Ad spend is dead. Here's what replaces it.

It's been a while. Let's skip the formalities. I'll catch you up on my life later. I just wanted to get back in the habit of writing again.

We're heading into Q4, and I'd bet a lot of you are either trying to figure out whether you're doing the right thing, or you're ready to jump ship and try something new. Either way, I figured I'd share some of the things that have been lingering in my mind, so you can think them through too.

The last year felt like ten. A lot of things rose and fell at the same time. Peptides and GLPs became the new thing everyone wanted to sell, then got commoditized almost overnight, easy to get into and hard to win at, both at once. Facebook ads turned into a curse for some people and a blessing for others. AI took over the internet and made dead internet theory real. Virtual AI influencers are winning people's hearts and pushing viral crypto coins. There are wellness and doctor "advisors" that are completely AI, and the people buying what they recommend have no idea. And for God's sake, an oregano supplement did around $20 million.

So here's what I think we're walking into over the next 12 to 18 months.

1. Ad spend becomes the worst way to build a business.

Ads are renting attention. The rent keeps going up, and everyone's targeting the same people with the same creative. I think it gets replaced by token spend. Token spend is the new marketing. The more tokens you can spend, the more input and output you get, whether that's code, content, pages, or just shipping in general. An ad disappears when you stop paying for it. What you build with tokens is yours.

2. Agents replace the agency.

I'll give you my own numbers. I fired every single agency I was working with and built skills so agents do that work instead. I posted about it the other day: I'm spending around $3,000 a month on tokens. Without them I'd be spending close to $12,000 a month on people to do the work I'm doing. Email marketing and SMS for my brand used to mean working with four or five people. Now I spend about four hours, and it's done for the whole month.

I'm not going to tell you it's better than a good team. But it feels just as good, and that's the dangerous part. AI gets better every single day. This is the worst it's ever going to be.

Here's the part nobody talks about. Before, if you wanted to step away from your business, you hired people. A team could run things while you took a day, a week, a trip. Agents are different. They do the work, but they don't carry the responsibility. Someone still has to tell them what to do, check what came back, and keep building the skills that make them better. That someone is you.

So a solo owner with agents can run what used to take four or five people, and it can feel like freedom. But you're also always working on the business, because there's always another skill to build or another output to check. Whether that's a dream or a trap depends on how you look at it.

3. LTV is how you survive the swings.

The unreliability of ads is the whole problem. Costs fluctuate constantly, and the only way you survive that is by raising what a customer is worth: better retention, higher AOV, a real experience around the product. I think e-com itself turns into something like e-com plus SaaS. Someone buys a product from you, but they stick around for more than the product. They stay for the tools, the community, the space you create for them after the purchase.

4. The work moves off the desk, and your edge moves offline.

I went from wanting to sit at my computer all day to talking to Claude from my phone, telling it what to do, and coming home to check whether it got it right. That's exactly why it's strange to me that Apple is launching touchscreens and bigger devices. They're good ideas and long overdue, but I think they're a little late. And with the playing field this level, the difference is how good your AI is for what you're trying to do. That comes from spending less time on your phone and online and more time in the real world, learning, so you know what to ask for and can tell when the answer's wrong.

5. Beauty and skincare keep going, and the world keeps shipping it to us.

First it was the Japanese trend. Then the Korean trend. People here want to experience what the rest of the world is already doing, and I think that keeps happening. There's always another thing crossing the ocean that feels brand new. The more of that story you can tell, where it came from, why it works there, the more innovative it feels. And it works the other way too: the more innovative something feels, the more people want the story behind it.

On top of that, obesity is one of the biggest problems in the world, and millions of people are now injecting themselves to lose weight. The aftermath is saggy skin, stretch marks, wrinkles. I think that becomes a very big problem, and a very big market.

6. Everything gets personalized, and peptides eat the supplement space.

Everybody thinks peptides are going to grow the supplement space. I think they eat it up. Why would you buy a regular supplement that barely has enough of what you need, all crammed into one pill, when you can get peptides derived from your own body that fill the exact gaps you have? To me, that's the revolution.

And it won't stop at supplements. People will get their blood tested, get a plan built around them by AI or a human, and everything gets catered to that one person: supplements, food, diet, skincare, hair care. Even Sephora and Ulta change. You get scanned and handed items that match who you are and what you're trying to do.

So where does that leave you? Think about what's happening to the middle of the market. Marketing is getting commoditized, because everyone has the same tools and the same ads. When that happens, margins get thin. And when margins get thin, owning a business stops being as attractive as it used to be, because you're carrying the risk, the inventory, and the ad spend, and the spread you keep keeps shrinking. At some point you can make the same money owning one department, or one skill, with a lot less on the line.

I see four ways to be the person who owns the skill. Teach people how to do something, because there's always someone a few steps behind you who will pay to get there faster. Be the person doing the work, like creating content, and get really good at it, because every brand needs it and most of it is bad. Get good at distribution, getting that content in front of people, because attention is still the bottleneck. Or go deep into manufacturing, because making the actual product is the hardest part to commoditize.

If you're sitting in Q4 wondering whether to stay the course or jump ship, that's the question I'd ask yourself. Not what business should I start, but what's the one skill that's actually mine? And do I want to own the whole business, or own the skill?

Be in touch, miss you all.

Moe