It’s easy to create performance marketing campaigns on Facebook and Google’s self-serve platforms. But for Drishay Menon, co-founder of men’s skincare startup Bottlecode, it wasn’t so easy to get performance marketing to perform.
He and his co-founders would set up a Facebook campaign. They’d see click-through, but no conversions. Then, after a week, they’d drop that campaign and start a new one.
“It really came down to the test, iterate and refine cycle,” Menon said.
Bottlecode was an early-stage startup with just four employees — three of them co-founders. No one on the team had a marketing background, so they weren’t sure how to iterate on early campaigns and refine their targeting. They didn’t have any success benchmarks to contextualize what they were doing. They didn’t have enough budget to learn on the job, either.
“How do you learn from these channels when you are constrained by cash?” Menon said. “It was really tough to be able to understand: Are we doing this right?”
They reached out to some agencies for help, but nothing stuck. Some had rigid DTC marketing playbooks that didn’t fit Bottlecode’s business; others were just plain too expensive.
