Operator's template Nº01 / DTC unit economics
The first customer P&L.
This fully loaded P&L shows what platform CPA hides. It adds up every cost of acquiring a new customer, from media and creative to fees and fulfillment, then works out what retention has to recover to break even.
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Free. XLSX.
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What's inside
- 01Every acquisition costMedia, UGC, whitelisting, agency fees, affiliates and tools go into one P&L, alongside what your ad platform shows.
- 02Your real CPAIt puts fully loaded nCAC next to the ad-spend-only CPA your dashboards report.
- 03The two-cap operating systemA MER ceiling protects cash flow, an nCAC target protects unit economics, and the tighter one is your daily constraint.
- 04Acquisition contribution marginIt's worked out on ad spend alone and fully loaded, so you know when you're profitable on the first purchase.
- 05Retention breakevenIt shows how much email, SMS and subscription have to recover when first-purchase margin goes negative, with your cash position by month.
- 06The ads-off testA built-in sensitivity shows your monthly burn if you turned acquisition off.
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Read weekly by operators at
Google, Procter & Gamble, Target, ByteDance, Ritual, Dr. Squatch, Lovevery, Koala, HiSmile, Tinuiti.
Newsletter subscribers, by employer. Their companies haven't endorsed this.
Your posts consistently show a systems-level understanding of Meta rather than surface-level dashboard thinking, and that's pretty rare.
Kartike S., on LinkedIn
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More field studies
- The DTC landing page teardownField study Nº01. I classified and counted every landing page behind the paid social of 20 DTC brands, 266 pages across 11,999 live ads.PDF + CSV
- Meta scaling stages 2026Operator's map Nº01. A Meta account goes through four stages, from “$10K a month and nothing sticks” to “$5M a month and boring on purpose.”PDF + XLSX
- The DTC static ad systemField study Nº02. I pulled every active ad from 106 DTC and consumer brands, 67,852 in total, and sorted them by format.PDF