Post by Marcin Mleczko

Grüns just sold to Unilever for $1.2B. From launch to billion-dollar exit in under 3 years. I mapped their Meta funnel - 241 active ads. Only 39% point to a buy-able page. The other 61% route mostly through avatar-specific listicles. A few things stuck out: 1. They run 4 separate listicle funnels in parallel - gut health, kids ("5 Reasons Your Kid Isn't Pooping"), men's fertility, methylation. Same template, different audience door. 2. They have a co-brand listicle with OLIPOP PBC sitting inside their own domain. Borrowed-audience presell without leaving their stack. 3. Their kids funnel routes through a quiz on quiz.gruns before showing the offer. Buyer intent surfaces before any product does. 4. Healthline runs 12 ads that LOOK like a publisher placement. They're not. Each "activation.healthline." URL is an Everflow affiliate redirect (affid=56) that sends the click straight to gruns. Healthline is monetizing as an affiliate, not as an editorial partner. 5. Every ad in the offer-LP cluster points to a slightly different URL. Same first-order page, 9 URL variants. Since iOS 14.5, Meta's algorithm bundles learnings when multiple ads share a URL - creative-level reporting gets noisy. Path variants (/offer-a, /offer-b - NOT UTMs, which browsers and ad blockers strip) give each ad a hard identifier that survives signal loss. Pixel + CAPI events tag with a unique URL, so creative-level decisions stay clean. Maybe 1 in 20 DTC teams operationalizes attribution this far. 6. They run a SECOND brand inside the same ad account. 5 ads under "Nütrops" and "Nütrops with Grüns". Nütrops is Chad Janis's mushroom-gummy sister brand. The extra step ISN'T friction. It's architecture that lets brands squeeze the most out of their funnels. I mapped all 10 active Grüns funnels - ads, presells, PDPs, the affiliate redirects, the lot. Comment GRUNS and I'll send it. (make sure we're connected so I can DM)