Founder, iJustHelp

Hotca

Creative strategist for DTC brands. He plans the angles and writes the briefs, so a brand's team knows exactly what to build before anyone presses launch.

Biography

Hotca (Rafael Hotca) is a creative strategist and the founder of iJustHelp, a creative strategy studio for direct-to-consumer brands in supplements, wellness, food and beauty. His work sits upstream of the ad: he audits a brand's account and funnel from ad to checkout, builds the monthly creative plan, and writes the briefs that tell every person on the brand's team what to make next.

He describes the first chapter of his life as "Ugly baby, odd mind." Born in Brussels, he grew up in Belgium speaking French and Romanian at home and Dutch at school, then moved to Romania at nine, where a teacher who expected him to be difficult ended up saying she had never seen anyone learn just by watching. He works today in English, Romanian, French and Dutch, and is learning Russian and Chinese.

Persuasion showed up early. As a child he got what he wanted by asking for it every day, several times a day, until the answer changed. By sixth grade he was buying video games cheaply and reselling them at a profit; by seventh he was following crypto markets and talking his father through them.

That curiosity became his first professional ground. His background is in Web3 and decentralized finance (DeFi), where he designed DeFi project plans and built the skills he still relies on: research, systems thinking, and an instinct for what makes people commit. From 2022 he took on online marketing projects for brands in several countries, then taught himself direct-response copywriting, studying ads until the walls of his room were covered in them.

He also learned the limits of speed the hard way. The first time he used AI for advertising, he produced 800 static ads in a single day; reviewing them, he found every one was bad. The lesson shaped his method: AI handles the dirty work, but deciding what to say, to whom and why remains human work.

In 2026 he worked as a freelance copywriter and creative strategist for a personalized daily supplement brand. In seven weeks he took around 30 assets from research to client approval: a four-avatar customer system, a voice-of-customer quote bank and a claims register, static ad tests, long-form native ads, 20 video scripts across eight formats, six advertorials, a rebuilt product page, and checkout, post-purchase and pre-renewal offers. Nine of the videos launched on Meta in July 2026.

The same year he founded iJustHelp. He built its research system, including live Meta ad audits of supplement brands and a swipe library of 68 direct-response brands and 102 funnel pages, and designed and built the websites of the Hotca network, including this one.

The leverage is in the plan and the brief, not in making more ads.

How he thinks

His views run against much of the industry. He argues that asset production is overrated and planning underrated; that one mind should own a funnel rather than five specialists; and that copying a competitor's winning ad almost never works, because the ad succeeded for reasons the copier can't see.

Outside work, Hotca plays padel and poker, the second for its lessons in probability and in reading people. He reads biographies and history, and names Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and Ray Dalio's Principles as the books that changed how he thinks.

Find him

Contact

For interviews, podcasts and press: contact@ijusthelp.com. For brands: tell us about your brand.