How Get Maine Lobster drove 3.5x more ad revenue with Perplexity Computer

The problem

Luxury customer experience on a small-business budget

Before Mark Murrell ever sold a lobster, he was thinking about his customers. “Lobster is a special occasion food, flown in for gatherings and milestones,” says the Get Maine Lobster Founder and CEO. He knew this business model came with a responsibility: to help make customers’ special days as memorable as possible.

That’s why Mark decided to team up with a friend in the fishing business to launch the company. The lobster-fishing expertise was already there; Mark just needed to focus on providing a beautiful customer experience. “I feel lucky that I get to be a part of so many anniversaries, graduations, and birthday parties,” he says.

With average order value around $250, Get Maine Lobster is a premium product. Mark realizes customer satisfaction and retention are crucial to his company’s growth, so he invests in the customer experience. To build customer loyalty, he even places handwritten notes inside every box of lobsters he ships.

Email and paid social are the main channels Mark relies on to help Get Maine Lobster grow. “I think of our customer’s experience from first click to last dish,” he says. “I want to be thoughtful about their entire customer journey.”

Mark uses Meta ads to suggest lobster to people planning special occasions. But running the ads is time-consuming. He must constantly update campaigns with new creative, and A/B test to get the best results possible. "It's essential, but it’s a beast to manage,” Mark says.

Mark uses email and SMS flows to educate new website visitors about lobster, and win more orders from existing customers. But managing all these campaigns was eating up a lot of Mark’s time. “I don’t want to be huddled up in my office, trying to draft emails and ads,” he says. He’d rather focus on the human side of running a business, like hand-writing thank-you notes.

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Mark was also struggling with the fact that the company’s tech stack required him to toggle across many tools like Shopify, Attentive and GA4 to run his campaigns. He needed a single location where he could log in and see all his data and tools. "I wanted a command center, built around my business,” he explains.

The solution

A business operations command center

Perplexity invited Get Maine Lobster to participate in a pilot, testing whether Perplexity’s agent platform Computer could out-perform manual campaign processes.

The Perplexity team’s goal was to help Mark build a command center that would handle tasks like reporting, campaign creation, and email copy, so Mark has more time for the customer relationship-building he loves. “With Perplexity, I have access to all models for one price," he says. "I don’t need to tell it to use GPT for this or Claude for that; it just runs.”

With Perplexity’s support, Mark connected Computer to existing business tools like Shopify, Attentive, Wicked Reports, GA4, and Xero, unifying them into one dashboard for his business operations. "Now I can see everything in one place and probe for insights,” he says. “If I ask Perplexity about seasonal correlations, it could flag that sales are slow in October and I might want to counteract that with a new campaign.”

Meta ads on autopilot with Computer

Mark set out to see if Computer could take over ad campaigns, particularly ones that he was running on Meta. “I wanted to build an AI agency that could produce campaign ideas, generate content, and evaluate results,” he says.

Get Maine Lobster received a $30,000 test budget from Perplexity to test Mark’s hypothesis. The goal was to see if Computer could meet the customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend targets Mark’s manual campaigns typically brought in.

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Every morning, Computer analyzes the Meta and Shopify data piped into Get Maine Lobster’s command center, learning the brand’s value props, visual style, and other key features. Then, it analyzes existing Meta ads across ecommerce, not just direct competitors, to inform new campaign ideas. Throughout the day, Computer generates ad ideas, writes creative briefs, makes static ads and sends them to Mark in Slack for review. It also connects with Higgsfield AI to produce video ads.

When Mark gives feedback, it’s saved as a rule that Computer applies to future ads. Over the first seven-day campaign, he went from approving 20% of Computer’s ads, to approving 90% with no feedback.

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Every day, Computer generates a PDF ad performance report and sends it to Mark in Slack. "With the daily reports, I’m looking at scalability, not just individual ads’ performance,” says Mark. Amplifying Get Maine Lobster’s best ads is as simple as asking Perplexity: "can you scale all my winning ads by 20%?"

Results

63% higher ROAS and 3.5x more revenue in days

Get Maine Lobster ran both the Computer-generated Meta campaign, and its typical non-AI generated ads. After the two campaigns ran side by side, the results were encouraging:

• Computer's campaign generated 63% higher ROAS than the non-AI one while spending 2.1x as much, bringing in 3.5x the revenue.
• Micro-testing creative with different avatars, outfits, settings and colors found winning ads with 14% lower CAC.

Computer also helps Get Main Lobster fulfill more orders by staggering shipping dates around the company’s fishing schedule. When purchases outstrip lobster supply, Computer automatically updates arrival dates to when enough seafood will be in stock.

These experiments have boosted sales to the point that Get Maine Lobster’s growth is now limited by fishing limits, not customer interest. “At this rate, we’ll max out our fishing allotment,” says Mark. To meet demand, the company is expanding its offerings to dinner kits, lobster rolls, and partnership with local restaurants.

With Computer taking over campaigns, Mark is able to spend more time at sea with his fishing-industry partner. “It’s so much better to be out here on the boat with Perplexity running my ads,” he says. “It runs all the mundane and challenging stuff so I can focus on the human part. I can spend a lot more time down here, doing what I really love.”

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