Why I Wrote The DTC Playbook (And Gave It Away For Free)

I kept having the same conversations

A lot of founders and operators have come through my inbox and calendar this year. Some just getting started, some running brands doing serious revenue. At some point I realised I was repeating myself: same stories, same frameworks, same lessons.

That was the trigger. Put it down somewhere. Not as a blog post or a podcast episode, but in a format that's actually usable. Something a founder or operator could pick up, find the bit that matters to them right now, and get to work.

Going back through the last 15 years also forced me to sharpen my own thinking. That was a bonus.

It's not a book. It's a product.

The trickiest thing was making it work at every stage. Pre-revenue. Launch. Growth. Scale. I didn't want someone running a $30M brand wading through startup basics.

So I built it differently. You don't read it front to back. You do the health check, answer the questions, and it points you to the sections that apply to where you are now.

The audience wasn't who I expected

I started writing this with a picture in my head of who it was for. Early-stage founders trying to figure things out, the way we did at Quad Lock.

The signups told a different story. More 10M+ and 50M+ brands than sub-10M. Investors and advisors. Multiple people from the same team.

That insight changed what I was building as I was building it.

Lesson: don't get too attached to the plan. The signal in front of you matters more than the assumption you started with.

I wish I'd had this

When we started Quad Lock, there wasn't much out there. You had to figure it out yourself. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing. The speed at which you could figure things out was its own kind of arbitrage.

But what's in the playbook isn't just my thinking. It's what we worked out together over a decade of building Quad Lock: me, my co-founder Chris Peters, and the team we built around us. We all would have benefited from something like this on day one.

This isn't a "guru" play

There are already great DTC guides, courses, and consultants out there. I just have a few contrarian views, and some of what we did worked well, so I thought it was worth writing down.

Not all of it will apply to your brand. Every brand is different. Use it the way I use podcasts and interviews: not "I should do exactly what they did," but "what's the lesson in this for me?"

Why free?

Honestly, it's not entirely selfless.

The health check that sits behind the playbook tells me a lot about where founders and operators are struggling. That's useful to me. It shows me what problems are common right now, across different brands and stages. For the advisory work I do, it's also a faster way to get up to speed on a business than a string of introductory meetings.

So there's something in it for me. Worth being upfront about that.

And the beautiful thing about the internet is that once something's written down, the cost to serve it is near zero. It doesn't need me in the room or on a call to be useful.

It's not a magic bullet either. You take the ideas, combine them with what you know about your industry, brand, and customers, and you still have to go make it work. It's just what worked for us.

Stories are good. Tools are better.

I wanted this to be as usable as possible. That's why it's built around checklists, diagnostic frameworks, and downloadable tools.

In the early days at Quad Lock, I'd have given a lot for a template P&L to model from, or a checklist of what to get right before scaling spend. You get the insight, then you get to the doing.

One takeaway

Take action. Do things. Learn from those things. Repeat.

You'll learn more in a week of doing than a year of planning.

The DTC Playbook is free at thedtcplaybook.com →

28 sections. 100,000+ words. Diagnostic tools, checklists, and everything I wish existed when we started Quad Lock.