Most businesses think they need massive ad budgets to compete. Spend more, get more. But after spending over $1 billion on ads for brands like Nike, Red Bull, State Farm, and Ashley Furniture, I can tell you the real lever isn’t budget. It’s trust.
The problem with most marketing
The mistake most businesses make when it comes to marketing is they’re so focused on “Buy my stuff right now, book a phone call,” they forget people buy because of trust. And I see this over and over again, whether it’s a Fortune 500 or a small local business.
Big companies can get away with brute force. The elephant can lose more blood than the deer or the rabbit. They can afford Super Bowl ads. They can afford to just bleed more because they can sustain. But small businesses can’t afford that, which is exactly why they need a smarter approach.
What is Dollar a Day?
Dollar a Day is my testing and scaling methodology. Once you know the key reasons people buy from you, you put content out there for just one dollar a day.
Seven dollars to boost one post, like a YouTube video or a Facebook post, for seven days. So you’re spending seven dollars to test one piece of content. You might test 10 pieces of content. Now you’re spending 70 dollars. And then when you find a winner, you increase that.
We’ve scaled single campaigns from $1/day all the way to $1 million per day. That’s how we got to a billion dollars in total ad spend. It’s a mass testing strategy. And if you’re a small company, a dollar a day is very reasonable as a testing methodology.
Most people keep launching new campaigns from scratch. That’s the wrong approach. I can pretty much guarantee you that if I went into your Google or Facebook account, found your past winners, and just renewed and extended those campaigns, my performance would beat whatever new idea you come up with. The math is that simple. Most people never go back and look at existing campaigns.
How we drove $38 million for the Golden State Warriors
We had the Golden State Warriors as a client for five and a half years. We ran the ads and analytics for a professional basketball team, which at the time was the number one sports team in terms of media success. Facebook and Google just rolled out the red carpet for us.
The first year, we spent $1 million, and we drove $38 million in provable revenue out of Ticketmaster.
Here’s the thing. We found the moments that were the most successful, the most memorable, like Steph Curry making a crazy half-court shot to win the game. And then we doubled down on that. We turned those into ads, boosted those posts, put them on YouTube and Facebook and LinkedIn, made posters. We did all these things by gathering the winners.
That’s the whole principle. Find what’s already working and amplify it.
Trust is the real lever
Let me give you another example. Last week, I was in Jacksonville with my friend Zach Peyton. He runs Superior Fence & Rail. He took us to his original location and showed us how the company started. He’s got “Superior Fence and Rail” everywhere.
We recorded a batch of simple videos. Some 15 seconds, some a minute long. We interviewed his top salespeople, technicians on the job, and captured authentic stories. We’re having dinner with people, we’re at conferences, we’re just capturing real moments.
We’re not trying to educate people about fencing. All of it is amplifying trust. And it doesn’t have to even be about the product. When you interview someone who’s respected in the industry, and they mention your company, that trust transfers.
The HVAC company that proved B2B works too
My buddy Marko Sipila has an HVAC quote company. If you’re an HVAC company that sells air conditioners, you put the price of the unit on the website. A homeowner comes in and says, “I have this kind of house, here’s some details.” And it says, “Okay, based on that, here’s a quote. Between thirteen thousand and fifteen thousand.”
He started this less than a year ago. Now he has 350 HVAC companies paying for his tool.
Some people say, “Dollar a Day will never work for B2B.” We made dozens and dozens of videos for him. He tried different approaches like “Hey, are you an HVAC company? You should try our software.” Those didn’t work.
What worked was interviewing someone respected by HVAC people, not selling air conditioners, but doing sales training in the industry. Just because there was that credibility, that trust, people said, “Oh, I should use your software because they use your software.” That one video outperformed everything else. Not because of fancy production, but because of trust.
Find the one main reason people buy
Here’s what I tell every business: look at your existing customers. Ask them why they bought. Odds are you’re going to find one main reason, one main story. Some people call it the swinging door hinge, because that’s where the leverage is.
Stop trying to do everything. Find that one lever and build all your content around it. Then test it with Dollar a Day.
How AI fits into my system
Right now, I like Claude for its extended reasoning. When it comes to being creative and auditing and being emotionally clever, I find ChatGPT is actually the best. And then we like to run Grok as well, to fact-check the whole thing, because Grok is connected to real-time data.
But here’s what most people get wrong about AI. I see a lot of dabbling, a lot of people talking about “Did you see this new feature?” I’m like, “Okay, that’s great, but show me the impact on your business.”
The way I use AI is simple. I go to the AI and say, “Based on all the conversations I’ve had, all the emails, all the projects we’re working on, tell me, be honest with me, with maximum truth-seeking, what can we do differently?” And then it puts together a specific goal, a measurable goal. Put a plan together and do it.
It’s like you wanna run a marathon. You don’t just buy running shoes and think that’s going to change things. But that’s how people think about AI. They think buying the tool is the answer.
The biggest mistake people make with AI
Everyone’s jumping into AI. It’s like giving people access to a race car, but most people don’t have a driver’s license.
I see business owners get excited about tools without having the foundation in place. Get your strategy right first. Know your goals, know your audience, know your key message. Then let AI handle the execution.
Every Friday, I used to spend hours reviewing status reports across all our different companies. Could be agencies and software companies. For the last 25 years, my Fridays have been spent going through these status reports, looking through them, giving feedback. Now I have AI go through all of them. These are tasks that are important but they’re not the highest, best use of your time.
Even non-tech people can use AI
I have a friend, I don’t want to make fun of him, but he runs drug rehab treatment centers. He’s the furthest thing away from tech. You know how you have an older relative who’s just been left behind by technology?
What’s amazing is in the last month, I have him now chatting with ChatGPT. He talks to it when he goes on walks. He answers his emails with it. He even built an app, which is crazy. The app looks at whether patients are attending their scheduled counseling meetings. He built another one that checks which counselors are doing the best, because they bill sessions back to insurance.
He was manually doing this across all his different centers in Ohio and New Jersey. There’s no way he could watch over everybody. And even this guy who said “I don’t understand technology,” even he got it once he just started using it. That’s always the big unlock. If they can just use it a little bit, then it clicks.
What AI can’t replace
Look, I’ve got 30 years of engineering experience. But the thing that makes the difference isn’t technology. It’s relationships. It’s the real stories from real people.
Your job is the strategy, the relationships, the trust. AI handles the execution, the repetitive stuff, the reporting. That’s the division of labor. The human brings the trust. The AI brings the scale.
How to get started
Here’s what I’d tell anyone:
- Audit your business with AI. Feed it your website, your LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, all that, and tell it to do a SWOT analysis. It doesn’t require you to do anything.
- Find your key lever. What’s the one main reason people buy from you? Ask your customers.
- Create authentic content. Interview your customers, your team, people respected in your industry. Simple phone videos work.
- Test at Dollar a Day. Boost each piece for $1/day, 7 days. Test 10 pieces for $70 total.
- Scale the winners. When the data shows what works, increase the budget.
- Let AI handle the rest. Use AI agents for reporting, content distribution, and repetitive tasks.
Here’s what it comes down to
Look, you don’t need a big budget. You need real stories from real people, and a simple system to test what works. That’s Dollar a Day. Start at $1, find your winners, and scale from there.
AI just makes the whole thing faster. It handles the grunt work so you can focus on building relationships and creating content that actually means something. We’re doing this right now, across dozens of companies. This is not pie in the sky.