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Welcome to ClickDose! This week, no teardown. We're giving away the playbook we run for clients instead, start to finish, on a real category.
In today's edition:
🥃 Our entire Playbook, run in public: from raw research to a live funnel, using Creative HQ, the internal app we built to run it.
📚 Step one on a real category: 190 Reddit comments about natural deodorant, and the one complaint that drowned out the rest.
🤖 Then the build: an ad and a page that are congruent.
🔍 One AI tool: the dictation app we talk to instead of typing.
🥃 Steal Our Entire Playbook
The exact process we run before spending a dollar on ads. The full write-up is free on our site. This is what it looks like on a real category.
12 threads. 190 comments. One complaint louder than all the rest.
🧠 The Setup
We wrote the whole system down as The Playbook and put it on our site for free. We broke it down below and ran it in a category with famously angry customers: natural deodorant.
📚 Step 1: The Research
Before writing anything, we research. Reddit, review sites, social comments. For this example we researched twelve Reddit threads across five subreddits, 190 comments, plus the category's review pages. Real customers describing the problem to each other.
(We pull this through Creative HQ, an internal research and creative app we built for the agency. It scrapes the threads and comments for us.)
The phrasing is the ad copy:
"It wears off in hours at best."
"Suddenly every day I smell like BO by the afternoon."
"I have tried literal 20. And they are so pricey and it feels like such a waste."
Then rank the complaints by how often they repeat. Baking soda rashes came up a lot. So did the drawer of abandoned $15 sticks. But complaint number one, by a mile: it stops working. It dies mid-afternoon, or works for two weeks and quits.
Two more things came out of the threads. A comment with 886 upvotes quoting a dermatologist: odor comes from bacteria, not sweat. And the category's favorite excuse, taken apart by its own customers: "There is no such thing as a detox period. There is nothing in your armpits to detox."
🎯 Step 2: The Pain Point
Every pain point eventually gets its own funnel. You start with the most common.
By 3:45pm this customer is already asking herself: did this thing quit on me again? The ad answers that question and takes her side.
She also wrote the desired outcome for us: "I just need something that will last 8ish hours, bonus points if it survives a workout." That's a spec sheet, free.
🛠 How to Run the Research Yourself
Spend two hours reading threads and reviews. Save the exact sentences people write. Don't reword them into marketing language. "It wears off in hours at best" works as ad copy. "Customers report longevity concerns" does not.
Count how many times each complaint comes up, and rank them by that count. Ignore how dramatic any single post is. One angry rant is one person. The same complaint showing up forty times is a market.
Write down what people say they want, in their own words. One commenter wrote "bonus points if it survives a workout." That line is better than anything a marketing meeting will come up with, and it was free.
TOGETHER WITH CLICKDOSE LABS
Great ad. Wrong page? ClickDose Labs' Page Lab builds conversion-ready landing pages in-house and tests them against your control. Then Growth Lab fills them with qualified traffic. Senior operators on your account from day one. Apply to work with us →
🤖 AI That Actually Ships
Steps 3 and 4 of the Playbook: build the ad and the page for the winning pain point, and make them match.
🧠 The Setup
Meet STILL, a deodorant brand that doesn't exist, with one product and one argument: acid, not perfume.
The mechanism came from the research. Odor is bacteria eating sweat, so perfume only covers the smell until it fades. An acid that keeps skin at pH 4.2 stops the bacteria from growing at all. That's also why the real sticks quit at 3pm: the perfume left, and nothing else was working.
(The creative and copy came out of our Creative HQ)
The ad: one static, one strong headline, the cheapest format on the Playbook's list. The headline is the pain point with a clock on it.
And where our click lands:
The offer sells certainty, because this category has burned everyone. The 3pm Guarantee: smell yourself before dinner, any day in your first 60, and you get a full refund and keep the stick. The Graveyard Amnesty: $2 off per dead stick in her drawer, honor system. Her wasted money becomes the discount instead of the reason she doesn't trust us.
🛠 Three Things We Put On The Page
The headline is a comment, not a claim. "Smell like BO by the afternoon?" is a customer's sentence with a question mark added.
Name the guarantee after the doubt. Every burned buyer remembers the moment their last purchase failed. A guarantee named after that exact moment reads like proof you were listening.
Say what it doesn't do. STILL's page states plainly that it will not stop you sweating. Only aluminum does that, and there's none in here. One honest sentence converts skeptics.
💀 Bottom Line
The full Playbook is free: read it here. Want us to run it for you, Creative HQ and all? That's Page Lab. Reply "PAGE" and we'll tear down your current landing page for free. First five replies only.
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🔍 Founder Finds
One tool a week, actually tested, with how we'd run it.
🛠 Wispr Flow: the dictation app that made talking faster than typing. We use this daily. Flow lives at your cursor: hold a key, talk, and clean text lands in whatever app you're in. It strips the umms, fixes punctuation, formats lists, and learns your jargon, so a rambled thought comes out reading like you typed it on a good day.
How we'd use it: AI prompting. Long, detailed prompts are the tax you pay for good output from Claude or ChatGPT, and nobody types 300-word prompts. You'll happily say one. Same for Slack replies, braindumps, and research notes.
The caveat: free gets you 2,000 words a week on desktop. One proper braindump eats most of it. Unlimited is $15 a month, $12 on annual. And dictation is a skill: day one you will talk like someone leaving their first ever voicemail. Try it here (referral link: We get credit if you subscribe, and use the tool either way).
🎁 New: Refer One, Get The Machine
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It's called The Machine Prompt, and it unlocks at exactly one referral. Send ClickDose to one person who buys ads, they subscribe, the machine lands in your inbox automatically. That's the whole transaction.
👋 That's A Wrap!
Have something you want feedback on? Have great ideas to share? Email us and we can discuss here.
See you soon,
Eric and Rob | The ClickDose Team
