Zero to Seven Figures in 90 Days — Thiago Cordeiro on Direct Response, VSL Funnels, and Scaling With Affiliates

🎧 Listen: Castos

I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I sat down with Thiago Cordeiro, the 27-year-old Brazilian entrepreneur behind OG Group. Thiago’s company crossed $10 million in revenue in the last twelve months running direct response marketing in the nutraceutical space — and the arc that got him there runs from near-professional eSports through pandemic dropshipping and a $1M Pilates info product. What makes this conversation worth your time isn’t the top-line number, though. It’s how precisely he can explain the machine underneath it.

From eSports to Dropshipping to a $1M Info Product

Thiago’s origin story is a case study in opportunistic pivoting. He was almost a professional Gears of War player on Xbox, competing in major events, when he enrolled in computer science college in Brazil in 2018. Then the pandemic hit, his classes stopped for six months, and two friends running a sneaker dropshipping operation gave him his window.

He spent the next few years importing from China and selling to the Brazilian market, until the inconsistency and thin margins of dropshipping wore him down. The pivot to info products produced his first $1 million in sales — a 27-day Walipilates challenge sold through a quiz funnel. Then he met the nutraceutical market, and three months after his first exposure he was operating as a vendor in the US weight-loss niche.

The VSL Funnel Model: 40 Minutes of Storytelling for Cold Traffic

OG Group’s core expertise is direct response marketing on 100% cold traffic — no audience, no brand awareness, just strangers hitting a page. The workhorse is a video sales letter running 40 to 50 minutes, built on a full storytelling arc: problem identification, a unique mechanism reveal, credibility, then the offer.

Ninety percent of the traffic comes from Meta, with the remaining 10% on native channels like Taboola and Outbrain. The creative side leans on UGC-style video, podcast-format ads, and increasingly, AI production tools.

A $15K Loss, Then Seven Figures by Month Three

When I asked Thiago for his most surprising success, he told the story in reverse — starting with the failure.

“My first month in nutra I took a loss. I almost gave up. But I noticed I was actually learning something from that loss. My second month I was already profitable. My third month we went completely skyrocket — from a loss in month one to seven figures in month three.”
— Thiago Cordeiro

That first month cost him $10–15K, in a category he’d never touched, with a funnel format he’d never run. The lesson he draws from it isn’t about nutra specifically — it’s that the rough first attempt is tuition, not a failure signal. The adjustments that turned month two profitable came directly out of what month one taught him.

AI for Research, Not for Copy

Thiago is a heavy AI user on the creative side — HeyGen and Dreamface generate UGC-style AI actor ads so nobody on the team has to film themselves reading a script, and Claude and ChatGPT drive audience research: pain points, objections, dreams, and what’s trending on Reddit and across the blogs where his audience lives.

But he draws a hard line at handing copy entirely to the machine.

“If you go straight to AI and trust 100% on AI to write your copy, you’re going to be dealing with generic terms and seem like everyone else — the same promises, the same offers. You need to combine. Use AI for research and the base structure, but then come in and review with your expertise.”
— Thiago Cordeiro

In direct response, differentiation lives in the specificity of the pain points and the uniqueness of the mechanism. AI flattens exactly those things when it works unsupervised. His advice to entrepreneurs entering the market runs the same direction: automate the repetitive 10–15-hours-a-week processes with AI and spend the recovered time thinking strategically.

The Backend Is the Business: Affiliate Economics and LTV

The most tactically dense part of the conversation is Thiago’s explanation of his affiliate economics. Since January, OG Group has been recruiting affiliates — first in Europe, now in the US — to run offers the team validates first with internal traffic. The commissions are fixed CPAs deliberately set so high that the front end breaks even or loses money, because that’s what wins affiliates the ad auction on Meta, native, and YouTube.

The money is made behind the sale: email marketing, SMS, high-ticket backend funnels, and a coaching program with weekly calls where customers get nutrition and exercise guidance alongside the product. The front end acquires the customer; the backend carries the margin. OG Group even produces VSL optimizations and ad creatives for its affiliates, so their only job is running traffic.

The target for this year: $20–50 million in revenue from the affiliate arm alone. Thiago recruits in person at Affiliate World and Affiliate Summit, and the company is hiring copywriters and affiliate managers to keep the affiliate experience its competitive edge.

One Unhappy Customer Is Louder Than 100 Happy Ones

When I asked about AI systems acting as sentiment aggregators for brands, Thiago brought a Brazilian saying to bear: one negative person is louder than a hundred satisfied ones. A happy customer leaves one comment on one ad. An unhappy one shows up across multiple creatives, the DMs, and customer service simultaneously.

His open question is whether AI sentiment systems will read that as volume or recognize it as one loud voice — a real concern as more buying decisions route through AI recommendations, and part of why monitoring how AI systems represent your brand is becoming its own discipline. His defense is deliberately unfancy: make the product, the customer service, and the members area good enough that the satisfied hundred outweigh the loud one.

You Can’t Scale on Individual Skills

Thiago’s hottest take is really two partnership principles. First: build with a partner you trust — but pick someone who is your opposite. A copywriter shouldn’t partner with another copywriter; the combination is what compounds.

Second, the lesson of his last six months of growth:

“You cannot rely 100% on your individual skills. The only way you can actually scale is to know how to become a leader and train other people to become leaders at their departments.”
— Thiago Cordeiro

He’s candid that this is his current hardest problem — delegation, training, process documentation, and keeping data on every department as the company grows. It matched my own experience leading teams of 10–15 marketers: if you can’t delineate expectations and follow up on them, it falls apart, because there is no cloning technology.

Connect with Thiago Cordeiro

Thiago’s company is OG Group, and he’s most active on Instagram at @ThiagoBCord. If you’re in the affiliate world, you can also find him in person at Affiliate World and Affiliate Summit, where he’s actively recruiting affiliates for OG Group’s US and European offers.

🎧 Listen: Castos