Hi team 👋

Today, we’re diving into how a collagen supplement brand quietly built a $40M+ business by doing the opposite of what every conversion “expert” preaches. Most DTC supplement brands stuff their pages with countdown timers, urgency popups and “Sarah from Miami just bought” notifications.

Obvi went the other way by building trust and a community people actually believe in.

In five years, they’ve achieved:

• $40M+ revenue 

• 500k+ authentic social followers

• 50%+ repeat purchase rate

• Features in major publications without paying for PR

In today’s edition, I’ll be covering:

• Obvi’s Meta ads system and how creative became their best targeting

• The Google capture strategy that turned searchers into buyers

• A conversion framework of segmented pages, trust stacking, and a testing framework that cut CPA by 55%

The Origin Story

Obvi was founded in 2019 by Ronak Shah, Ashvin Melwani, and Ankit Patel, three marketers who had already spent years running performance campaigns for other supplement companies. They saw an opening in the crowded collagen space: most brands looked clinical and unapproachable, while younger consumers wanted something fun and flavorful.

Starting with just $10k, they launched candy-inspired collagen powders and put nearly all of their early budget into paid ads on Facebook and Instagram. By leaning into this performance-first approach to paid media and conversion optimization, Obvi scaled from zero to $20M in two years and eventually surpassed $40M in revenue.

Your Invitation to Join Assembly

👀 Quick plug: I just launched a free community called Assembly. It’s still rough around the edges (ugly, even), but I’m loading it with AI powered resources and the exact full-funnel (flywheel) playbooks I’ve built from running $27M+ in ad spend while working with 100+ DTC brands.

The goal is simple: give founders and marketers the tools to scale profitably in-house without burning money on bloated agencies or isolated courses.

Anyways, you can hop in free below:

The Playbook Breakdown

ACQUISITION ENGINE
The Great Meta Reset

Obvi had partnered with a big influencer. The campaign worked, sales spiked, and people talked. But Meta’s algorithm went haywire.

Instead of targeting Obvi’s ideal customers, it started to mimic the influencer’s audience profile (which overlapped but diverged in important ways).

And even after the campaign ended, the algorithm still kept targeting and putting people into the wrong audience pool.

That’s what people in ad ops call pixel poisoning, when bad data or misaligned signals contaminate your account so deeply that the algorithm goes off course.

After this, they had to rebuild trust with Meta and clean up their pixel. They didn’t just tweak a setting; they re-engineered their ad account structure, pixel hygiene, and creative strategy.

Here’s how they tactically approached this:

1. Cleaned up the Pixel & Restarted the Signal Path

You can't fix anything if you're feeding Meta garbage data.

Instead of throwing more money at a faulty system, Obvi worked with Upstack to strip out all the noise. They removed unnecessary information and only sent clear, high-quality signals back to Meta.

Think of it like detoxing your account. Without it, every audience test and creative experiment would be tainted from the start.

2. Introduced High-Quality Audiences to Help Meta

Once their pixel was healthy again, Obvi brought in Proxima's AI Audiences to guide (not replace) Meta's algorithm.

The tactical execution:

• Built 7 distinct AI Audiences seeded with traits of their highest-LTV customers

• Watched performance over about 2 weeks, killed non-performers, consolidated winners

• Eventually 57% of their total Meta ad spend was flowing into these AI Audiences (not broad Advantage+ campaigns)

This helped them scale Meta spend 2.3x while lowering New Customer CPA by 12% and increasing NC-ROAS (new customer return on ad spend) by roughly 7.5% 🤯 

Instead of asking Meta to "find my customers from scratch," Obvi was now handing it better targeting data to work with.

3.They Used Creative as the Gatekeeper

With cleaner signals and smarter audiences locked in, Obvi ran creative like a filter. Ads had to earn the click.

They ditched broad, generic messaging and went hyper-niche. Instead of "Try our collagen supplement," they created ads that spoke directly to specific problems:

• "Noticing hair thinning?" → This specific flavor targets that…

• "Struggling with joint pain?" → Here's the collagen stack that helps…

• "Gut issues keeping you up?" → This blend is formulated for digestion…

Their ads became self-selecting. Only people with genuine intent clicked through, which fed Meta even better conversion signals, which improved targeting further.

They also brought on a creative analytics tool that highlights which hooks and assets actually cut through. Obvi shipped 4x more winning creatives with better hooks and assets that achieved a better cut through.

ACQUISITION ENGINE
Google: The Underdog They Finally Unleashed

For years, Obvi treated Google Ads like the backup player. Mostly branded search, a handful of category keywords, nothing ambitious. But by early 2024, they hit a wall: Meta alone couldn't sustain the growth they needed.

Google had to become a profit center, not just a safety net.

In the supplement space, keywords are brutally expensive. And Google's automation loves to broaden targeting aggressively, which can torch your budget in days.

Instead of letting "smart" campaigns run wild, Obvi took full control with intent-matching landing pages.

Branded Terms → Product Detail Pages
Searches for “Obvi collagen” or “Obvi protein” go straight to the product pages — not the homepage. Why this works: traffic already has brand intent, so you remove friction and maximize conversion.

Non-Branded → Advertorial-Style Pages
Search terms like “collagen for skin” or “best collagen powder” hit advertorial-style pages first, educational content, comparisons, benefits, and then product. This warms up interest and softens objections before showing product offers.

Long-Tail Keywords > Broad Bets
Instead of bidding on high-cost, generic keywords, Obvi goes after long-tail, intent-rich phrases. Reliance on keywords like “collagen” is replaced with high-intent queries like “collagen for nails”, “collagen bloating relief”, or “best collagen for women over 40”. Long-tail keywords tend to have higher conversion rates and lower CPCs due to less competition. An approach that lets them spend more efficiently and capture searches others ignore.

Meta Creatives Now Repurposed on YouTube for TOF Demand
The same video ads that proved strong on Meta are repurposed as YouTube pre-roll/in-feed creatives to drive top-of-funnel awareness. This ensures consistent messaging across platforms and captures users earlier in their journey before they Google.

It’s clear Google became a profitable engine once Obvi layered it with Meta campaigns. And when Obvi made products available on Amazon, it delivered an additional 10–20% incremental revenue. 

CALIBRATING CONVERSION & MULTIPLYING PROFIT
Landing Pages, Testing, & Trust

When Meta CPAs climbed, Obvi rebuilt the on-site experience so every click led to a page that matched the ad promise and maximized conversion. Here are four key things they focused on:

Quiz Style Flows
Obvi replaced static PDPs with quiz-style flows. Instead of one collagen page, they built funnels for hair + nails, gut health, and weight management. Each repeated the ad headline, showed UGC, and drove to a single high-contrast CTA. This tighter message match helped cut CPA by more than 50 per cent.

Trust Signals Everywhere
Pages stacked credibility with 7,000+ reviews, screenshots from their 100k+ Facebook group, before and after photos, transparent ingredients, and a clear 60-day guarantee. Keeping mixed reviews visible improved confidence and reduced returns, which helped push repeat purchase rates above 50 per cent!

Aggressive Testing
Obvi treated landing pages like ads, running A/B tests on headlines, layouts, proof placement, and subscription prompts. They quickly cut losing variants and doubled down on winners.

Moving social proof higher on the page lifted checkout clicks, while quizzes pre-segmented visitors and increased time on site. These optimizations lowered CPA by 55 to 57 per cent.

Smarter Subscriptions
Obvi defaults to one-time purchases, then offers a subscription at checkout or via post-purchase email. Perks include:

• Free shipping

• Bonus gifts

• VIP group access.

By framing subscription as a benefit instead of a lock-in, Obvi lifted retention, which allowed them to bid more aggressively on Meta and Google while staying profitable.

The Application

1. Clean Your Signals
Audit your pixel/event setup. Cut noisy or duplicate events. Only feed Meta and Google high-quality conversions so their algorithms know exactly who to find.

2. Seed Platforms With Your Best Data
Upload first-party lists, segment by LTV, create lookalikes or AI audiences. Treat each segment as its own micro-market and feed it matching creatives.

3. Creative as Targeting
Run multiple ad angles tied to specific pain points. Map each ad to a matching landing page (hair health ad → hair page; gut health ad → gut page). Use creative analytics tools to spot winners fast.

4. Capture Spillover With Google
Split branded vs non-branded campaigns. Bid on competitor/category terms. Optimize Shopping feeds with lifestyle images, keyword-rich titles, and review badges.

5. Dedicated Landing Experiences
Lead with buyer intent and personalise. Repeat the ad’s headline on the landing page. Stack social proof near the CTA. Strip distractions. Test layouts and copy weekly, not quarterly.

6. Smart Subscription Offer
Default to a one-time purchase first. Offer perks beyond discounts (free shipping, gifts, VIP group) at checkout or post-purchase to boost retention.

7. Track the Right Metrics
Measure new customer CPA, NC-ROAS and LTV at 3–6 months. Feed insights back into creative, targeting, and offers.

8. Layer Retention & Winbacks
Post-purchase upsells and physical winback mailers turn one-time buyers into long-term advocates.

WRAP UP

The Bottom Line

Think of your funnel as a flywheel. Clean data + smart targeting + creative filters + channel diversification + retention systems = sustainable growth.

— Dev

PS. I’ve finally just launched a community to connect with founders and marketers across ecom. Super ugly at the moment, but the resources in there are invaluable. Join my free community called Assembly to connect with other brand owners/marketers, get new playbooks, ad platform updates, templates and live trainings built for scaling.