What I learned from Hugo Pires, CMO of Sassy Saints.
He took Sassy Saints from $2M to $20M in twelve months. These are my notes from our conversation on personas, in-house creators and a creative framework that works across categories.
Hugo is the CMO and a partner at Sassy Saints. He's one of the sharpest performance marketers I've talked to this year.
I sat down with him for episode two of the podcast and walked away with a notebook full of ideas. Below are 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, because dog owners buy on emotion. It worked until customers started emailing him that their dogs were choking on the battery inside, and he killed it.
What he kept was the ads muscle, because he liked the copy and the creative. In 2022 he built a performance creative agency, and in October 2023 he took on Sassy Saints as a client. They had a new dipping powder kit that was already on fire. Three months later Sam, the CEO, offered him partner and CMO, and he took it. From 2023 to 2024 the brand grew 10x.
Sell to people who aren't you.
Hugo has never painted his nails, but he sells nails for a living.
His framework goes product → problem → person. Every product has a feature, every feature has a benefit, and 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.
What founders think customers care about and what customers really care about are two different things. Close the gap with surveys, review mining on Reddit, Trustpilot and Amazon, and talking to your buyers.
At Sassy Saints he builds psychographic personas. He doesn't care if you're 30 and live in Manchester, only whether you share the problem. They have about six personas internally.
One is Busy Bridget, who's short on time and can't sit in a salon for two hours. Under her sit sub-personas with different lives, like the career woman or the time-pressed mom with two young kids. They share the core desire and get different creative.
Most brands only have one true hero persona. Once you know who it is, your product, copy, landing page and brand all fall in line.