Shipping 300 ad variants in a week (without losing your mind)
How a two-person growth team moved from one-off generations to a structured variant explosion.
Halo Naturals' growth team is two people. Last quarter they shipped 312 ad variants for their Spring launch in seven days. Here's the structure they used.
Start with the audience graph, not the creative.
The instinct is to brief 'a hero shot' first. Don't. Map the audiences first — that gives you the constraint set every creative will be measured against.
Three concept directions, four variants each.
Twelve base creatives is the right number. Less and you're testing noise. More and you can't draw conclusions in a week.
Variant explosion AFTER you pick winners.
Don't generate 300 variants up front. Generate 12, run them for 48 hours, then explode the top 3 into 100 each. That's how you get to 300 without the variance pollution.
One short note when something ships, plus the occasional long essay. No clutter.