Santa Cruz Paleo: $4M a Month, Zero Ads?

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Guest host Chris Orzechowski of Orzy Media is in the chair today, and at 12:45 CT we sit down with Sam Ross, Co-Founder and CEO of Numeral, fresh off a $100M Series C.

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Cork flagged Santa Cruz Paleo, the electrolytes, protein and beef tallow brand, as reportedly doing around $4M a month with zero ads running (Cork on X).

We’re pulling up the brand’s Meta Ad Library page live to see what’s actually there, and digging into how a supplement brand gets to that size on organic demand alone (Meta Ad Library, santacruzpaleo.com).

Iris CEO Drew Fallon called media buyers who sell themselves on lifetime ad spend “the dumbest shit literally ever.” Dollars spent say nothing about whether those dollars made money. Results and judgment are the pitch, not the size of the budget you burned (Drew Fallon on X).

More Perfect Union and Zephyr Teachout are going after Starbucks over surveillance pricing, where what you pay depends on data about you. Personalized pricing is a growing flashpoint, and the backlash shows how fast it turns into a trust problem (More Perfect Union on X, Zephyr Teachout on X).

A startup raised $1.3M from Y Combinator for glasses built so “you never have to type or speak again.” If input moves off keyboards and voice, the way shoppers search and buy moves with it (Aarush Yadav on X).

OuterSignal tells brands 10x more about their customers than they know right now: age, occupation, property value, social following, family status, interests, education, and more. It uses that to identify VIP customers, build precision segments, and personalize outreach at scale.

Whether it’s flagging celebrities, athletes, investors, podcasters, buyers at large retail chains, or simply surfacing micro-influencers within a target cohort, OuterSignal finds, flags, and activates the customers that matter most with unprecedented precision.

Stop marketing to lists. Start marketing to humans.

Pokémon announced a collab with Fender. A licensed drop aimed squarely at collectors on both sides, pairing one of the biggest entertainment brands in the world with an instrument maker people already collect (Pokémon on X).

Liquid Death teamed up with outdoor-blanket brand Rumpl. Two brands with loyal, merch-hungry fans make for a natural crossover, and a blanket is a product people actually keep around and show off (LinkedIn).

The triple collab reportedly drops Nov. 19 at $130. A game launch, a sneaker giant and a celebrity drop stacked into one shoe, priced at the normal end of the AF1 range rather than the hype end (Kurrco on X).

On launch day, a McDonald’s franchisee pushed back on “that’s insane” replies, pointing to today’s beef and wage prices and asking “where else are you going?” Value is now the argument fast food has to win in public (McDonald’s franchisee on X).