Aggregate #001:
The first issue of our new weekly wrap – a short blast of the stuff that's most exciting
Hello
Welcome to Aggregate #001. I’m giving the Substack a serious upgrade this year.
Every Tuesday – as you have done for the last three years – you’ll get my usual essay.
This is a seven minute read sitting under one of these six core themes: founder mindset, paid social, growth stories, data & insights, creative & psychology, and growth frameworks.
But in addition, I’ll also send out Aggregate every Friday.
Aggregate is for consumer founders and senior operators to catch up on everything they missed going into the weekend. It’s a bit more magaziney, I’m going to link out to other stuff you should be reading, and there’ll be just a short viewpoint each week of something that’s on my mind.
Please leave comments, hit reply, let me know what you think.
Josh
Margin
A single viewpoint of the week.
Authenticity is now a scarce commodity.
Portrait mode has ruined bokeh in photography just as ChatGPT has ruined the em dash. AI will soon do the same to high beauty in film and video.
Last month, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote about this — but also pointed out something hiding in plain sight:
“…but the primary way people share, even photos and videos, is in DMs. That content is unpolished; it’s blurry photos and shaky videos of people’s daily experiences. Think shoe shots and unflattering candids.”
British founders skew older, and the people in charge of creating brands are often those who grew up with Instagram as a place of aesthetic perfection. But it’s not just Gen Z who use it differently now. We all do. Open your DMs to your partner. Look at the last 10 things you shared. How many are polished? How many are beautiful? My bet is less than zero.
Unpolished ads is no longer just a nice-to-have, its increasingly the dominant and maybe only way to win on paid. And if Mosseri’s post is anything to go by, he doesn’t expect the rest of Instagram to shift any time soon.
If you need some ad inspo, get out of the glossies, and open up your DMs.
Key stat
The most interesting stat I’ve seen this week.
Signals
Key signals for builders, growers, and operators.
Creative Testing within Ad Sets [Meta] – this one has been in a few of our ad accounts since last October, but we’re hearing a lot about it from various corners now. Upsides are: you can keep a winner in the hero without any disruption to learning. Downsides are you’re capped at 5 creatives per week.
2026 the year of peptides? [Consumer] – peptides are surging amongst the US tech and biohacking communities being used for everything from injury recovery, performance, mental function, anti-ageing, and sleep. Ozempic falls into this category, but it’s broadening fast.
How awareness spend can help you triple your revenue [Meta] – We launched our first report of 2026 this week on going full funnel on Meta. So far we spy downloads from Harrys, Popsa, Coat, Wild Dose, and Ffern. If you’ve hit a ceiling and creative isn’t working anymore, then maybe this is for you.
OpenAI ads rollout has begin [Platforms] – The most hyped new ad product of the year launches today. This is a CPM-only model, and currently invite-only. The best ad platforms improve products because they force the user into the discussion. But there are also plenty of examples of bad ad platforms. The question currently though is who is still using ChatGPT?
The ‘economy of loneliness’ creates AI boyfriends [Consumer] – while in most of the world, it’s men using AI to generate girlfriends, in China, there is a surge of professional gen z and millennial women using it the other way round. This is just one service targeting this market, as reports the FT.
The stack
A shortlist of stuff I recommend you read and listen to this weekend.
📚 A group of TikTokers tried to detox their timelines. New York Times (£)
📚 The Stack Above The Cloud. Nfx
📚 Ryan Serhant – The Definitive Profile Behind ‘Owning Manhattan’. The Profile
🎧 How Cognitive Biases Work. Stuff You Should Know
🎧 Kara Swisher. Longform #271. (Archival)
📚 What Kills Cartels. The Diff
Forward to a friend
If you like this, I’d love for you to forward it to a friend and let me know what you think. Or leave a comment below.
Love it. Great format.
Brilliant! I'll be back next week