Selected work

Running paid acquisition for larven.ai

Paid and social media marketing, built from nothing and scaled to $400k ARR in five months.

Client: Larven
Engagement: Paid acquisition, social and creative production
Duration: Five months, ongoing

$400k ARR: Grown from zero in five months
From 0: No existing ad account, creative library or tracking at the start
5 months: From first campaign live to the current run rate

Starting from zero

There was no account to inherit. No campaign history, no creative library, no conversion tracking worth trusting — which is a harder starting point than it sounds, because there is also no baseline to tell you whether anything you do is working.

That shaped the order of the work. Measurement went in before spend, so the first campaigns produced usable data rather than just impressions. Creative was treated as a production line from day one instead of something to sort out later. And the scaling rules were written while the numbers were still small, which is the only time anyone is calm enough to write them honestly.

Five months on, that same structure is what the account still runs on. Nothing below is a one-off tactic — it is the routine, repeated every week.

How the account is run

Four principles do most of the work. They are deliberately unglamorous — the advantage comes from applying them every week rather than from any single clever idea.

Nothing scales until the numbers are trustworthy

The first work on any account is measurement, and Larven was no exception. Conversion tracking gets rebuilt, server-side events are wired up and deduplicated against the browser pixel, and every downstream number is reconciled against what the business actually banks.

Platform-reported performance is optimistic by design — every channel takes credit for the same conversion. Until spend, signups and revenue reconcile in one place, any decision about budget is a guess wearing a suit.

Creative is the account

Targeting is largely automated now. The variable still under our control is what is actually in the ad, which makes creative the main lever rather than a supporting task.

So the account runs as a pipeline rather than a series of campaigns: a standing backlog of angles, hooks and formats, produced continuously and shipped on a fixed cadence. New concepts are always in the queue, which means performance never depends on one winner holding up.

Tests that produce conclusions

Every batch goes live against a stated hypothesis — a specific angle, hook or format — in a structure that isolates that one variable. If a test cannot change what we do next, it does not run.

Results are read on a fixed schedule against thresholds agreed in advance. Concepts that clear them graduate into the scaling campaign; the rest are cut on the date, not when someone feels ready to give up on them.

Scaling is a decision made before the good day

Budget increases follow rules set in advance: sustained performance against contribution margin, enough volume to trust the number, and headroom in the creative queue to feed the extra spend.

Deciding the rules while nothing is on fire is the entire point. It stops scaling from becoming a reaction to one strong afternoon, and it stops a bad week from triggering a panic cut that throws away a working account.

The operating rhythm

Most accounts do not fail from a lack of ideas. They fail because nothing happens on a reliable schedule. This is the cadence the Larven account runs on.

Weekly
Performance reviewed against target — spend, acquisition cost and contribution margin, not platform ROAS.
Weekly
New creative batch ships. The queue is refilled before it empties, never after.
Weekly
Cut and scale decisions applied against the thresholds, regardless of how the week felt.
Monthly
Step back: channel mix, creative themes that are working, and what to test next quarter.

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