Most founders have more marketing data than they know what to do with — and are making worse decisions because of it. The issue isn't measurement. It's that the metrics they're watching were never designed to match the sales cycle they're actually running. When you compare this week's ad spend to this week's revenue in a business where the average purchase takes a month to close, you will always misread what's working. Erik Huberman has watched this exact pattern destroy good campaigns — and has the dat...
Most founders have more marketing data than they know what to do with — and are making worse decisions because of it. The issue isn't measurement. It's that the metrics they're watching were never designed to match the sales cycle they're actually running. When you compare this week's ad spend to this week's revenue in a business where the average purchase takes a month to close, you will always misread what's working. Erik Huberman has watched this exact pattern destroy good campaigns — and has the data from 5,000+ brands to prove it.
Erik is the founder and CEO of Hawke Media, a full-service outsourced marketing agency that has helped over 5,000 brands — including Red Bull, Verizon, and Crocs — generate nearly $3 billion in client revenue. He built Hawke from scratch into a 250-person bootstrapped company and spent eight years turning client data into a proprietary AI platform trained on over $700 million in media spend.
The conversation opens on a problem Erik sees across every category: founders who look at ROAS on a weekly or monthly basis and draw conclusions that are structurally wrong. If a sales cycle averages 30 days, scaling ad spend from $1K to $5K daily won't show up in revenue for two months — but most founders see flat revenue, conclude the channel doesn't work, and cut the spend that was compounding. Erik's argument isn't that data is bad. It's that a correct data point, read through the wrong frame, produces confident, wrong decisions. He extends this into a broader claim about the AI hype cycle: that much of what AI is being credited with is the same problem — regurgitating inputs without understanding the context that makes data meaningful.
The second thread in the episode is about what it actually takes to build something that scales. Erik's 90/10 framework — 90% of budget and effort to scalable, repeatable marketing, 10% to viral — runs counter to how most first-time founders allocate attention. He's seen viral moments generate $10 million in revenue, trigger infrastructure build-out, then vanish — leaving a company with overhead designed for a spike that's already gone. He's equally direct on the executive team side: coming out of COVID, he identified a specific type of stagnation — people who kept referencing the good old days instead of building toward what came next — and made significant changes. The quality he says is hardest to find, and most essential to keep, isn't talent. It's the specific kind of grit that lets someone miss a goal, absorb it, and keep charging.
Roland observes that the measurement problem Erik describes — having access to data without knowing what it means — mirrors a pattern he sees consistently in SaaS companies at the $3M–$15M stage. Founders at this stage have typically invested in reporting infrastructure, but the cadence and frame of the reports were built around what's easy to pull, not what reflects their actual sales cycle. The result is a false confidence in the numbers that makes it harder, not easier, to allocate well. Erik's experience — and his data across 5,000 brands — suggests this isn't a scale problem. It's a framing problem that shows up at every stage.
Key Moments:
00:02 — Erik's opening claim: AI is mostly regurgitating the internet — and why that's a bigger problem than most companies realize
02:13 — The ROAS fallacy: why comparing this month's spend to this month's revenue will make you cut your best campaigns
04:39 — What actually happens when you scale ad spend from $1K to $5K daily — and why the numbers look broken even when the strategy is working
06:40 — How Hawke uses AI internally: augmentation over automation, and why the "army of 20-year-old interns" framing is more accurate than the hype
12:16 — CEO alignment vs. optimization: why marching in the wrong direction together often beats optimizing in five different ones
15:42 — The 2024 executive team inflection point: what Erik changed, who he kept, and the specific behavior pattern that triggered most of the exits
18:44 — The honest pitch Erik makes to every new hire — and why he deliberately screens out people who find it unappealing
22:28 — The 90/10 marketing rule: why scalable and repeatable should get 90% of your budget, and what happens to companies that chase viral instead
23:39 — The viral sugar rush: how a $10M viral moment can cost a company $10M in infrastructure it no longer needs
25:02 — The Forbes 30 Under 30 moment that made Erik feel, for the first time, like he was competing in the thing he was built for
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Hawke Media is offering listeners a free marketing audit. This is most useful for growth-stage companies that are spending on marketing but aren't confident their measurement approach is reflecting their actual sales cycle. https://hawkemedia.com
If you're spending on marketing but not sure whether your reporting frame is set up to match your actual sales cycle, this is the kind of problem Midstage works through directly with founders at the $1M–$50M stage. mdstg.ac/drag-erase
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