The DTC Guys OS · $7, updated quarterly
Your ROAS looks good. What does your contribution margin say?
The DTC Guys OS is the unit-economics playbook I use to run consumer brands: calculate contribution margin, see what each order actually leaves behind, find the leak, and fix the right number first. Updated every quarter. Seven dollars.
Instant download after checkout. It used to be free. It is the same book, and it is worth more than seven dollars, so now it costs seven dollars.
What's inside
The whole operating system, step by step.
- The one formula. Net sales, cost of delivery, ad spend, contribution margin. Everything else sits on top of it.
- The four places your money goes. Where every dollar of revenue actually lands, and which line is quietly eating the business.
- The operating bands. Healthy, watch, problem, for the numbers that decide whether a brand works. Where you should sit, and what it means when you don't.
- Six stages, run as plays. The map the whole OS runs on, and numbered steps inside every stage, with a done-when checklist so you know when it's actually done.
- One brand, computed all the way through. A $5M example brand carried across the whole book: the leak found, the lines drawn, the year sliced, the week saved. Beside it, real receipts from brands I've run.
- The three lines. The sales floor, the profit floor, and the ceiling: establish them before any target gets set.
- Voice of customer. Your customers already wrote your ads: the corpus, the language bank, the profiles.
- The 2026 acquisition reality. Why the creative is the targeting now, and what to steer on instead of platform ROAS.
- The retention math. Where about 60% of the business actually lives, and how to measure whether it's compounding.
- Cadence and exit. How to reinvest, when to promote without training people to wait, and what a brand really sells for.
- What's working right now. Dated Q3 2026 field boxes in every stage, refreshed each quarterly cut. The boxes expire. The stages never do.
- The limit. The one read no tool can do, named on purpose. Because that's the whole point.
What it can't do is tell you which of your numbers is lying to you. That read, on your actual business, this quarter, with your margin and your cash position, is the human. That's me. The OS is yours to keep, whether we ever speak or not. Seven dollars, and no call attached to it.
Operated and advised
Before you ask
A fair question now.
Is this just AI slop?
Of course I used AI. I use AI to do better work, and pretending otherwise would be daft. But it is not the source of the judgment. This comes from 20-plus years of applying the work across consumer brands with very different products, models, and stages, plus what I have learned from mentors, advisors, and some of the best operators in the space. AI helped me organize it, challenge it, and make it more useful. It did not invent the experience.