WiseTrack Collective

The Advantage

by Mike Wystrach

Issue #36 | September 9, 2026

From a COVID Baking Habit to a Multi-Million Dollar Brand & the Most Underinvested Marketing Channel You Have

She built the audience six years before she had anything to sell. Then the part nobody does: moving them somewhere she owns.

THIS WEEK'S THROUGH-LINE

You do not own the people who follow you. Move them somewhere you do.

Welcome Note

Thanks for reading the thirty-sixth issue of The Advantage. This one is brought to you by Proppel. Details on Proppel and the discount for Advantage readers are at the end of the newsletter.

Last week was about finding the places where you are the constraint and taking yourself out of them. This week is about the audience. Where it comes from, and where you keep it.

The watch is my conversation with Addison LaBonte, who built Sweet Addison's into a multi-million dollar gluten-free dessert brand out of her apartment kitchen. She built the audience first and let it tell her what to sell, and she was her own first customer, which is the pattern in every business I have started.

Then the Practical Edge is the other half of that. You do not own the people who follow you. Here is what that costs, and where to move them. Let's get into it.

WORTH WATCHING:

Build the Audience Before You Build the Product

The Advantage · Mike Wystrach × Addison LaBonte · ~56 min

Addison LaBonte was a math major and a walk-on Division I soccer player at the University of Maine who graduated straight into a finance job she did not want. Today she runs Sweet Addison's, a multi-million dollar gluten-free dessert brand she bootstrapped out of her apartment kitchen and still self-manufactures. What makes the episode worth your time is the order she did things in. She built the audience first, and the audience told her what to sell.

WHAT I LOVED ABOUT IT:

The old playbook was to make the product and then go find the customers. Addison ran it backwards. She started @organicallyaddison to document her own gluten-free cooking. It grew for years and then took off during COVID, when everybody was home baking, and only then did she build a company for the people who were already there.

The turn is my favorite part of the conversation. In December of 2022 she posted a different cookie recipe every day for twenty five days. A few of them hit five million views, and the DMs started coming in asking where people could buy them. She had proof of demand before she had a product.

She was also her own first customer. That is the pattern in every business I have started. I did not start them because I had the most domain knowledge. I started them because I had a problem I wanted fixed. Addison went gluten-free for her own health, could not find a cookie worth eating, and ended up flying home to Maine with batches of her own cookies packed in her suitcase. She got stopped by TSA, and her answer to the agent is the whole thesis of the company.

Then there are the numbers, which I love because they are so unglamorous. Five thousand dollars to start. Seven to eight thousand dollars in month one, out of the apartment, with zero paid marketing. Commercial kitchen and the first paid ads at month six. No outside capital.

THE LINE THAT STUCK

"I can't buy these anywhere. They don't exist on the market."

MY 20-SECOND RECAP

if you do not have the full 56 minutes

→Build the channel, then build the product. An audience is a standing focus group and a launch list at the same time. Addison had people telling her what they wanted before she had a Shopify store.

→Twenty five days of one thing beats a year of everything. The Christmas cookie run worked because it was narrow, daily, and specific enough that the algorithm and the audience both knew exactly what she was.

→Ask for twenty minutes, not for a mentor. She cold messaged people in her industry on LinkedIn with a short, specific list of questions. Most said yes, and almost every call ended in an introduction to somebody else. We did the same thing at a food equipment conference when we were starting Freshly, and that guy stayed in our business for ten years.

→Higher intent and higher volume are two different budgets. Google converts better for her. She spends more on Meta. Both of those are correct at the same time, and the mix is the answer.

→Being early to a label costs you nothing. She launched leading with wholesome ingredients because gluten-free and dairy-free still felt too niche to lead with. Two and a half years later she leads with all of it.

PRO MOVE

Go back through ninety days of your own comments and DMs and write down every time somebody asked to buy something you do not sell. That list is a product roadmap, and it is free.

WATCH →

PRACTICAL EDGE

Rent the Audience, Own the List

WHY IT WORKS

At Freshly, a marketing offer sent to an active customer got close to a 50% open rate and a 3% to 5% click-through rate. The same offer sent to somebody whose email we had but who had never bought got 20% to 30% open and 1% to 3% click. Both of those beat anything we ever saw on Facebook or Instagram, and both beat the published industry averages below.

In my opinion email is the most underinvested marketing channel there is.

It is always on. You are not bidding against anybody to reach your own customer. And every other channel you pay for works harder when it exists.

SMS is the other half of the play, and it runs on different rules. Email you can send weekly. Text you should send about four times a year, and only when you have something worth interrupting somebody for. Used that way it is the best activation tool you have.

This is what I told Addison on the podcast this week. Instagram and TikTok are excellent at the top of the funnel, and they do one thing email will never do, which is put you in front of people who have never heard of you. Use them for that. A follower is permission for the platform to show your post. It is not permission for you to reach a person. Move the people who raise their hand onto a channel where you decide who gets the message.

THE DATA SUPPORTS IT

Klaviyo's 2026 benchmark report, drawn from more than 183,000 brands, puts the average email campaign at a 31% open rate and a 1.69% click rate. Read the open rate as directional, because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection has been opening messages on users' behalf since 2021.

You have seen the claim that SMS gets a 98% open rate. There is no source behind it, and there cannot be, because text messages do not return read receipts. The largest vendors do not publish an SMS open rate at all. What they do publish is the click. Omnisend's 2026 benchmarks, built on more than 246 million campaign sends across 27,000 brands, put SMS campaign click rate at 12.39% and automated SMS at 20.34%. That is roughly seven times the email click rate, and you already know from your own phone how hard it is not to read a text.

Now the platforms. I could not find a study with a disclosed sample that publishes what share of your followers see an organic post. What does get published is engagement per follower. Socialinsider studied 35 million Instagram posts across 447,613 profiles in 2025 and found an average of 0.48%. Rival IQ puts the 2026 median at 0.30%. Different metric, same direction.

In the FTC's antitrust case against Meta, Judge Boasberg's November 2025 opinion cites Meta's own data. Fewer than 15% of the posts people see in the Facebook feed are original posts from friends. On Instagram it is 5%. Mark Zuckerberg told investors in April 2024 that more than half of what people see on Instagram is recommended by AI rather than followed.

HOW I USE IT

Once we turned paid on at Freshly, our organic reach dropped off a cliff. I cannot prove the two are connected, and Meta has never claimed it either way. What I can tell you is that we stopped being able to count on organic to move product, and the reach was going away for everybody at the same time.

If you are selling a product, use Klaviyo for both email and text. It was built for ecommerce rather than adapted to it, and if you are running Shopify it is close to plug and play. Free up to 250 profiles, and paid email starts at $20 a month.

THE SETUP

→Give people a reason worth an email address. Early access to a drop, a vote on the next flavor, a code that does not exist on the feed. "Subscribe to my newsletter" is not a reason.

→Put the ask where the traffic already is. Link in bio, a pinned post, one story a week, and the order confirmation page if you sell anything.

→Report customers and non-customers separately. They are two different numbers and averaging them hides both. Our customer list ran roughly double the open rate of our prospect list.

→Treat text as an activation tool, not a newsletter. A text is more intrusive than an email and it has to earn the interruption. Four times a year, on a real sale or a real deadline, it is the strongest button you can push. Monthly, it is an unsubscribe machine.

TRY IT →

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Thanks for reading.

Founder · Operator · Investor

→ Know someone with an audience and nowhere to send it? Forward this to them.

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The Advantage | WiseTrack Collective

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