Hydrant grew from $14,380 to $108,470 in monthly revenue over 97 days.

Scaling ad spend didn’t scale profit.

Hydrant had $6,800 a month in Meta spend, a reported 1.74× blended ROAS, and a contribution margin of −3.8%. Every new customer cost them money on the first order, and subscriptions weren’t strong enough to make the math work.

Cash runway was down to six months. They weren’t failing. They were stalled, and the clock was running.

The standard playbook had already been tried.

A $2,400-a-month UGC agency delivered eight videos using the same type of hook. CPA fell for three weeks, then climbed again. Advantage+ campaigns raised CPA by 8% with a creative library that was too thin.

Sitewide discounts of 25% pushed AOV down to $39.80 and hurt subscription signups. A full Meta account rebuild moved nothing.

Direct costs totaled roughly $7,200, alongside 4.5 months of missed opportunity while contribution margin stayed negative.

The first conversation wasn’t about creative.

It was about contribution margin.

The financial diagnosis uncovered $2,140 a month in uncounted fulfillment surcharges and processing fees. Before producing more ads, the team needed a clearer picture of what each order actually left behind.

Retina Strategy: find the missing angles.

Every active creative was mapped to a Schwartz awareness level. Solution Aware accounted for 67% of the mix; Problem Aware angles received just 8% of spend.

The analysis identified Problem Aware as an opportunity, citing supplement-category CPAs 40–50% lower at that awareness level. Research covered 340 competitor creatives across Liquid I.V., LMNT, Waterboy, and Cure, and identified three angles the team found unaddressed.

First creatives live in 7 days.

Ad Forge delivered the first live batch within seven days of kickoff. Over the 97-day engagement, the team produced 295 assets across three monthly sprints.

Batched production and modular editing brought the reported per-asset cost from roughly $180 at the previous agency to $41.

Each variant changed at least one structural dimension: awareness level, hook type, or framework. The work went beyond putting a new caption on the same video.

A path from testing to scaling.

During the engagement, this stage was called Creative Ascension. Creative testing and media buying worked together to find the ads worth supporting with more budget.

The reported screening rule gave each creative 72 hours and $150 to reach a CTR above 1.4% and a CPA within 1.3× the account average. Ads that failed either threshold were stopped. In the first month, 68% of the assets shipped were cut.

Those were the rules used in this engagement. Winners moved through four stages:

1. Validation
2. Stress test
3. Scale
4. Iterate

By week ten, the account had 14 validated winners across four awareness levels, up from zero. Problem Aware spend rose from 8% to 39% of the budget as acquisition costs came down.

Same product. Same team.
Different outcome.

In 97 days, monthly revenue reached $108,470 and contribution margin moved from negative to positive. The complete reported comparison:

Scroll the table to see all results.

USD. “pp” means percentage points. Meta purchase CPA and blended CAC are separate measures; contribution margin is not net profit.