Kelly spotted a US trend (mushroom adaptogen beverages) with no real UK equivalent, validated unit economics and subscription fit before launching, then scaled almost entirely on Meta ads while keeping the team tiny. His key unlock was expanding flavors rather than marketing tactics — launching two new SKUs dropped CAC 50% overnight. He layers influencer gifting on top of Meta as a content and whitelisting engine, runs inbound retail (Holland & Barrett, Boots) as a margin-positive secondary channel, and is deliberately staying UK-focused to dominate one market before touching the US.

“you cannot outmarket a subpar product range you just can't — like trying to polish a turd, it's never going to work”

“I was running like 25 landing pages for like the past year... I was like all this let's run all our ads to one product page scrap off all the landing pages which I spent like hours tinkering and performance was better overnight — it's like simple scales usually”

“influencers right now is a content and whitelisting machine for meta basically which has definitely brought down CAC”

“better to dominate the UK and be the brand in that space first rather than be you know 2 million in 10 countries — better to be 20 million in one”

Matt Kelly grew Spacegoods to ~£18M in revenue by treating paid Meta as distribution for a brand and product he believed in on gut instinct, not customer research. He kept CAC flat over three years by deliberately raising AOV alongside it, and recently dropped subscription price from £39 to £29 — cutting CAC ~40% while barely moving AOV — to broaden TAM. He now believes the business ran too long as a marketing machine and that retention, not ad volume, is the real ceiling on growth.

“I didn't do customer research on like rainbow dust. I just like was in immersed in Twitter and stuff and saw that that looked cool.”

“I actually don't think that is the main thing. I think the brand thing is much more important than the ads thing to be honest. Like people either want to buy your product or they don't. An ad can push them to purchase but there has to be some intent especially on Meta.”

“We went from 39 to 29 on subscription and the AOV barely moved. CAC came down like 40%... even if the LTV CAC is net the same, the benefit is that it broadens the TAM because there's more people willing to pay 29 than 39.”

“We've probably launched products in fear of not hitting the budget and then in doing so, you've just complicated and doubled your workload for everyone. And then you piss off your team because they're not clear on what you're trying to do.”

Kelly built Spacegoods on a single mushroom coffee SKU for roughly two years, running paid social (Facebook/Meta) without improving the product, then raised venture capital and began expanding into a multi-SKU functional powder beverage brand. His core growth thesis is that the size of the consumer problem you solve determines how easy paid acquisition is, and that tight category ownership — not breadth — is what drives both scale and a strategic exit above £50M revenue.

“What category do you own and how clear is the offering?”

“Every market is crowded. You can either solve a problem that's not been solved yet. You can improve a product, which is probably the easiest way to like apply newness... or you can like apply a new angle to an existing niche.”

“Unlock your full potential is the slogan, always has been. We haven't really leaned into it enough. So now I want it to be like basically like fuel for the modern athlete and it doesn't mean sport, it means like the busy mom, the e-com bro scaling, the guy with a shit office job.”

“I thought we're actually a product business. Oh yeah, shit. We should probably figure out products as well. That's basically what happened with me. It was like for like 2 years with one SKU that we never even improved cuz it was like decent from day one.”

Matt Kelly grew Spacegoods to £18M/year by entering the UK mushroom supplement market when there was effectively no competition, differentiating through intentional design (standing out in a commodity packaging space), and running Meta ads as the core acquisition engine on a subscription model. He consolidated early around a single hero SKU — mushroom coffee — which now drives ~80% of revenue, and credits timing/category tailwind as the single biggest growth lever, alongside raising venture capital to accelerate hiring.

“I wasn't going to start something that had no margin that would never work on meta for example”

“the fact that it was like design led and pink and purple and all this, it definitely helped”

“we launched as like single skew... we were literally a chocolate flavored mushroom powder at the start... Now, that's like our core product, probably 80% of revenue”

“The answer to almost every problem is the right person. The cause of almost every problem is the wrong person. Hiring is the single hardest part of any business. That's your job as a founder.”