with, if you think it can help you out.