DTC Podcast

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Media owns the traffic. Brand owns the site. The page in between belongs to nobody, and it's been sitting in a Notion doc called landing page priorities Q3 since 2022.

Eric brings Daniel from Pilothouse back for an all killer no filler on the post-click experience: why it stayed generic for a decade, what changed in the last twelve months, and what the team is seeing in its pilots with Black Crow AI.

For media buyers, creative strategists, and founders whose ads are working and whose conversion rate isn't.

What you get:
The middle child problem. Media assumes brand is loving the page, brand assumes media is, and nobody has touched it since 2022.
Why this was never a priority question. Personalizing creative is cheap. Personalizing destinations used to mean five pages through design, dev, QA, and deploy, which took literal months. So teams built one page, pointed everything at it, and updated it once a year.
The 65-inch OLED analogy. You walk into a store, tell the salesperson exactly what you want, and they hand you the catalog. That's what a generic PDP does to someone who just clicked a very specific ad.
The creative is the brief. The ad unit becomes the input for the storefront: the copy, the image, the targeting, the interests, all of it read and matched.
What the pilots are showing: roughly 20 to 21% lift in conversion rates, on storefronts now taking about half the budget rather than one test ad set off in the corner.
Where Black Crow adds something a general purpose model doesn't. Persistent ID across sessions means the page knows you're back and can serve a different experience.
The technical prerequisites that actually gate this: Shopify, and enough Meta budget to test a difference. Brand and creative prerequisites matter less.
Brand safety. These aren't fully dynamic pages. You can lock images and titles and adjust on the fly.
Which brands it suits so far: a few concentrated top SKUs rather than a long tail catalog.
The third party cookie, revisited. Daniel's verdict on the biggest talking point of 2022: what a nothing burger.
Why the strategist now owns this. No IT ticket, no web team queue. That's the difference between now and twelve months ago.

Who this is for: performance marketers and DTC founders who have solved pre-click and never touched what happens after.

What to steal: treating your best ad as the brief for its own landing page, and the Shopify plus testable budget prerequisite check before you invest in any of this.

Timestamps:
00:03:00 Why the post-click experience matters
00:07:00 Personalized landing pages lift conversion rates
00:10:00 AI-powered landing page personalization
00:15:00 Matching landing pages to ad creative
00:21:00 Using ad creative as the landing page brief

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A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million it drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion it is 2 to 3 percent. Justin Jefferson has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment, and those numbers are the opening for a harder conversation about where the money should go.

If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes books quarterly.

If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin explains discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance can argue about the same number.

What Justin gets into:
Spend-to-revenue benchmarks at $10 to 15M, $100 to 500M, $500M to $1B, and past $1B
Marginal ROI against blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
The brand that went zero to a hundred on top of funnel, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and then had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear, and audio: roughly flat in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a budget, and where he sees real incrementality on Amazon instead
The gap he sees between top and bottom of funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than flat ones

Who this is for: operators between $10M and $500M who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.

What to steal: report return on the next dollar by channel alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.

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. Episode 1 sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.

Timestamps:
00:00 Why Marketing Mix Modeling Is Changing
03:00 Why Meta and Google Are Getting Harder to Scale
07:00 When Brands Should Invest in Top-of-Funnel
13:00 How to Measure and Predict Marketing Performance
19:00 How the Marketing Halo Drives Growth

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Adam Gillman co-founded Hiya Health (hiyahealth.com), the kids' vitamin brand that launched in March 2020, stayed bootstrapped, and sold to USANA at the end of 2024 at a reported $260M valuation. He and his co-founder Darren still run it, and 2026 is the year Hiya finally hit retail shelves at Target.

If you're a founder or operator building a subscription DTC brand, this episode is a start-to-exit walkthrough from someone who did it without a single VC check.

What's inside:
The "single SKU phase": why Hiya sold one multivitamin for 2.5 years before launching anything else, and what had to be true before product two
Attacking gummies head-on: porous form factors that kill vitamin content, and sugar as "candy in disguise"
How new SKUs stayed accretive instead of cannibalistic as the catalog grew
Why influencer was the backbone of a channel mix that hit 25% month-over-month growth in stretches from 2023 to 2025, including creators Hiya has worked with for 3 to 4 years
"We want this to sit on your counter, not inside of your cabinet": the packaging and sticker-pack decision that quietly built enterprise value
Disney, Barbie, and Marvel collabs done properly: rebuilding the entire customer experience per license, to the point that existing subscribers repurchased product they already had
The exit itself: open bidding process, why he can't imagine doing it without an investment bank, and the leverage of not needing to sell
Lightning round: the metric founders obsess over too much (revenue growth), the one they ignore (gross margin to CAC), and the e-commerce trend he thinks has peaked (creative velocity for its own sake)

Who this is for: subscription DTC founders, operators fighting rising CACs, and anyone who wants to see what a bootstrapped nine-figure exit actually looks like from the inside.

What to steal: Adam's channel discipline. Under $20M in revenue, put the majority of your effort into making one channel work before touching the next one.

Follow Adam: @AdamGillman on X | hiyahealth.com

Timestamps:
00:00 Building Hiya From a Single SKU
08:00 Expanding Products Through Customer Trust
18:00 Why Brand Building Creates Enterprise Value
23:00 Scaling Growth With Influencer Marketing
35:00 Creative Velocity, CAC and Sustainable Growth

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pilothouse.co

Every year around this time, Eric and Jacob record some version of this episode. This is their seventh Black Friday together, and the through-line hasn't changed: brands sprint through summer, look up at the end of October, and realize the Halloween sale and Black Friday are on top of them with none of the groundwork done.

If you run meaningful spend on Meta, this is the checklist to work through before the CPM doubling kicks in.

What you get:
Stocking the pond. Low-cost lead gen and engagement campaigns at 5% of budget (or less), optimized to engagement instead of purchase, so Meta buys you cheap eyeballs now that become warm retargeting audiences in November.
The giveaway playbook, start to finish: partner bundle (the beer brand and the beef jerky brand), a $750 prize, a squeeze page, leads firing on signup, and an October 15 end date. The FOMO purchases from non-winners are typically what push the giveaway spend into the green before the dripping even starts.
The audience-window answer: engagement audiences hold up to 180 days, purchaser lists now build to roughly 720. Engage someone in August and you can still recall them for Black Friday.
Warming the algorithm: start ramping spend two months out, 10 to 15% a week, instead of a 500% budget jump on November 1.
Value-based lookalikes in the Andromeda era. Export your top 500 purchasers by lifetime spend, upload, build the 1% lookalike. Less central than it used to be, still working.
The CAPI audit: if your events manager shows a 5 or 6 out of 10, you're not sending enough parameters back. Click IDs, event IDs, name, email, phone. Target an 8 or 9.
The invoicing trap. Meta has moved brands to monthly invoicing, and an unpaid invoice can pause your account until it's resolved. Check your payment settings and your spend limit now, and set the limit way above what you plan to spend.
Offer architecture: why tariff-squeezed brands can finally offer again, sitewide vs. tiered thresholds, which catalog shapes suit which structure, and why you test at 5 or 10% off in an end-of-summer sale instead of guessing at 40 in November.
Creative as the gift guide: "perfect gift for your wife" hooks, unboxing reels, catalog frames with Christmas theming, and countdown urgency tied to real shipping cutoffs. No smoke and mirrors.
ASC structure: one broad Advantage Plus campaign with the full catalog, plus manual bottom-funnel catalog campaigns per collection so you have levers to pull during peak windows.
And Lennying a campaign. Eric's Of Mice and Men metaphor for over-managing an account to death, plus Jacob on why human interventions during volatile weeks add to the volatility.

Who this is for: media buyers, retention leads, and founders who want their November spend converting instead of prospecting.

What to steal: the 5% engagement budget, the giveaway structure with a pre-BFCM end date, the CAPI parameter audit, and the payment-settings check you should do today.

Timestamps:
00:00 Pre-Warming Your Q4 Audience
05:00 Building Leads Before Black Friday
11:00 How to Warm Up Meta’s Algorithm
18:00 Testing Your Q4 Offers Early
28:00 Managing Meta Performance Volatility

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Fifteen videos in a shoot day. A writer's room where creators cross-edit each other's scripts. Hair, makeup, and wardrobe walkthroughs before anyone hits record. This is what organic content looks like at Kiyoko Beauty (kiyoko.ca), the curated Asian beauty retailer that hit 8 figures in 5 years, bootstrapped, while all three co-founders kept their full-time jobs.

Gillian Liu walks through the whole machine, from a part-time student's 3M-view TikTok to a production calendar planned a month out.

If you run content, growth, or a retail business on thin margins, this episode is worth a notebook.

What's inside:
The full production process: concepts and formats planned a month ahead, scripting against a reference hook library, a writer's room because "sometimes you're in it too much by yourself," script read-throughs with talent, then batch shoot days. "It's not vibes at all."
Her comparison for why the pros post consistently: comedians who have joke-writing down to a science.
The hiring filter for content roles: "What's your screen time? Show me." Her most recent hire clocks 8 hours a day. Gillian's reaction: "That's it?"
Where it started: a student with 1,000 followers, found via Instagram DM, told to post three times a week with no direction. Three months in, one video hit 3M views on a niche product only Kiyoko carried, and site sessions 10x'd overnight.
Platform roles: TikTok reaches strangers, Instagram converts them through stories and community, YouTube Shorts reposts overperform, and Red Note gets Gillian recognized on the street by the Chinese Canadian community.
The math forcing all of this: retailer margins. A Meta top-of-funnel ad runs ~$10 CPM; organic works out to under a dollar. Paid has been bottom-of-funnel Google only for five years.
The curation model itself: pay brand premium on COGS, then harvest demand created by other people's marketing budgets.
Merchandising by data: Amazon US/Canada volume, Korea's top sellers, brand heads-ups on strategic SKUs, and Shopify's "search queries with no results" report.
Brands as partners: one runs a 50/50 ad split with Kiyoko, others commission content monthly and pay in inventory value.
The early jank: a $2,000 first order, a free Shopify theme, shipping from a co-founder's basement, and buying out-of-stock items from the Asian grocery store down the street.
Why three co-founders kept their 9 to 5s (cash flow first, risk second), plus two warehouse moves in five months and the new California fulfillment center.

Who this is for: content leads and founders doing organic at scale, and any operator whose margins can't support paid top of funnel.

What to steal: her writer's room. Have creators cross-edit each other's scripts before anything gets shot.

Visit the brand: kiyoko.ca

Timestamps:
00:00 Building an Eight-Figure Brand While Working Full-Time
06:10 The Organic Content Strategy That Changed Everything
10:02 How Kiyoko Produces Viral Content at Scale
17:07 Merchandising and Choosing Winning Products
28:03 Why Organic Beats Paid for Customer Acquisition

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