Why I Wrote The DTC Playbook (And Gave It Away For Free)
I kept telling the same story
I'm having a lot of conversations with founders and operators at the moment. Some are just getting started, some are running brands doing serious revenue. At some point I realised I was telling the same stories, explaining the same frameworks, walking people through the same lessons over and over again.
That was the moment I thought: I should put this 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 get my own thinking clear. That part was useful for me too.
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 to find what's relevant to them.
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 parts that might actually help.
The core idea: The last thing a founder or operator needs is a hundred thousand words standing between them and the three paragraphs that are going to give them an unlock.
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. If you could figure things out fast, you had some kind of arbitrage.
But if we knew what we know now back then, things would have been a lot smoother. My co-founder Chris Peters, the whole Quad Lock team. We all would have benefited from something like this.
This isn't a "guru" play
There are great DTC guides, courses, and consultants already out there. I just have a few contrarian views, and some of what we did worked well, so I thought it was worth sharing.
Not everything here will be for everyone. Every brand is different. I'd want people to 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 genuinely useful to me. It helps me understand the problems that are common right now, across different brands and stages. And for the advisory work I do, it's also a faster way to get up to speed with a business than a series of introductory meetings.
So there's something in it for me. I think it's worth being upfront about that.
But there's nothing in here that costs me anything to share. And if it's written down, it doesn't need me in the room to be useful.
It's not a magic bullet either. You take these insights, combine them with what you know about your industry, your brand, your customers, and then you still have to go make it all work. There's no secret sauce. 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.
I remember sitting in the early days trying to work out what good looks like. If someone had handed me a template P&L to start modelling from, or a checklist of what to get right before scaling spend, that would have saved real time. You get the insight and then you get to the doing quickly.
The way I see it: Success is often in the detail. Understanding your business well enough to know what's working and what isn't. Getting the big things set up properly so you don't have to think about them constantly, and then getting into the detail. That's where you outdo the competition.
One takeaway
Take action. Do things. Learn from those things.
There's more to it than that, obviously. But if you had to say one thing: do things and learn from them.
You'll learn more in a week of doing than a year of planning.
The DTC Playbook is free at thedtcplaybook.com →
28 sections. 99,000 words. Diagnostic tools, checklists, and everything I wish existed when we started Quad Lock.