Why Transparency is a Growth Engine

Hey everyone,

Welcome back for another bite to chew on.

You know as brands scale, there can be a secret challenge lurking beneath the surface - a growing disconnect between how they present themselves and what customers actually experience.

Most brands respond by doubling down on polished marketing. More ads. Better creative. Shinier content.

But what if the answer isn't more marketing, but more honesty?

When we first started letting negative comments stay up in our Facebook group, it felt like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Our team was nervous. But four years and over 100,000 community members later, that decision to build in public has become a powerful growth engine.

Today, we want to break down exactly how we did it, and more importantly, how you can use radical transparency to unlock growth in ways that marketing dollars never could.

On the Menu:

• The Hidden Cost of Perfect Brands

• Building Real Community Through Radical Transparency

• How Customer-Driven Innovation Changes Everything 

Your highest-intent customers are the ones who just bought from you.

Seems obvious, right?

But a lot of brands miss this clear growth lever. Everyone is focused on paid acquisition and getting that first conversion so they overlook the moment when customers are most receptive.

This is something we learned from Aftersell.

Since onboarding with them we’ve become obsessed with optimizing our buy flow. They make it so easy to see the results and shift your mindset. 

Here’s how they help us build irresistible post-purchase offers → 

1. Upsell UX with social proof, scarcity, and urgency

2. Multi-product sequences, with one-click buy options

3. Personalized offers via parameters like ad creative, shopping journey, product-in-cart, and more.

So far our AOV has improved +$7.50, but we think that’s just the start. 

Want to see how much revenue you're leaving on the table?

Book a call with Aftersell to analyze your post-purchase opportunity: Schedule Your Revenue Analysis

The Hidden Cost of “Perfect” Brands

Remember when "building in public" meant founders tweeting their metrics? That’s still a thing, but it helps to go deeper. 

Today's consumers are drowning in carefully curated authenticity. Every brand claims to "listen to customers." Every founder shares suspiciously polished "behind-the-scenes" content. Every company pretends their journey is nothing but up and to the right.

The result doesn’t seem…actually authentic. 

In the early days of Obvi, we played this game too. We'd delete negative comments. Handle complaints in private messages. Pretend every product launch was killer. We thought we were protecting our brand. 

Instead, we were killing the very thing that would eventually drive our growth: genuine customer trust.

The real cost isn't just in rising CACs. It's in what happens after you acquire those customers. When you maintain a perfect facade, you create a cycle that's impossible to sustain…

• Your customer service team spends more time hiding problems than solving them. 

• Your product development happens in a vacuum because you're afraid of negative feedback. 

• Your marketing costs balloon because paid acquisition becomes your only growth lever. 

Most importantly, you lose the single most valuable asset any brand can have: customers who feel invested in your success.

This dynamic is especially deadly in categories like supplements, beauty, or wellness. Because your customers aren't just buying a product - they're buying into a transformation.

When that journey inevitably includes setbacks or challenges, your perfect brand image becomes a barrier rather than an asset.

Building Real Community Through Radical Transparency

The tendency is to approach building a brand community purely as a marketing channel. 

You know, create a Facebook group, seed it with positive content, and hope engagement follows. But real community isn't built on manufactured positivity - it's built on trust.

Our journey to 100k+ community members started with a simple but terrifying decision: we would let every piece of feedback stay up (unless it violated community guidelines.) 

• No deleting negative comments. 

• No hiding product issues. 

• No sanitizing the conversation.

In the beginning, this felt like commercial suicide. 

A customer would post about a bad experience, and our instinct was to hide it. But we forced ourselves to do the opposite. Instead, we’d jump directly into the comments and acknowledge issues publicly. 

More importantly, we'd solve them publicly.

That’s when something fascinating started happening. Other customers began jumping in to help. They'd share their own experiences - both good and bad. They'd offer solutions. They'd provide support. 

What started as criticism would often evolve into deep, authentic conversations about health, wellness, and personal transformation.

This shift changed our business. Our community became what one advisor called "customer insurance" - a safety net that transforms how people experience our brand. 

When someone hits a challenge with their health journey or product experience, they don't just abandon ship. They have a place to get real answers from people who've been there.

The impact extends far beyond just customer service. Our support tickets have actually decreased even as our customer base has grown. Why? Because most questions get answered by the community before they ever reach our team. 

More importantly, these answers come with context, empathy, and personal experience that no support agent could provide.

How Customer-Driven Innovation Changes Everything

Building in public doesn’t just have to be about handling feedback - it can also change how you launch products. 

The traditional route: Focus groups or market research + gather data + analyze trends = present finished products to the customer.

But we've completely flipped this model on its head. Practically every single SKU we've launched after our first two was chosen directly by our customers.

Not through focus groups. Not through third-party market research. 

Via direct voting from our community.

The process is simple:

1. We create a survey with realistic options we can actually produce, send it to our customers and subscribers

2.  We commit to launching the winning choice within 3-6 weeks. 

But the magic isn't in the survey - it's in what happens after.

Our community has transformed these product launches into events. They debate options based on their real health needs. They share previous experiences with similar products. They suggest modifications and improvements. 

Most importantly, they become invested in the outcome.

This investment changes everything about how product launches perform. 

This has helped turn our constraints into advantages. 

When we started, we could only afford to produce 1,000-1,500 units at a time. But instead of hiding this limitation, we’ve made it part of our story by leaning into the small supply and scarcity.

In fact, we tend to launch limited quantities at midnight on Sundays (yes, people actually stay up waiting.) Here’s what happens:

🎉 The early buyers rush to our community to share their success. 

🏃🏽‍♂️ Others see the "out of stock" notification and join the waitlist. 

🤩 FOMO builds naturally through community discussion. 

By the time we restock, it's become its own event. Each drop creates a quick revenue injection of $40-50k, but the real magic is in the restock…which often outperforms the first release.

Sum it up

As we move deeper into 2025, brand building is becoming more and more required if you want to build something sustainable.

Rising acquisition costs mean you can't just spend your way to growth anymore. Increasing competition means you can't rely on product alone. The winners will be the brands brave enough to build real relationships with their customers.

The key is understanding that transparency isn't a marketing tactic - it's a fundamental shift in how you operate. 

Your tl/dr takeaway:

• Treating vocal critics as opportunities rather than threats

• Letting customers drive product development rather than just validate it

• Building community around real experiences, not curated content

• Using constraints as connection points rather than limitations

Your customers don't expect perfection. They prefer honesty. 

When you give them that, they'll give you something far more valuable: their trust. And in 2025's environment, that's one of the most sustainable competitive advantages left.

All the best,

Ron & Ash