How Onewheel 12x'd Their Ad Output in 10 Days Using Refunnel

Onewheel, founded by Kyle Doerksen makes self-balancing electric boards built to recreate the feeling of snowboarding or skateboarding on everyday rides. Their lineup spans seven to eight boards, from the $750 Pint to a flagship model that hits up to 32 miles of range on a single fast charge.

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Onewheel sells direct-to-consumer through their Shopify website and ships worldwide, with some additional retail storefront presence.

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They believe content creators are one of the most important pillars of their business success.

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We sat down with Ryland, who spends roughly 90% of his time producing ads for Onewheel.

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Before Refunnel:

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Before using Refunnel, Onewheel's creator workflow was hands-on and slow.

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Finding creators meant Ryland sitting inside Instagram for hours, scrolling through tags and stories, vetting profiles one by one, and reaching out manually.

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1. Manual Discovery: Ryland would scroll Instagram looking for who tagged the brand or posted about Onewheel, then check each profile to see if their content style was a fit before reaching out.

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In his first six months working this way, he only managed to onboard around five creators.

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2. Whitelisting Through an Agency: Their paid media agency owned the whitelisting workflow. Every new creator meant pinging the agency, waiting for them to add the person to a campaign and by the time someone realized something was missing, the agency was already out of office.

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3. Personal Accounts Got Stuck: When a creator had a personal Instagram instead of a creator or business account, partnership ad invites would land in limbo. Ryland would send the request, the creator wouldn't see it, then they'd have to convert their account and get a fresh invite, adding another day or two onto every approval.

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4. Generic, Spec-Heavy Ads: Onewheel's ads were mostly recycled launch footage with text overlays or voiceovers describing specs. They "screamed I'm an ad," and ROAS sat around 3X. Once Ryland shifted to creator-led pieces that captured the feeling of riding, the very first one cleared a 15X ROAS in two weeks and the best one ran at 75X ROAS.

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The result: a slow, hard-fought creator pipeline; whitelisting bottlenecks at the agency; dropped opportunities from posts the team never saw; and an ad output that couldn't keep up with the scale they needed.

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4 Ways Onewheel Is Using Refunnel
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1. Social Listening: Onewheel's social media manager keeps Refunnel open on his second monitor every day. The platform pulls in not just tags and direct mentions, but posts where someone wrote "Onewheel" in a caption without tagging them at all or if only the logo shows, content that would have been lost otherwise.

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2. One-Click Whitelisting: Instead of pinging the ad agency for every new creator, Ryland sends Refunnel's pre-written DM straight from the platform. He offers tiered whitelisting kickbacks at 3%, 5%, 10%, and 15% of ad spend, and most creators happily accept the 3% offer. Acceptance rate so far: 100%. As Ryland put it: "These people are posting that stuff for free anyway. Even if someone gets twenty bucks, they're like, sweet."

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3. Personal-Account Workaround Handled in the Background: Whenever a creator has a personal account that needs a business manager set up to run partnership ads, Refunnel handles that backend work automatically.

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4. 10X Ad Creatives: Ryland's team targets 40 ads per month, Refunnel's frictionless workflow lets him hit that cadence without producing each piece from scratch. He spots a strong reel inside the social listening tool, sends the one-click whitelist, downloads the clip, swaps the order of a few cuts, drops on a text hook, and ships it.

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Their Workflow

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How Ryland turns a fan's video into an ad that runs on Instagram:

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• Find a good video. Ryland looks through the videos Refunnel surfaces (posts and stories) from people talking about Onwheel, even when they don't tag the brand.

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• Ask the person if we can use it. Ryland clicks one button and Refunnel sends them a message that says "Hey, can we use your video in an ad?

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• Offer them a small cut first. Ryland starts by offering 3% of what Onewheel spends on the ad. He can go up to 15% if he needs to, but almost everyone says yes to 3%. So far, nobody has said no.

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• Wait for the green light. When the person accepts, a little green lightning bolt shows up in Refunnel. That means the ad is ready to run. Refunnel sets up all the boring tech stuff in the background so Ryland doesn't have to.

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• Make the ad. Ryland downloads the video, cuts it down, moves a few clips around, adds some words on the screen, and saves it.

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• Run the ad. Ryland goes into Meta and launches the ad from the creator's handle, so it shows up on Instagram looking like the creator posted it themselves — not like an ad from a brand.

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The Results
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In Refunnel's first month with Onewheel, Ryland delivered 30 ads in a week and a half, roughly 12x his previous output.

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Over the last three months on the platform:

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- 2,500+ pieces of creator content captured
- 1,000+ creators posting about the brand
- 3.9 million impressions
- 100% acceptance rate on whitelisting requests
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Refunnel turned a manual, agency-dependent ad pipeline into a self-serve operation that hits the team's monthly target without buckling.

Why Refunnel?
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Refunnel stood out because it allowed them to:

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1. Content Visibility: Social listening captures every mention (tagged or untagged, post or story) so the team can pull from content that previously slipped past Instagram's notifications.

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2. Video to Ad Speed: One-click whitelisting plus auto-handled backend setup for personal accounts means Ryland can onboard a creator and download their content in minutes.

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3. Automated Payments: Tiered ad-spend kickbacks (3-15%) turn organic posters into willing partners. As Ryland summed it up: "It's a win-win for everyone."
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Refunnel replaced the manual scrolling, the agency hand-offs, and the personal-account dead-ends with one dashboard that lets a small team move at scale.