I'm Curtis. I help DTC brands scale profitably.
I run Misfit Marketing, a boutique DTC performance marketing agency. We work hands-on with founders on the things that actually move revenue: paid acquisition, creative strategy, attribution, and unit economics.
Most of my career has been spent in the weeds of Meta and TikTok ad accounts. I have managed and advised on more than $100M of paid spend across DTC brands at every stage from pre-launch to nine figures.
What I do
Misfit Marketing. Performance media for DTC brands. Meta, TikTok, attribution, creative testing, and the operational work that ties them together. We do not run cookie cutter retainers. We sit alongside the founder and the team.
Consulting. A few times a year I work directly with founders on strategy, hiring, and rebuilding the marketing org. Usually when something is broken and the in-house team needs a translator between paid media reality and business reality.
The podcast. I sit down with operators who have already done what most founders are still trying to figure out. The episodes turn into recap articles I publish here, with the full breakdown of what I learned.
Writing. A weekly Substack of tactical breakdowns. No theory, no recycled threads. The kind of thing I would have wanted to read when I was running a $10M brand and trying to get to $50M.
How I got here
I started buying ads at a small DTC brand and learned the work by breaking accounts and fixing them. Founded Misfit Marketing in 2019 when it became clear that most agencies were optimizing for retention and reporting rather than for the founders' P&L.
The pattern that has played out over and over: founders inherit a media buying function that looks like it is working on paper, but the unit economics underneath are quietly breaking. The job is to make the picture honest and then rebuild the lever that drives growth.
How I think about the work
Most paid media problems are not paid media problems. They are creative problems, pricing problems, margin problems, or organizational problems wearing a paid media mask. The reason a Meta account drifts is almost never the bid strategy. It is the offer, the funnel, or the operating cadence around them.
I focus on the small number of decisions that compound. Persona, hero ad concept, payback period, and the operating tempo of your testing program. If those are right, the dashboards take care of themselves.
Where to find me
- · Misfit Marketing (the agency)
- · Substack (weekly DTC breakdowns)
- · Podcast (conversations with operators)
- · Curtis AI (chat with my writing and frameworks)
- · LinkedIn (where most of the daily writing happens)
If you are running a DTC brand and want a real conversation about where the next $10M of revenue is coming from, my email is curtis at misfitmarketing dot co.
Curtis