Can you walk me through how you actually think about ad spend as r- as a risk management exercise? Like, what does that framework look like in your day-to-day?

Yeah.

So I think a lot of kind of, um, what's helped me find success at Jackson is just these 90-minute commutes to OC, where I'm just stuck in my head and just running these, like, thought experiments pretty much, um, combined with listening to the experience of other people.

So essentially, the thought experiment that had helped me with this one was the guy named Brad Jacobs, an fascinating guy, founded eight billion dollar companies, not 8 billion, but eight separate billion dollar companies, crazy entrepreneur, and he does this ex- he does this exercise where he tries to, like, accordion his mind back and forth to the really small picture and the really big picture and back to the really small picture.

So then when we're talking about trying to optimize your advertising spend, like what is the optimal advertising spend? Well, I think if you accordion to the really small picture, and if you're trying to optimize for contribution margin, the next hour of what would probably all of us do, especially high LTV, long consideration process, would probably turn off all of our ad spend, hit SMS, and drop our prices 50% and do a massive discount, and that's probably what would optimize contribution margin for the next hour.

If you go accordion back to the really, really big macro big picture and you're like, "Okay, how would I optimize contribution margin over the next fifty years?" Well, assuming that we compound growth for the next, let's say, fifty years, this year is gonna contribute a fraction of a fraction of a percent, where probably what I would do is I would focus on learning, I would focus on getting as many insights, figuring out whether we had the right product and aggressively testing, and I wouldn't care at all about contribution margin.

For this year, it would just be a learning exercise where I would spend as much as my cash flow could allow.

And all of those are-- I think the forecast is a great way for it to get captured and then can provide constraints on like a day-to-day, week-to-week basis so that nobody's running around being like, "I'm gonna run at a 10X MER right now, blast the SMS list," like Michael mentioned, "and just generate a bunch of cash right now, and then, and then I'm gonna worry about the September forecast when I get there." 'Cause like ultimately that month will be smaller if you do that.