What I Learned From Hugo Pires, CMO of Sassy Saints
Hugo took Sassy Saints from $2M to $20M in twelve months. I sat down with him for episode two of the podcast and walked away with a notebook full of ideas. He's one of the sharpest performance marketers I've talked to this year.
This is the summary of that conversation. Not every detail, just the parts I think you'll steal.
Hugo's Path In
Hugo started in dropshipping. Five or six years ago. He calls it his school of business.
His breakout product was a flopping fish toy for cats that he sold to dog owners. Why? Dog owners buy on emotion. The thing worked until customers started emailing him that their dogs were choking on the battery inside. He killed it.
What he kept was the ads muscle. He liked the copy. He liked the creative. In 2022 he built a performance creative agency. In October 2023 he took on Sassy Saints as a client. They had just launched a dipping powder kit that was already on fire. Three months later Sam, the CEO, offered him partner and CMO. He took it. From 2023 to 2024, 10x.
Sell To People Who Aren't You
Hugo has never painted his nails. He still sells nails for a living.
His framework goes product → problem → person. Every product has a feature, every feature has a benefit, every benefit solves a problem. The marketer's job is to find the people with that problem and talk to them the way they already talk to themselves.
There's what founders think customers care about. There's what customers actually care about. Two different things. Close the gap through surveys, review mining on Reddit and Trustpilot and Amazon, and talking to your actual buyers.
At Sassy Saints he builds psychographic personas, not demographic ones. He doesn't care if you're 30 and live in Manchester. He cares if you share a problem. They have about six personas internally.
One is Busy Bridget. Time-starved, can't sit in a salon for two hours. Under Busy Bridget sit sub-personas with different lives: career woman, time-pressed mom with two young kids. Same core desire, different creative.
Most brands only have one true hero persona. Once you know who it is, your product, your copy, your landing page, and your brand all fall in line.