D2C Diaries

This podcast is proudly sponsored by SARAL. 

Find influencers, reach out, manage every relationship, all in one place, without any chaos. 200+ brands including Grüns, Solawave, Spacegoods are running their influencer programs on SARAL.

If that sounds like what you've been looking for, go to https://tinyurl.com/3t4d4myx and book a demo with their team. Tell them we sent you to claim your $500 discount and whiteglove onboarding.

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In this episode, Olly and Loukas go deep on the AI systems they've spent the last few months building inside Soar Group - the personal operating systems, the creative production infrastructure, and the internal tooling that's changing how the business runs.

This isn't a conversation about AI tools. It's about the architecture underneath them.They cover:
How Olly built a personal operating system based on Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki pattern — using Obsidian connected to Claude Code. Call transcripts categorised automatically every day, Slack piped in, reasoning traces stored against every decision made in the business.

How Loukas built his own version in VS Code connected to Claude Code with in-depth context on every brand, every direct report, and every specialism, plus a reinforcement learning loop built into the content pipeline.

The Club Neuro AI operating system - a full web app built as a test case before rolling into the Control Room. Best performing frameworks dashboard, hooks database, one-click reporting, weekly Reddit scrape, and a UI designed to capture operator intuition at the moment it happens.

The four learning loops: performance into hypothesis, hypothesis into correction, correction into rule, decision into outcome.

How they hired an AI videographer targeting 60 unique concepts a month — the equivalent of 15 shoot days replaced by one person.

A mass static generation system with 40-60 framework prompts, brand DNA and personas pre-loaded, ready to generate at scale.

The principle that ties it all together: context compounds. Models don't.

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00:00 Intro
02:05 Our sponsor: SARAL
03:00 Our personal operating systems we've built
21:00 AI as a feedback loop
24:14 Our sponsor: SARAL
25:10 Our foundational context and data engine
30:20 Club Neuro: creative intelligence operating system
35:00 Best in class forecasting process 
39:50 Our internal creative processes
47:28 Business intelligence platform

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

This podcast is proudly sponsored by Incard.

Most founders building high-growth digital companies are stuck doing the same thing: toggling between apps, wrestling with spreadsheets, and manually reconciling expenses - all while trying to actually grow their business.

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This is a time-limited offer valid till the end of this month, April 2026.

Take control of your finances with Incard today: https://incard.co?fpr=soarwithus&fp_sid=pod

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Most people think growing a DTC brand is complicated. It doesn't have to be.

In this episode, Olly and Sam break down the Growth Compass™ — Soar Group's trademarked framework for diagnosing the #1 constraint holding any ecommerce brand back from profitable growth.

4 pillars. 20 sub-factors. One binding constraint. Fix that one first. Everything else is noise.

As promised in the episode — the full Growth Compass™ cheat sheet covering every sub-factor across all four pillars https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ3_v0

If you want us to run the full Growth Compass™ audit for your brand - scored across all 20 sub-factors with a prioritised roadmap - book a call with the team 👉 Book a call https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tQ4SL0

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

We're back. After a month off, a new office, two London events, and somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 ads launched... there's a lot to catch up on.
In this episode, Olly and Loukas do a full Q1 2026 debrief across creative strategy, Meta attribution, offer positioning, and the frameworks they've been running across 250+ brands.
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This episode is sponsored by Foreplay. Start your free trial here: https://tinyurl.com/3caahj4w
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🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0tvkYy0
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
Brad Jacobs: How to Make a Few Billion Dollars: https://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Make-Few-Billion-Dollars/dp/B0CHTQP25T
Rick Rubin: The Creative Act: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/1838858636
Jason Cohen: A Smart Bear: https://longform.asmartbear.com/jason-cohen/
Oren Johnson (organic content & creator trends): https://www.youtube.com/@orenmeetsworld
The GLP-1 $1.8B four-person business: https://x.com/jonoringer/status/2039759594461839599?s=20
Creative Testing Playbook: comment TESTING below and we'll send it to you
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Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

🚨🚀 Your creative strategy was built for an algorithm that doesn't exist. In 4 weeks, we'll identify exactly where your creative is leaking money and hand you a roadmap on how to fix it  using a persona-driven strategy that reduces CAC, beats creative fatigue, and scales spend profitably.

4 week sprint. 3 hours of your time. No retainer commitment: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQ-p0

Most brands respond to reach problems by producing more creative. More hooks, more formats, more volume. But if you're speaking to the same emotional states in the same way, more output isn't going to move the needle.

The real unlock is persona diversity — and not just at a demographic level.

In this episode of D2C Diaries, Loukas breaks down the exact micro persona framework Hambi use across seven and eight figure DTC brands to drive incremental reach at scale on Meta. This is the internal process — from macro persona to micro persona mapping, through to how psychological diversity in your creative signals to Andromeda who to put your ads in front of.

If you're managing serious Meta spend and incremental reach is a constraint, this is the framework to fix it.

Download our persona breakdown board here: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0sDQTw0

Loukas published an article on micro personas, you can read that here: https://x.com/LoukasHambi/status/2028854922209374604

Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/

🚨🚀 If you're a brand spending £100K/month, we'll run your ads. Apply for your growth roadmap: https://eu1.hubs.ly/H0slb_f0

Most DTC founders have a number in their head. A valuation. An exit. A moment where the work pays off.

What nobody tells you is that the decisions killing that outcome are being made right now, long before you ever sit across from an acquirer.

In this episode, Olly and Loukas sit down with Paul Hanley from the Fortia Group, one of the UK's leading e-commerce M&A advisors, to pull back the curtain on what the exit process actually looks like from the other side of the table.

Paul and his team have seen hundreds of DTC businesses come through their doors — from £400K startups to £50M+ brands — and the same mistakes keep showing up. Paul breaks these down.

Plus Paul launches Beauty Value Labs — a new network built specifically for beauty founders who want to understand where their valuation stands today and what it could be.

About Beauty Value Lab: For beauty brands doing $10M+ in revenue, the most important exit decisions are already being made,  without you realising it. Years before a banker gets hired, through operating choices and reporting discipline.

Beauty Value Lab is a pre-exit value engineering platform built by career investment bankers at the Fortia Group, working with founders 12 to 36 months ahead of a transaction. Membership includes quarterly Buyer-Grade Valuation Memos, ongoing decision support grounded in buyer logic, and direct access to active beauty acquirers through closed-door sessions.

This is not a founder community. It sits upstream of advisors and bankers, engineering the conditions under which future transactions succeed.

If you're a beauty founder building toward an exit in the next 1 to 3 years, find out more at the link below: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DfEGtuaRTYMsFYeVoK3CBQf8GH0GJ1dV/view
https://thefortiagroup.com/

Follow Paul: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-hanley-4ab64592/
Follow Olly: https://linktr.ee/ollyhudson
Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joe_marston
Follow Loukas: https://shorturl.at/TRI8B / https://x.com/LoukasHambi
Follow Liam: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liam-dean-a11a43152/
Follow D2C Diaries: https://www.tiktok.com/@d2c.diaries / https://www.instagram.com/d2c_diaries/