The DTC Podcast

Hosted by Eric Dyck

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Oct 2026

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What does it take to build and scale a successful direct-to-consumer brand? The DTC Podcast is a marketing strategy podcast hosted by Eric Dyck, with practical ecommerce growth strategies from founders, operators, and marketing experts. Explore DTC marketing, customer acquisition, performance marketing, paid media, conversion rate optimization, customer retention, creative strategy, AI, and brand growth. Hear what works, what fails, and how leading consumer brands adapt and grow. Subscribe for actionable insights to help you build a stronger, more profitable ecommerce business.

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November 9, 202639 min

How Cadense Markets a DTC Brand to Seniors: 750 PTs, Linear TV and a Call Center

How do you market a DTC brand to older adults? Johannes Sauer, CEO and co-founder of Cadense, sells an adaptive sneaker to a customer base that skews 60 and up. His answer has been physical therapist referrals, linear TV and a call center, with Meta still doing the heavy lifting online. Cadense makes a sneaker with nylon pads on the sole that let the foot slide over a snag instead of catching, built for people who trip after a stroke, with multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's, or simply with age. It looks like a regular athletic shoe on purpose. Johannes says Cadense passed ten million dollars in lifetime sales within 28 months of launching on pre-order from its own site. He walks through the clinician program that replaced a failed affiliate pitch, an eight-question checkout survey that 75% of buyers finish, and the channels that come next: senior living, retail and Medicare Advantage. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You want to test demand before committing to a production run. Cadense opened pre-orders on its own Shopify product page in September 2023 and had sold two-thirds of its first container by the time it shipped the following March. Pre-orders cash-flowed new colors and sizes for the first year and a half. You're about to send launch traffic to Kickstarter. Johannes has run three Kickstarters and skipped it this time, so Cadense kept the analytics and a direct relationship with every early buyer. Your ads can't promise what the product does. Cadense is a class one medical device, so early ads showed walking patterns like shuffling and let people recognize themselves. A recent retrospective study of 705 customers found an 87% drop in self-reported monthly falls, and Cadense always presents it that way. Your affiliate offer gets turned down. Eleven of the first twelve physical therapists Johannes pitched said they'd happily recommend the shoe but wouldn't take a commission. Cadense sent them a sample pair and a postcard with a tracked QR code and discount code instead. More than 750 PTs in the US now recommend it. Nobody finishes your post-purchase survey. Johannes opens with gender and an age bracket before asking anything that takes thought, and 75% of buyers complete all eight questions. The last one asks people to describe what bothers them about their walking, and the answers become ad copy. Your customers aren't reachable online. Cadense runs 60 and 120-second spots on remnant linear TV that send viewers to an outsourced call center. One in five of those callers has no email address. You assume the adult kids are the buyers. Johannes expected a 50/50 split between customers and caregivers. It's closer to 70/30 in favor of people buying for themselves. Your audience isn't on Instagram. Facebook takes around 80% of Cadense's Meta spend. Nobody searches for your product. Cadense spends on Meta top of funnel to create its own Google demand. AppLovin matches Meta on ROAS at a small slice of the budget but hasn't scaled past that. DTC alone won't get you to a billion. Cadense is moving into senior living, specialty retail and Medicare Advantage, using its DTC track record as the proof point. The pitch to insurers: Johannes puts the cost of a fall to a health plan at $20,000, against a $200 shoe. ABOUT THE GUEST Johannes Sauer is CEO and co-founder of Cadense, which he built with Dr. Tyler Susko, whose gait research at MIT led to the shoe. https://cadense.com STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 02:00 How Cadense created its innovative footwear 06:00 Launching a DTC brand with pre-orders 13:00 Building a referral network of 750+ physical therapists 19:00 Increasing post-purchase survey completion rates 25:00 Reaching older consumers through TV advertising

November 6, 202636 min

A DTC Strategist Thought Claude Would Replace Him. But It Just Gave Him Superpowers

How should DTC brands use AI for growth strategy? Rafael Gi and Duncan Ferguson of Pilothouse use Claude to diagnose why a brand stopped growing, then make the call themselves. Raf is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse and runs the audits behind new client pitches, five to twelve of them every two weeks at peak. Duncan leads strategy on the delivery side and builds the systems the team operates. They walk through how a nine-figure brand's growth flatlined, why one client's AOV fell from $40 to $32, a regional market maturity model that took two weeks instead of six months, and what happened when Duncan ran Pilothouse's strategy process in Claude without his own inputs. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your growth flatlined and nothing changed. A brand that had just hit nine figures came to Pilothouse with no idea why growth stopped. Raf found 70% of its media going into three markets. Meta kept spending where the brand already had customers, and there were no new ones left to reach there. You want AI to find the problem for you. Raf pulls eight to fifteen reports across platforms, then forms a hunch from experience. A frequency of 140 in one area usually means overinvestment, so he asks his knowledge base to validate it or prove him wrong. Your AOV dropped and you can't see why. One client's AOV fell from about $40 to $32 after it launched a $20 product. Without budgets set by product, Meta spends toward the cheaper item because it moves more volume. Raf confirms it by pulling the spend split between the two products over time. Your AI setup breaks between teams. If sales and delivery each define a client's "goal" differently, the agent pulls the wrong section of the wrong document. Pilothouse aligns object definitions and the naming of files, folders, agents and skills across departments, and Raf and Duncan share skill files to keep context in sync. Your audit is too long for anyone to act on. Pilothouse's CEO calls it Claude food and human food. Claude gets the raw data, and the strategist's job is turning a hundred-page output into a ten, five or one-page version a client can absorb and act on. A data project needs a data scientist and six months. Raf built a regional market maturity model for a nine-figure brand in four workshops over two weeks, doing the processing in Claude on a 178-megabyte dataset. The numbers went through the brand's CFO. You're wondering whether AI can run strategy on its own. Duncan turned Pilothouse's scaling growth system into a set of Claude skills, then ran it with his own inputs removed. It didn't reach the same conclusions, and it made persuasive arguments that were technically wrong. Your strategy dies after the handoff. Duncan calls it seagull strategy: the plan ships, hits reality, and the strategist isn't there to see the results. Pilothouse strategists stay to operate the systems, down to finding a JavaScript snippet in a Shopify backend that was distorting how AOV registered. Customer research costs too much. Raf uses AI for semantic mapping, grouping the words people use when they react to a product, work that used to mean an expensive focus group and people coding transcripts by hand. ABOUT THE GUESTS Rafael Gi is head of strategic growth at Pilothouse. Duncan Ferguson leads strategy at Pilothouse. https://pilothouse.co STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 02:30 How AI is transforming marketing strategy 08:00 Building connected AI workflows across teams 13:00 Using AI to identify ecommerce growth bottlenecks 20:00 Why human judgment still matters in AI strategy 28:00 The challenges of scaling AI automation

November 2, 202643 min

Why a 5 ROAS Target Held Back This DTC Brand: Vyper Industrial's Dayne Rusch

What ROAS should a DTC brand target when it sells a high-priced product? Dayne Rusch, co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, used to demand a 5 ROAS on the first order and now calls that target stupid. Vyper sets a new customer CAC goal, checks it every day and keeps scaling while it holds. Vyper makes premium shop chairs, carts and creepers in Wisconsin, with its flagship chair at $625, and calls itself the Yeti of the garage. Two and a half years after his first visit, Dayne is back with a new 65,000 square foot facility, a new CRO and performance team, and a plan to spend 2027 on brand: national TV, collaborations with Ford, an event that drew more than 5,000 people and a full-time human calling abandoned carts. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE You set a high first-order ROAS target and growth stalled. Dayne says chasing a 5 ROAS suffocated Vyper's growth and didn't bring in enough revenue to cover operating costs. The target now is a new customer CAC, checked daily, and when Vyper is under it during the holidays, they spend more. Your product is too expensive for subscription-style LTV math. Vyper is profitable on the first purchase. Its ideal customer buys one chair to test the quality, then comes back for four more. Others come back for accessories that run $200. You keep testing new channels. Dayne puts the budget into the three he knows work, TV, Meta and email, and says $100K on an unproven app can get you nothing. Your TV ads sell too hard. Vyper is moving from problem-and-solution spots to brand spots built on collaborations with Ford, Hendrick Motorsports and Realtree, because a partner everyone recognizes lends credibility. Your site is cluttered with what you think customers want. Vyper rebuilt its pages from reviews, forums and on-site questions about what nearly stopped people from buying. Dayne's LinkedIn post put the lift at 37% on mobile and 67% on desktop with sessions flat. You want to use AI without sounding like everyone else. Vyper's team uses Claude to cut a two to three hour image task to 15 minutes and to spark design ideas, but keeps the copy human. After a trial of AI replies to abandoned cart texts, Vyper hired a full-time person to call and text abandoned carts. You can't justify an event on ROI. Vyperfest drew more than 5,000 people. Dayne counts local brand, hiring and team morale as the return, and a second one is planned for next September. You can't measure brand spend. Dayne watches branded search, organic and direct traffic, and whether new customer cost is falling. He doesn't trust post-purchase surveys on their own. You are running the same Black Friday as last year. Vyper gives every sale period its own brand look across ads, email and site, splits discounts into blocks and brings back limited editions for one weekend. Your giveaway prize is eating the budget. Vyper swapped six-figure trucks for a UTV that costs it $20,000, with free email entry to build the list before Black Friday. ABOUT THE GUEST Dayne Rusch is co-founder and CEO of Vyper Industrial, which he runs with his brother Dylan. https://vyperindustrial.com STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Building Vyper into a premium automotive brand 05:00 How Vyper increased website conversions 12:00 Why Vyper is investing heavily in TV 21:00 Using AI without losing brand authenticity 30:00 Vyper’s Black Friday strategy

October 30, 202637 min

Cutting Ad Spend on December 2nd Is the Most Expensive Mistake of Q4 | AKNF

Should DTC brands cut ad spend after Cyber Monday? Jacob says no. Black Friday customers often come back to buy gifts, the big retailers pull back so CPMs tend to dip, and the first two weeks of December can outperform the end of November. On the third DTC Rundown, Eric Dyck is joined by Jacob and Abby from the social team at Pilothouse. Each topic runs on a timer. They start with rising Meta CPMs and the product browsing default Meta switched on this week, then get into whether the offer or the creative matters more on Black Friday, what a late Thanksgiving means for your sale, why December still pays, and whether a founder should fire their agency two weeks before Black Friday. Get an audit from Pilothouse: https://pilothouse.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Your Meta costs keep climbing. Meta CPMs are running higher than last year, with Q4 and the US midterms both pushing prices up. Brands that fed the pixel with cold traffic earlier in the year are the ones seeing it pay off now. Meta just put a shopping page between your ad and your site. Jacob explains why Pilothouse will test product browsing before opting out, including what opting out could do to your opportunity score. You can't decide between the offer and the creative. Abby keeps the offer front and center in every Black Friday ad and wins on how she says it. One cookware brand in her portfolio saw CPMs go down this year after a flood of new video content. You run the same ads to everyone. Jacob hammers the offer to retargeting audiences and leads with variety and messaging for cold traffic, then narrows to what works three or four days into the sale. Thanksgiving is late and your window is short. Launch early to mid November, then stack an extra 5% or add countdown timers if the promo starts to fizzle. Your ads say 20% off and the sale is pacing behind. Abby leaves the creative alone and lets shoppers find 25% on the site, a happy surprise that helps them pull the trigger. Your discount isn't deep enough. A jewellery brand moved from 30% off sitewide to "up to 50%" by adding more products to its clearance section. You plan to pull back on December 2nd. Keep your Black Friday ads running through Cyber Week, have gifting ready to go, and push until your shipping cutoff. Your gifting ads launch with no learnings. Abby launches evergreen gifting ads during Black Friday so they already have data when the sale ends. Your shipping cutoff has passed. Gift cards, discounted gift cards and expedited shipping keep the last days of December selling. Your brand doesn't fit gifting. Use a self-gifting angle: you did your holiday shopping, now it's your turn. You're not planning Q5. Health brands can ride new year resolutions, and jewelry brands should build their Valentine's Day creative before January ends. You skipped top of funnel in October. Abby explains how she fills the funnel in October with brand-building video, then drains it in November with heavy Black Friday messaging. Your founder wants to fire the agency on November 15th. Jacob would ride it out unless the agency has checked out, and Abby lists the red flags that make switching worth the risk. ABOUT THE GUESTS Jacob and Abby work on the social team at Pilothouse, a performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer Want to be on the Rundown? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co TIMESTAMPS 00:00 Black Friday creative strategy 03:00 Rising Meta CPMs 07:00 BFCM offers vs. creative 18:00 Why you should keep spending after Cyber Monday 30:00 When to fire your marketing agency

October 29, 202633 min

Don't Go Dark: How DTC Brands Should Plan 2027 Marketing Budgets | Harness the Halo 6/6

Should a DTC brand cut its marketing budget for 2027? Greg Dolan, CEO of Keen Decision Systems, says cutting is the biggest mistake he expects to see, because a brand that goes dark pays more to get back to where it was. Greg co-founded Keen 16 years ago after a decade as a CPG brand marketer, waiting six to eight months for a marketing mix PowerPoint that didn't help with the next decision. Keen's database now covers 450 brands and $48 billion in media spend. In the final episode of Harness the Halo, he explains how the loop of measuring, planning, buying and reconciling works, why he thinks a brand of any size should invest in top of funnel, and why he would never hand the marketing budget back to the CFO. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE Tariffs are squeezing your margin and marketing looks like the easy cut. Greg's advice is to cut non-working dollars first and keep the lights on, because coming back from dark costs more than staying in market. You've been told to wait on brand marketing until you're bigger. Greg disagrees. He says top of funnel spend acts as cover fire that makes your middle and bottom of funnel more effective, and that a brand living on bottom of funnel spend pays more for the same result over time. You're scaling inside one platform. Greg's data favors spreading spend across channels that reinforce each other, like Meta and Amazon, and judging each one on what the next dollar returns in profit. Someone told you a channel doesn't work. Greg calls blanket channel verdicts a broad generalization. What matters is the brand's objective, where its customer is, whether you can buy the channel efficiently, and when you spend. You're relying on Google's or Meta's free marketing mix model. Greg calls them myopic, says they grade their own homework, and says they need a data science team and constant experiments to calibrate. Your business is seasonal and your budget piles into the peak. Greg's biggest client bet was a century-old seasonal brand that spent less during its peak season and more around it, and grew top line and profit. Your CFO only looks at CAC. Greg would show the CFO the net present value of marketing, so it gets judged as an investment the way any other capital spend is. Nobody agrees who owns the marketing budget. Greg says the CMO should, as long as the CMO learns the CFO's language and is held to profit. You plan once a year. Keen starts from two years of data, updates the model as new data arrives, produces a week-by-week buying plan, and checks actuals against the forecast. You blame creative when results swing. Greg says only great creative shows up as a big effect in the model, and that where and when you spend usually matters more than people think creative does. ABOUT THE GUEST Greg Dolan is co-founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com HARNESS THE HALO Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is the final episode. STAY CONNECTED DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co YouTube: https://youtube.com/@dtcnewsletter LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer SPONSOR Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com TIMESTAMPS 00:00 AI-powered marketing measurement 06:00 Using AI to optimize marketing spend 09:00 Why top-of-funnel investment matters 19:00 Marketing budgets during economic pressure 26:00 The future of autonomous media buying

October 26, 202649 min

What Investors Look For in a DTC Brand: Norwest's 10-Point Framework

What do investors look for in a DTC brand before they fund it? Norwest partner Lisa Wu, an early investor in Jet, Ritual, and Remedy, walks through the 10 attributes her team uses to spot a breakout consumer brand. She covers why a well-built consumer brand should only need one or two rounds of capital, why replenishment categories need gross margins north of 60%, and why supplements and personal care can sell for five times revenue while apparel can trade at one times. If you run a $5M to $50M brand, use her list as a scorecard and mark yourself green, yellow, or red on each attribute. Get the DTC Newsletter: h ttps://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - Know which of the 10 attributes your brand is weak on before you raise, so you fix the reds instead of pitching around them. - Avoid funding a consumer brand like a tech company. Too much capital at rising valuations buys mercenary customers and forces you to chase targets your unit economics can't support. - Be first-ish instead of first. The later mattress-in-a-box brands drafted off the category education the early, venture-funded players paid for. - Build clinical proof into the brand from day one. Science washing (adding a dermatologist, a survey, and a claim once you notice the trend) is something customers can sense. - Cut acquisition costs with a distribution advantage others haven't found yet, like a trusted clinical voice whose audience includes other creators who look up to them. - Make paid acquisition work by pairing it with strong retention. Natural replenishment categories let lifetime value cover what you spend to acquire. - Price for the premiumization of mass, and keep investing in brand, because a cheaper competitor is always coming. - Protect gross margin early so wholesale and retail stay open without a reformulation later. - Choose a category acquirers want to buy. A $100M brand at five times revenue sells for $500M. At one times, it sells for $100M. - Win with one product first, then expand into adjacent products where the customer already trusts you. About the guest: Lisa Wu is a partner on the venture team at Norwest, where she has invested in consumer brands for more than a decade. Her investments include Ritual, Remedy, and Jet, which was acquired by Walmart. Norwest runs venture and growth equity on one platform, so it can back founders from seed through profitable scale. Reach Lisa at lw@nvp.com. https://norwest.com Stay connected: The DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co Timestamps: 02:10 Why Health and Wellness Is Booming 08:45 How Ritual Built Consumer Trust 14:05 10 Attributes of Breakout Consumer Brands 24:05 Building a Distribution Advantage 40:55 Consumer Trends Investors Are Watching

October 23, 202625 min

How DTC Brands Should Prep for Amazon Black Friday After Prime Day

How should DTC brands prep for Black Friday on Amazon? This year's Prime Day events show where ecommerce growth is coming from: shoppers stocked up on consumables while big-ticket categories lagged. Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse. He walks through what June and October Prime Day showed. Some consumable brands Pilothouse manages grew 150% or more year over year during October Prime Day, a few sold more in that two-day event than in the four-day June event, and average order value dropped. He explains what that means for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, how premium brands should position for shoppers who wait for deals, and what to set up on Amazon now. Work with Pilothouse: https://dtcnews.link/pilothouse Key takeaways: - Know which shoppers are waiting on you. Paper products, household cleaning, personal hygiene and pet food jumped on deal days, while headphones, tablets, wearable tech and TVs lagged. - Sell on value. Shoppers want the product they already like at a better price, so make your differentiator easy to find and quick to understand on the listing. - Build awareness before the deal day. Shoppers do their research ahead of the sale, so get in front of them in the weeks before Black Friday and retarget them on the day. - Test your listing images with care. Amazon once required white backgrounds, and lifestyle and annotated images exist because sellers kept pushing. Deal-day hints in images are a gray area, and a removed listing means missing the event entirely. - Be available where your customer shops. More shoppers compared Walmart, Target and DTC sites during deal days, and if your competitor is listed there and you are not, they get the sale. - Plan a review push after Black Friday. Amazon's new Review Requests ads let you pay per click to ask recent buyers for a review. A click does not guarantee a review. - Start ranking for your Black Friday keywords now. Put the keyword in your title, highlights, bullets and description, give it its own campaign, and use placement modifiers to hold top of search into the deal day. About the guest: Tyler leads the Amazon team at Pilothouse, a full-funnel performance marketing agency for DTC brands. https://pilothouse.co Stay connected: Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Sponsors: Advertise on DTC: https://dtcnews.link/advertise Timestamps: 00:03:36 Amazon Prime Day trends 00:05:00 Consumables surge during deal days 00:07:40 How shoppers define value 00:12:30 Positioning premium products for BFCM 00:16:40 Omnichannel holiday shopping behavior

October 21, 202640 min

How to Build a Creative Flywheel for Your DTC Brand for Free

Do influencer partnership ads lower customer acquisition costs for DTC brands, or just move them? They lower CAC on Meta, but rev-share creator deals send a big share of that saving into a new line on the P&L. Yash Chavan, founder and CEO of Saral, the team behind the Sathi affiliate platform, walks through the math on an $80 AOV supplement brand and lays out how to build a creative flywheel instead: an influencer affiliate program where affiliate revenue covers the cost of seeding product, and the posts that win organically become the ads you boost on Meta and TikTok. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - Work out whether partnership ads are cutting your CAC or relocating it, using Yash's worked example of an $80 CAC dropping to $68 while creator and platform fees add $9.20 back. - See why creator payouts tied to GMV grow as a variable cost when you scale ad spend, and how capping the payout on any single ad stops one viral video from costing you $10,000. - Build a creator pyramid: seed creators who already post in your niche, turn the ones who post into affiliates, give the top sellers bigger deals, and run the top performers by views as partnership ads. - Let organic performance choose your ad creative, with rules like boosting a reel on Meta once it passes a view threshold inside 48 hours. - Raise your affiliate activity rate by rewarding the steps before the sale, like a free product when a creator joins and a small cash reward when they post. - Catch leaked codes, leaked affiliate links, and affiliates bidding on your brand keywords before you pay commission on those sales. - Plan a creator push in mid October that can still produce ad creative and affiliate revenue before Black Friday. About the guest: Yash Chavan is the founder and CEO of Saral, an influencer marketing platform for ecommerce brands. Before Saral he ran an influencer marketing agency. His team also built Sathi, an affiliate platform for creator-led brands with fraud protection and gamified rewards. Saral: https://getsaral.com/ Sathi: https://www.mysathi.io Stay connected: Website and newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by Saral and Sathi. Saral matches your brand with creators who already make content in your niche, and Sathi turns the creators who post into affiliates, with fraud protection and gamified rewards built in. Start a free trial at https://getsaral.com/

October 19, 202649 min

DTC Customer Acquisition: How O Positiv Scaled TikTok Shop to $70K a Day

How do you lower customer acquisition costs for a DTC brand? Bobby Bitton, co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, says TikTok Shop did more for his CAC than any other channel. He launched it as a side project in November 2023, and within 30 days one SKU went from $2,000 a day to $70,000 a day. Bobby walks through how O Positiv runs more than 100 ads a week through an in-house creative team, how they move what works on TikTok Shop over to Meta, and why retention now gets the same attention as acquisition. He also explains why the brand waited until it was a $100 million business to go into retail, why linear TV beat streaming in their geo tests, and the brand architecture decision he would make differently. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: Lower CAC with TikTok Shop by sending samples generously and recruiting affiliates every week. Bobby set a goal of 1,000 affiliates and did the outreach himself on Sunday nights. Start TikTok Shop simple. Get affiliates posting before you touch GMV Max, paid campaigns, or contests. Get more usable creative by briefing creators less. O Positiv's brief is the product, what it does, what creators can say, and what they can't. Feed Meta with TikTok Shop learnings. The winning creator content runs on Meta, and the creators get paid extra for it. Test for creative diversity instead of running ten copy variations on one static image. Hold Meta to an allowable CAC and move spend up or down with the strength of your creative. Grow lifetime value by planning for life stages. A PMS customer who gets pregnant should reach for your pregnancy product, then your menopause product. Launch products customers can feel working. O Positiv's fiber gummy stuck and its immune gummy didn't, and that became the product rule. Go into retail with a big DTC business behind you, push for endcaps and out-of-aisle displays, and fly out for the buyer meeting. Expect retail to break your attribution. When Meta ads drive store sales, your Shopify CAC climbs while the business grows, so build omnichannel measurement early. Decide early whether you are a house of brands or a branded house, and keep it simple. About the guest: Bobby Bitton is the co-founder and CEO of O Positiv, the women's health brand he started with his sister Brianna Bitton in 2018. O Positiv makes FLO, URO, and MENO, and sells through its own site, TikTok Shop, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and CVS. https://www.opositiv.com Stay connected: Follow The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co

October 16, 202636 min

Founder Story Ads: How DTC Brands Win on Meta Without an Obvious Product Edge

What's the best DTC marketing strategy on Meta when every competitor makes the same claims? Liam Robinson, co-founder of Marlbank, says to stop arguing features and lead cold prospecting with your brand's growth story. On this episode of All Killer No Filler, he walks through how that switch got a supplement brand built by chemists scaling on Meta after months of feature-led ads went nowhere. Get the DTC Newsletter: https://directtoconsumer.co Key takeaways: - How to sell a product that's better than the competition when the reasons don't show up in an ad - Why feature-led ads turn into a shouting match in cold Meta prospecting - How to imply product quality through your brand's growth story instead of claiming it - What to use when you don't have big numbers yet: a first farmers market, a first hire, a first customer - How to build a then-and-now prospecting ad from your own camera roll - How Marin Skincare and Vyper Industrial pair a product distinction with a founder story - How to turn a Dragons' Den appearance into an ad, whether you got a deal or walked away without one - Which brands this angle won't work for About the guest: Liam Robinson is co-founder of Marlbank, a Meta-only agency for early-growth ecommerce brands, built in partnership with Pilothouse. Before Marlbank, he was one of Pilothouse's first media buyers. Reach Liam at liam@marlbank.co or his co-founder Nate at nate@marlbank.co. Stay connected: Subscribe to The DTC Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Get the DTC Newsletter at https://directtoconsumer.co Want to be a guest? Email eric@directtoconsumer.co