# Joe Hides

Joe Hides is a co-founder of Affluent.co, an advertising agency. Hides's work focuses on performance advertising and creative strategy for direct-to-consumer brands, including diagnosing ad fatigue and growth constraints.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/joe-hides/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-hides
- LinkedIn followers: 1,435
- Topics: ecommerce, paid-ads, meta-ads, ecommerce-growth
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-06

## Summary

Most useful for diagnosis-led performance advertising and creative strategy for direct-to-consumer brands, especially finding the real growth constraint before more ad spend.

- Best for: A DTC brand spending at least $20,000 a month on Meta with rising ad fatigue.
- Not for: A small brand with little Meta spend seeking sponsored posts or guaranteed ROAS increases.
- Check first: Confirm audit availability, paid scope, deliverables, terms, and sample trail from customer quote to hook.

### Takeaways

- Find the constraint before prescribing creative; production capacity, not ads, limited one client's sales.
- Use customer reviews and support feedback to identify objections and preserve customers' own words in hooks.
- A free diagnosis is standard front door; five audit places at a time, no commitment.

## Main ideas

- **Find the constraint before prescribing creative**: Joe Hides’s recurring rule is to identify the constraint before choosing a solution, and for agencies to look beyond ads at the wider business. When production, inventory, or offer structure is the limiter, more reach and testing change nothing: the ads were never the problem. They put it bluntly: prescribing without diagnosing is malpractice.
- **Use the customer's language, not the marketer's**: Joe Hides argues that most campaign plans come from people furthest from the purchase—the founder, marketer, or agency. They know the product and category but have not lived the problem, so they guess at the language and the resulting ads fatigue within months. Their method is to gather reviews and support-channel feedback from Shopify, Amazon, Trustpilot, support tickets, and social comments, keeping the typos and swearing, then run a fixed set of questions over the comments: what words customers used for the problem before they knew the brand existed; what made them buy now rather than later; what they tried before and why it failed; what almost stopped the order and what convinced them anyway; and what they praise that has never appeared in an ad. Use verbatim quotes only. Five-star reviews show the transformation a brand can promise; one- and three-star reviews reveal objections and reasons people churn.
- **A store makes a million; a brand makes a billion**: Joe Hides advises business owners, especially DTC founders, to build a brand people stay loyal to rather than a store that sells. The question is what remains when a competitor copies you: if the product doing its job is all you sell, a copycat leaves you with nothing. That’s the ceiling. They define a brand through four things: the company’s visual identity; the message put in front of customers and their perception of it; the mission; and whether new products keep being developed once something is working.
- **A free diagnosis as the standard front door**: Rather than pitch an engagement, Joe Hides repeatedly opens a small number of free creative audit slots for DTC brands spending more than $20,000 a month on Meta. It’s first come, first served, with no commitment. The audit’s scope is itself an argument: whether the ad and landing page align or fight each other in the funnel, where budget is starving the top of the funnel while attention goes to the bottom, and which top-performing ads are fatiguing before replacements are ready.
- **Self-belief and aggressive execution over a playbook**: Joe Hides presents having no network and no proven model as part of the credential, not a gap. They say they learned sales, marketing, and performance advertising from scratch through trial and error over more than seven years, and credit the agency’s growth to self-belief and aggressive execution rather than an inherited process or playbook.

## Work to read

- [Your customers have already written your best ad](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-hides_your-customers-have-already-written-your-activity-7508484002526375936-4ECB)
- [My client faced a weird problem brands would love to have](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-hides_my-client-faced-a-weird-problem-brands-would-activity-7511385583487934464-4fvh)
- [I give this one piece of advice to every business owner](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-hides_i-give-this-one-piece-of-advice-to-every-activity-7509226988423991296-3nO4)
- [I am offering FREE Creative Audits for D2C brands](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-hides_i-am-offering-free-creative-audits-for-d2c-activity-7510297901127028738-GchG)
- [I was a Team GB freestyle skier and filmmaker in 2017](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/joe-hides_did-we-make-activity-7513192857382334465-0wJz)

## Brand relationships

- **Affluent.co** (owned_business)

## Partnerships

The posts document an agency relationship, not a creator sponsorship package: Joe Hides co-founded Affluent.co, an advertising agency, and recruits clients through free creative audits for DTC brands spending more than $20,000 a month on Meta ads. Five audit places are offered at a time, first come, with no commitment. The agency is described as seven years old, working with 187+ brands and having produced 30,000+ ads, with £235m in reported client ROI and spend above £200,000 a day across accounts. Other posts gate assets behind a LinkedIn comment or direct message, including a prompt set for extracting customer language from reviews. Before considering an engagement, ask about fees, deliverables, turnaround, exclusivity and usage rights.

## Alternatives

- Adolphus Okwuchukwu: Adolphus Okwuchukwu is a better choice when a brand suspects its core creative premise is wrong, not just that individual ads are fatiguing. Their posts describe testing beliefs rather than variations—for example, challenging “premium ingredients” against “works in 10 minutes” to see whether the audience buys on efficacy instead of luxury. They also map creative angles using customer objections, awareness levels, and unique mechanisms, and mention AI-powered systems to develop and test creatives in volume. This fits a brand that needs to question its strategic assumptions and can support high-volume testing.
- Roman Tariq: Roman Tariq is a better choice when a brand’s main opportunity is to monetise existing traffic through bundles and upsells rather than fix ad creative. Their posts argue that brands often spend thousands on ads but never test bundles or upsells, and that selling to an audience that already trusts you is easier. They also limit their client roster to five brands at a time, which may suit a brand seeking dedicated attention. This fits a brand that already has traffic and trust but leaves revenue on the table from simple offer changes.
- Amir Faizan Malik: Amir Faizan Malik is a better choice when the main conversion problem is on the landing page or in copy that speaks to everyone rather than one specific person. Their posts describe auditing 23 DTC landing pages and finding that most tried to talk to everyone. They rewrite headlines to speak to a single person with a single problem, giving an example where conversion rose from 2.1% to 8.4%. They also offer email sequences and ad copy, all starting with deep research into audience language. This fits a brand that needs a copywriting overhaul across landing pages, email, and ads, not just ad creative.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/