My 2025 posts roundup
Top posts from 40,000 words
41 newsletters (42 including this one). Roughly 40,000 words. One year of thinking out loud about growth marketing, Meta ads, and building Ballpoint.
At the bottom of this newsletter, you’ll see a roundup of my top posts of the year. But first a reflection.
I’ve been blogging on some subject or other for over two decades now. No matter what it is I’m writing about, it has always been the best way to think.
My favourite blogposts are often the ones that don’t get the most read. But they’re the ones that my final draft is almost a total rewrite of the first one. Why? Because the process of writing challenges what I think. Some sentences you like the sound of as you put them to paper, only to write another one, pause, reset, and realise the ones before it weren’t worth it.
Old school social networks were great for being the opposite: unfinished thoughts. Twitter was the home of this. It was a place to try things on for size and learn from others as you go. It was in many ways an ongoing writing project to refine how you see the world.
LinkedIn sadly is often too perfect. There’s less room for experimentation with the articulation of your ideas. It’s not a platform to admit you don’t know the full picture or you’re still educating yourself. As a selling platform, you need to already come across as expert.
Modern X is somewhere between the two. Notes is sadly still just writers following for following.
But blogging remains a platform I can explore ideas and thinking. It remains a platform where I learn. It’s just the process is behind closed doors. No matter how good AI is as a thinking or debating partner, it’s still not a scratch on sitting down for 90 minutes with an empty screen and cursor in front of you.
I say all of this because as I re-read through so much of this year’s posts, I’m amazed again at how much I’ve learnt. I’m 37 years old, I’ve been doing Facebook Ads since about 2015, and I’ve already acquired millions of customers for various brands. And yet, there are still things that in this year I’ve learnt or realised for the first time.
It is because of this learning that this industry excites me more today than it ever has done before. Perhaps it’s the nature of advertising – in that the human condition means we’re constantly seeking something new. Or perhaps it’s that the ad platforms themselves evolve so frequently, and so we have to learn how to play with them each year. Whatever it is, marketing, advertising, growth, startups, is an exercise in continuous learning.
So a huge thank you to all of you. First of all for reading and subscribing (some of you paid too). Second of all to giving me a platform to learn and explore. It’s one of my favourite parts of my job.
I hope you all have had an excellent break and entering 2026 well rested.
All the best
Josh
Newsletter developments for 2026
There’s a few things which I’m planning for 2026. I’d love to hear your thoughts on these.
A full pivot towards Consumer
When Ballpoint and Early Stage Growth both launched, we did a little bit of everything. But as we have grown, we have become more confident in what we’re best at. And that’s consumer. Ballpoint will only be working with companies with consumer business models throughout 2026. And as such, it makes sense that this substack become more specifically focused at consumer.A likely rebranding of the newsletter
Just as Consumer is the natural evolution of our growth plans, the Early Stage Growth moniker potentially outgrows itself too. I have so far been of the view that there is stuff on here that helps educate founders at pre-seed or idea phase, as well as content aimed at helping growth leads at eight-figure companies. But more and more the natural content I want to write about falls into the latter.A weekly NIB or similar
There’s a whole load of stuff that I read every week that helps me do my job. Ultimately a large part of our ability to help you grow is not related to you, but related to the world around you. I’m exploring a weekly news in briefs edition of the newsletter that covers what’s happening that week.
In part, this might look like this weekend’s 2026 post where I reflected on current trends impacting consumer businesses. But they will likely be lighter weight and bloggier in practice. The full set of categories might be:market confidence data,
consumer trends,
news impacting the biggest consumer companies,
changes from all of the ad platforms,
shifts that the leading DTC/ecom brands are doing,
creative trends,
organic social trends,
high-level industry news impacting marketing & advertising,
global business affairs,
analysis and articles from marketing journals, and
measurement reports and experiments from bigger companies.
Consumer case studies
So many great newsletters operate in the space catering for b2b and more traditional tech. Growth hacks and loops and processes and onboardings diagnosed and everything in between. But there is more of a gap with consumer companies. I’m wondering whether a third instalment of the newsletter could be a fortnightly case study.
Let me know what you think of these. Ultimately this will be increasing the workload so we’d be treating it as an experiment, but these are areas I believe would provide value to me, and therefore could provide value to you too.
Top Substack Posts of 2025
Advantage Shopping Campaigns in 2025
The most-opened post of the year. A deep dive into how ASC performance has dropped off a cliff – from 50%+ of our spend to under 15% – with data from 10 accounts showing why we’re moving back to Manual. The data here genuinely surprised people.
The shift that happened after this was that Meta moved away from the old format ASC. Now everything is essentially ASC. We’ll be updating this post in 2026 with the latest data on:
Old school manual
Old school ASC
new ASC
In the meantime, go read that version here:
Good Copy
15 ways to write better ads. Started with a story about transcribing pub conversations as a 19-year-old wannabe novelist, ended with practical advice on everything from Hemingway App to why your first paragraph is usually unnecessary.
The one people forwarded most.
LTV Debt: Your Growth Killer
Why brands hit a wall at £10m ARR. The concept of ‘Lifetime Value Debt’ – the compounding cost of underinvesting in product while over-optimising on acquisition. Borrowed from technical debt in engineering, applied to consumer brands. One of my favourites to write – which considering how late in the year this grew, was glad to see it enter the top five so rapidly.
How to Run Your Growth Meetings
10 lessons from running 874 growth weeklies over a decade. The growth meeting is the single most important meeting your company can run. 80% of experiments fail. Get comfortable with that.
Your High Repeat Rate is Bad
Contrarian take: if 60% of your revenue comes from repeat customers, that’s a red flag, not a badge of honour. It means your acquisition isn’t working. It’s also something Shopify with its reporting defaults has a lot to answer for.
Failure
The most personal post I’ve written. Why Wine List really failed, and how fear of failure was a huge contributor to that failure. Brexit, firing friends, losing confidence in myself. ‘You’ve failed a company and it doesn’t matter.’ Hard to write. Important to share.
The End of Top-Down Branding
‘The final form of brand is decided by the public.’ Why brand guidelines are broken, the death of millennial sincerity, and why brand should be a mosaic rather than a story. Gen Z sees through it all.
Killing Creative Tests at Day 5
£7.5m of ad experiments analysed. By day 5, you can predict winners with 98% accuracy. Could mean a 28% reduction in testing budget – or 28% more creative volume. The data nerds loved this one.
You Don’t Need a Multichannel Strategy
‘Most companies get zero channels to work’ – Peter Thiel. You can get to £5m ARR on Meta alone. If you’re struggling past £1m, the problem is probably the product, not your channel mix. Focus beats diversification.
The 43 Tools That Make the Modern Growth Tech Stack
Plus 50 micro-tools built on Zapier and n8n. 75% of our current workflows weren’t possible in January. If I were looking for a job in growth today, I’d spend every spare hour experimenting with AI.
Honourable Mentions
5 Meta Ads Lies Too Many Startups Still Believe – CTRs don’t predict performance, lookalikes are dead, viewthrough isn’t fraud.
Forget CPA. CM3 is Your North Star – The only metric that matters for scaling.
Stepping Into the Void: Ben Taylor Interview – Ex-L’Oréal to failed condom startup. Honest, brutal, brilliant.
Futuregazing: Full-Stack Creative Strategists – AI means Creative Strategists can now go from insight to finished ad. The future is here.
Perfectionism is Killing Your Startup – Test, don’t debate.
Why You Need Creative Diversity – Understanding ads and audiences.
The Death of the T-Shaped Marketer – Or the future of ‘Growth Artisans’.
Thank you for reading this year. Whether you’ve been here since post one or just joined, I appreciate every open, every comment, every forward. The paid subscriber base has grown, the client roster has scaled, and the ideas have sharpened – in large part because of these weekly conversations with you.
See you in 2026.
Josh