 | Episode Cheat Sheet |
EP660
7 SEPTEMBER 2026
54 MIN LISTEN
Sam Kroonenburg
Co-Founder & CEO, Cuttable
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THE TL;DR
A self-described massive nerd who's been selling software since he was 13, Sam co-founded A Cloud Guru with his brother Ryan, scaled it to 600 staff, and sold it for just over $2 billion in 2021.
Instead of retiring, he built Cuttable, an AI ad-creative platform with $16 million raised, 300 brands on it and a team in New York.
Cuttable holds ad-by-ad data on more than $320 million of Meta spend, and it's built around one insight: more than half of all ads you publish will never perform.
This ep gets into the nuts and bolts of how to win on Meta, and where Sam thinks a marketer's job goes over the next ten years.
| Watch the Full Episode |
| From Bushy |
I still catch myself romanticising the big ad shoot. Months of planning, late-night creative sessions, razzle-dazzle client reveals and six-figure production. These days, you'd be crazy to put all your eggs in one basket like that, because half the Meta ads you publish will never work and only one in eleven returns more than 10x. Sam Kroonenburg sold A Cloud Guru for just over $2 billion and now runs Cuttable, which I've been using with a client for a couple of months. This one is about what that maths does to the way you brief.
CHEERS, BUSHY
P.S. We're running a free webinar with StudioHawk on Friday 18 September. Lawrence Hitches and I are unpacking search and AI data from 100 Australian ecommerce brands to see which ones are navigating the search change best. Register here.
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No affiliate or sponsorship arrangement here. Just passing it on in case the episode leaves you curious.
| 01 Skip To The Good Bits | |
| Tap any time code anywhere in this cheat sheet and the episode opens on YouTube at that exact moment. | |
“What’s valuable to our customer is not a generated ad. It’s an ad they’re willing to publish.”
— SAM KROONENBURG | Cuttable
| 02 The Big Lesson |
THE POWER LAW OF WINNING ADS
Sam has built two businesses by betting on a technology wave before it peaked and Cuttable is no different. Sam is a strong believer that the future of ads is volume. Winning on Meta doesn’t reward the best ad. It rewards the most shots.
RULE 01 25:10
The odds
You can’t pick the winner before you publish it, and neither can Meta. More than half of what you publish will flop, roughly one in four returns 3 to 5x ROAS, and about one in eleven clears 10x. Fifty ads in a week lift your odds of finding one to around 83%.
More than half the ads you publish will never perform.
RULE 02 26:33
The cost
Production is what stops most brands from getting near that volume. Hand-crafting each ad takes weeks of resourcing, so it's easy to end up testing four or five concepts instead of fifty.
Companies have not been able to afford to publish 50 ads in a week.
RULE 03 17:05
The control
Volume only works if people trust what gets published. Cuttable’s AI builds a schema of the ad rather than rendering final pixels, so a team can move one layer, a logo, a colour, without a new AI pass changing something else. That’s what helps a team to hit publish and stay on brand.
What’s valuable to our customer is not a generated ad. It’s an ad they’re willing to publish.
Solve all three together and Meta volume stops being a huge issue. You don’t get to pick the winner in advance on any algorithm-run channel, Meta, TikTok, Google, whatever comes next. You just get to choose how many attempts you can afford, and how much your team trusts what comes out the other end.
1 in 11
Ads that return more than 10x ROAS on Meta on Cuttable's numbers across its customer base.
| 03 Steal These Tactics |
1
Wire up all three inputs before you brief anything. Brand guidelines, the product catalogue and your Meta performance history. That combination is what stops a team freezing in front of unlimited options. 20:27
2
Publish the ad that looks like a screenshot. The formats winning on Meta right now are the ones that don't look like ads at all. 24:51
3
Map every ad against a target ROAS, not just spend. It turns your account into a heat map of what's actually clearing the bar. 30:05
4
Size your BFCM file count to your spend tier. Sam's Black Friday playbook calls for around 280 files at $25k to $75k of spend, 920 at $75k to $250k, and 1,400+ above that. 29:14
5
Connect Meta before you make anything. Cuttable reads back every ad in your account, including the ones it did not make, so your first brief already knows what has worked for you. 21:19
| 04 The Stack |
The AI ad-creative platform Sam co-founded, built so a performance team can lift Meta ad volume and variation without adding headcount.
Where every ad publishes and where performance reads back in. Cuttable holds ad-by-ad data on more than $320 million of spend to work out what's trending by category.
Cuttable syncs the product catalogue straight in, pulling imagery, video and descriptions so a brief starts from real, approved assets instead of a blank prompt.
Already supported alongside Meta as a second publishing channel, with Google Ads listed as coming next.
| 05 If This One Landed |
EP639
The Unicorn Rule: Why The Lad Collective Publishes 15,000 Ads to Find 10 That Work
Sam and I talk about this one in the episode. Mark Broadhead published roughly 15,000 ads over four years and found fewer than ten genuine unicorns. Same concept told by the creator living it rather than the platform measuring it.
EP624
It's Not Digital, It's Just Retail with Freedom's Paula Mitchell
Scaling ad variations without scaling headcount sounds simple until you try it. Paula Mitchell took Freedom from four ad concepts a campaign to thirty using the same team, and rebuilt what the role looks like in the process.
EP652
The Best Exit Is The One You Don't Need: Rob Ward on Selling Quad Lock for $500M
Founder exits are rarely as clean as the headline number. Before Rob Ward sold Quad Lock to Thule for $500 million, he built the discipline that made the exit possible in the first place, and he’s since given the whole playbook away for free.
| Pass It On |
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| Continue the Conversation |
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