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Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
Know your real margins with these six Excel models
Stop making shoppers hunt for answers
Build an audience before you build a product
A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need
This issue takes 2 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
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Resources
Know your real margins with these six Excel models
Your P&L shows what happened, but it can’t tell you if you’re actually making money. These six Excel models go a layer deeper: 13-week cash by bank balance, component-level COGS, channel margin per unit, inventory roll-forwards, monthly payback, and itemized trade spend.
Built by ex-CPG FP&A leads. Unlocked and documented in Excel and Google Sheets, so you can check every formula and defend it to your board. No Drivepoint account required. Plug in your SKUs, thirteen months, your own numbers, and know your margins, fees, and break-even cold.
Brand Breakdown
Stop making shoppers hunt for answers
We're doing a 100 days of stealing strategies from brands that are already winning.
For day 11, we have Pet Lab Co.
On their product pages, information isn't dumped into one long scroll.
It's split into tabs–vet reviewed, key ingredients, directions for use, product benefits.
So you click into whichever one answers your question instead of hunting through paragraphs to find it.
A shopper skimming for one detail, like dosage for a small dog, shouldn’t have to scroll past ingredients, reviews, and shipping info to find it.
Tabs let people go straight to what they came for, and the page stays clean for everyone else.
Here's what you should do today: if your product page has more than two or three sections of information, stop stacking them on top of each other.
Split them into tabs so shoppers can jump to what they need without wading through what they don't.
Pod Bites
Build an audience before you build a product
In this DTC Daily Podcast, Seth, founder of Wellness, broke down how having a built-in audience turned a product launch into an instant seven-figure business.
Most founders build the product first and then figure out who to sell it to. Seth did it the other way around. His health and wellness education company for moms was already the largest of its kind before Wellness existed. When he launched, the customers were already there.
Here's what founders should actually focus on.
Build the audience before the product: Wellness launched because Seth's existing audience kept asking him to sell what he was teaching them to make. The product followed the audience, not the other way around.
Create anticipation before launch: Seth used a separate email list to slowly drip product details without revealing everything upfront.
Use your email list to seed Meta ads: Once customers came in, Seth uploaded that list to Meta to build lookalike audiences.
Test influencers in volume first: Start with 20 to 30 influencers and see what converts. Smaller, up-and-coming creators tend to have more loyal audiences and charge less than established ones.
Push subscriptions over one-time orders: Wellness nudges customers toward quarterly subscriptions. It saves on shipping, reduces churn, and keeps customers from forgetting to reorder.
Don't write off direct mail: For customers who have stopped opening emails, Wellness sends physical mail twice a year with a discount code to reactivate people who have otherwise gone quiet.
The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.
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