Advice Line with Miguel McKelvey of WeWork

What It Covers

WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey joins Guy Raz on the How I Built This Advice Line to help three founders — a women's pants brand, a grief care package company, and a history merchandise store — solve growth and customer acquisition challenges through storytelling, content strategy, and channel diversification.

Key Questions Answered

• •Brand Storytelling on Product Pages: When a product carries a premium price point, the manufacturing story must appear prominently on the website — not buried or absent. Copa Threads charges $295 per pair but mentions nothing about local Minneapolis production or US-sourced fabric online. Customers need that context immediately to justify the cost before they leave the page.
• •AI Search Optimization as New SEO: Creating hundreds of dedicated web pages targeting every specific search query a distressed customer might type — such as "what to send someone after a miscarriage" — positions a brand to appear in both traditional search and AI assistant responses. One SEO specialist reported a payments company runs thousands of such pages for this exact reason.
• •Ambassador Seeding for Visual Products: Place products on visible, public-facing workers — restaurant servers, coffee shop staff — at no cost to generate organic street-level exposure. For Copa Threads, whose colorful patterned pants photograph well and attract unsolicited compliments, this tactic converts passersby into customers without paid media spend.
• •B2B Grief Gifting via HR Departments: Unmanaged workplace grief costs US employers an estimated $75 billion annually, making corporate HR teams a high-value channel for Good Grief's care packages. Starting with local Santa Fe businesses before targeting Microsoft or the Gates Foundation allows relationship-building at a manageable scale before pursuing enterprise accounts.
• •Evaluate CAC-to-AOV Ratio Before Cutting Costs: The History List spends $20 per customer acquisition against an $80 average order value at 50% gross margin — a ratio that signals scaling ad spend, not reducing it. When unit economics already work, the priority shifts to volume and channel experimentation rather than cost reduction.