The 50-Point Checklist Every $100K+/Month DTC Brand Needs

A reference checklist of the 50+ things every DTC brand spending six figures a month on paid should have in place. Most have about 60% of it handled at best.

Jordan Glickman·April 10, 2026·11

Frameworks

What separates the brands that scale from the ones that stall

At Impremis we audit a lot of DTC brands. Eight figures, nine figures, sometimes ten. The conversation is always the same.

They tell us they need better creative. Or better attribution. Or a buyer who finally "gets it."

Almost every time, the actual problem is something else entirely. It is fifty things, and the brand is doing maybe thirty of them well. No single fix unlocks scale. The unlock is structural — a portfolio of small, boring competencies stacked on top of each other.

This is the checklist I run against every account that lands at the agency. If your brand is doing $100K+/month in paid, you should be able to put a check next to most of these. Be honest. Most brands have somewhere between 25 and 35 checks. The ones running at $250K+/month profitably almost always have 42+.

How to use this

Don't try to fix everything. Pick your three biggest gaps and fix them in the next 90 days. That's it. Then come back, audit again, pick three more.

The brands that try to fix all 50 in a quarter end up fixing zero. The brands that fix three at a time, four times a year, end up at 42 checks within twelve months and they wonder why everything suddenly works.

1. Unit economics (the foundation)

If you're not honest about your math, nothing else matters.

[ ] You know your first-purchase contribution margin in dollars, not just percent
[ ] You have an nCAC ceiling tied to a payback period, not a vanity ROAS target
[ ] You track LTV by acquisition channel and you know which channels' customers actually return
[ ] You have a cohort contribution model showing month-over-month dollars produced by each acquisition cohort
[ ] Your revenue forecast for the next 90 days is within 10% of actuals on a rolling basis
[ ] You know your payback period in days and you measure it monthly

| Metric | Healthy benchmark | Red flag | |---|---|---| | First-purchase contribution margin | Positive on subscription, ~breakeven on one-time | Negative on first purchase with no clear LTV path | | Payback period | <90 days for one-time, <60 for subscription | >180 days | | nCAC vs CAC ratio | nCAC ~1.5-2x of blended CAC | nCAC >3x blended CAC | | LTV/CAC at 12 months | 3:1 minimum | <2:1 |

2. Creative production

The hard one. Most brands fail here not because their creative is bad but because the system producing creative is broken.

[ ] You produce roughly 1 net-new concept per $3K of monthly spend (not variations — concepts)
[ ] You track hit rate on net-new concepts (target 8-12%) and on iterations (target 20-30%) separately
[ ] You have a creative matrix mapping angles, formats, and creator types — and you can show empty cells
[ ] You measure creative decay — average days to fatigue per concept
[ ] You track spend-weighted creative age to make sure your spend isn't concentrated on dying winners
[ ] You document creative briefs with one specific objective per brief, not a list of preferences
[ ] You review losers as systematically as winners — what didn't work, what hypothesis was wrong

Creative is the single biggest lever in the account and the single most under-instrumented function in most marketing teams. If you have one check missing in this section, fix that first.

3. Media buying

Here's where the volume problem most often lives.

[ ] You have a healthy power-law distribution — top 1-2% of ads driving 40-60% of spend
[ ] Your kill rules are written down, signed by both creative and buying leads, and use minimum spend thresholds (not just CPA)
[ ] You alternate high-confidence and low-confidence test batches to keep hit-rate expectations sane
[ ] Your bidding strategy by campaign is documented (cost cap vs highest volume vs lowest cost) with a reason
[ ] Your account structure matches your strategy — consolidated where you need budget pooling, separated where you need attribution clarity
[ ] You review the account changelog weekly — every change made, by whom, with intended outcome
[ ] Daily budget changes are capped (no >20% same-day swings) to avoid algorithm reset

4. Attribution

If you don't trust your numbers, every decision downstream is a guess.

[ ] MER tracker in a Google Sheet, updated daily
[ ] Post-purchase survey running, with channel-level CAC reconciliation against platform reports
[ ] Multi-touch attribution tool configured (Triple Whale, Northbeam, or equivalent) above ~$200K/mo
[ ] Server-side tracking firing for all major channels above ~$100K/mo
[ ] Geo holdouts run at least quarterly to validate channel incrementality above ~$500K/mo
[ ] View-through conversions are reported separately and never bundled with click-through in decision math

For the full implementation, see the attribution stack guide.

5. Landing pages and CRO

The second-cheapest leverage in the account, after creative, and the most ignored.

[ ] Dedicated landing pages for top 3-5 concepts (not the homepage, not the PDP)
[ ] Mobile load time under 3 seconds at the 75th percentile
[ ] Above-the-fold social proof — review counts, press, founder credibility — on every paid landing page
[ ] Message match between ad and landing page — same hook, same promise, same visual language
[ ] Active A/B test running on at least one variable at all times (offer, hero, headline)
[ ] PDP optimized for paid traffic, not for SEO — different audiences, different needs

A 2-point CVR lift on landing pages is identical, mathematically, to a 2-point lift on creative efficiency, and it's usually 3x cheaper to produce.

6. Channel diversification

Over-reliance on Meta is the single most common existential risk on accounts I audit.

[ ] You have a second channel running at meaningful spend (Google, TikTok, AppLovin, YouTube, Pinterest)
[ ] Each channel has channel-native creative — not Meta ads with the wrong aspect ratio
[ ] Your per-channel spend floor is high enough to actually learn (usually $20K/mo+)
[ ] Affiliate / influencer channel is evaluated honestly with subsidy math, not vanity post counts
[ ] Brand search has its own budget and isn't bundled into the prospecting math
[ ] You have cross-platform creative testing — winners from one channel ported to others quickly

| Channel mix at $300K/month spend | Healthy | Concerning | |---|---|---| | Meta | 50-65% | 85%+ | | Google (incl. brand) | 20-30% | <10% | | TikTok or AppLovin | 5-15% | 0% | | YouTube | 3-10% | 0% | | Affiliates / partnerships | 3-8% | 0% |

7. Offers and pricing

Under-tested in almost every account I see.

[ ] You test multiple offer structures quarterly — bundles, free gift, tiered discount, subscription incentive
[ ] Offers are segmented — different prospect, different first-time offer
[ ] Offer math is explicitly tied to your CAC target, not a gut-feel discount level
[ ] Seasonal offer rotation is planned 90 days in advance
[ ] You've tested premium positioning (no discount, higher price, better story) at least once

The brands with the cleanest unit economics almost always have a structurally interesting offer, not just a flat 15% off. The brands with the worst unit economics are running 25%-off-everything-always and wondering why margin is collapsing.

8. Creator and UGC pipeline

[ ] You have a repeatable sourcing process for creators (not panicked DMs the week before launch)
[ ] You track performance by creator so you can scale the ones that work
[ ] Your creators produce diverse formats — not just talking-head testimonials
[ ] Briefs allow natural creator voice — not over-scripted to the point of feeling like an ad
[ ] Top-performing UGC is repurposed across channels quickly
[ ] You evaluate affiliate-style relationships with top creators, not just one-off paid posts

9. Retention, email, and SMS

Retention is where margin lives. It is also the channel most paid teams ignore until it's too late.

[ ] Post-purchase email/SMS sequence is live with at least 5 messages over 30 days
[ ] Cohort repeat-purchase rate is tracked monthly
[ ] Win-back campaigns running for lapsed customers (60/90/180 day)
[ ] Segmentation is real — at minimum by first-product purchased and frequency
[ ] Email/SMS has mixed messaging — not just promo blasts (education, brand, community)
[ ] Owned-channel revenue is 25-35% of total, depending on category

10. Reporting and dashboards

The meta-layer. If your team can't see the same numbers in the same place every Monday, half the rest of this list doesn't matter.

[ ] Daily dashboard for the buying team (campaign-level performance, kill log, spend pacing)
[ ] Weekly leadership dashboard (MER, nCAC, contribution dollars, cohort flags)
[ ] Ad-level performance is accessible without exporting CSVs every time
[ ] Prospecting and retargeting are reported separately, always
[ ] Month-over-month trends are visualized so deltas are obvious
[ ] Stakeholder summary sent weekly to founder/CFO with one paragraph of narrative

How to score yourself

Go through the list. Count the checks.

| Score | Diagnosis | Next move | |---|---|---| | 0-20 | You are flying blind. Most decisions are vibes. | Stop scaling. Fix infrastructure first. | | 21-30 | You're operating like a brand half your size. | Pick the 3 biggest gaps. 90-day fix. | | 31-40 | You're solid. Probably stuck around a plateau. | Pick the 2 highest-leverage gaps. | | 41-46 | You're in the top 20% of brands at your spend tier. | Refine the systems you have. | | 47-50 | Rare. You're the brand other founders ask to introduce them to. | Mentor someone. |

The brands at 47+ I've worked with all share one quality: they treated each of these competencies as a hire. Not as a tool, not as a workflow, but as someone whose job is to own that competency forever.

What I'd prioritize at each spend tier

If you're spending around $100K/month, the highest-leverage missing checks are usually unit economics, post-purchase survey, and dedicated landing pages. Those three alone reliably move accounts 10-15% in efficiency.

At $300K/month, it's almost always channel diversification, the creative matrix, and the kill-rule contract. The brand has gotten this far on Meta and is now exposed to a single platform with no test-bench infrastructure.

At $500K-1M/month, the gaps are usually retention/email rigor, geo holdouts, and offer testing. The brand is large enough that the cost of not testing these is enormous and yet they're still under-resourced.

At $1M+/month, the gaps are organizational. Cohort modeling. MMM. Mature reporting. Real analytics talent on staff. The brand has outgrown agency-only solutions for the strategic layer.

The honest part

You will never have all 50 perfect. The goal is not perfection. The goal is structural discipline — the willingness to keep auditing, keep fixing, and stop blaming creative every time the account stalls.

Most teams want one big unlock. A new agency, a new platform, a new creative bet that changes everything. The boring truth is that most accounts plateau because three or four boring things have been broken for six months and nobody named them.

Print the checklist. Bring it to your next leadership meeting. Be brutal about what you actually have in place.

FAQ

What if I have less than 25 checks?

Don't scale spend until you've fixed the gaps. Adding more dollars to a system with this much structural slack is the fastest way to burn cash. Pause new spend increases for 60 days, fix the top 5 gaps, then resume scaling.

Which checks matter most?

Unit economics first. If you don't know your first-purchase contribution margin and your nCAC ceiling in dollars, you can't make any other decision honestly. After that, attribution honesty (MER tracker + survey). After that, creative system (matrix + hit-rate tracking). Everything else is downstream.

Do I need all of these in-house?

No. A good agency or fractional team can own most of them. What you can't outsource is the standard. The founder and the CFO need to know what "good" looks like for each row, even if a partner is the one executing.

How often should I re-audit?

Quarterly. Do it the same week every quarter. Build it into the cadence. The brands that run this audit consistently move from 30 checks to 42 checks within 18 months. The brands that audit once and never again stay at 30 forever.

What if my team disagrees about whether something is "in place"?

Write down a specific definition for each check. Either you have a documented post-purchase survey reconciliation against platform CAC, or you don't. Either you have a written kill rule signed by creative and buying, or you don't. Vague "sort of" answers mean no — that's the rule.

Is this overkill for a $100K/month brand?

No. $100K/month is $1.2M a year of spend. A 10% efficiency gap is $120K/year — more than the cost of a senior hire. The infrastructure pays for itself within a quarter on almost every account I've audited.

How does this connect to the rest of the writing on this site?

This is the index. Most of the deeper posts on jordanglickman.com unpack one of these rows in detail. Start with the gaps you scored worst on, and read the post that maps to that competency. The attribution stack guide, why ROAS isn't the goal, and the creative vs. buying conflict cover three of the most common gaps.

Fifty things. Thirty checks if you're average. Forty-two if you're scaling cleanly. The path between those two scores is not a creative breakthrough or an agency change — it is a year of boring, unglamorous, structural work. The brands that do it pull away from the ones that don't, every single time.

Print it. Score it. Fix three things. Repeat next quarter.

Keep reading

Pieces I've written on related topics that pair well with this one:

12 Metrics That Matter More Than ROAS for DTC Brands — ROAS tells you what already happened. These 12 leading indicators tell you what's about to. The operator dashboard for ecommerce brands.
The DTC Retargeting Stack We Build for Every Brand — Most DTC retargeting is one broad campaign. Here's the four-layer stack, audience exclusions, and purchaser suppression that make it actually efficien…
The 8 Attribution Models DTC Brands Use, and the 3 That Matter — Attribution isn't one model. It's a stack of imperfect ones that check each other. Here's the system we use at $250M+ in annual spend.
The CAC Trap: Why Scaling Past $100K/Mo Breaks Margins — CAC rises past $100K/mo not because campaigns got worse — three structural forces most brands aren't built to absorb.
First-Party Data as a Competitive Moat: How DTC Brands Are Building Audience Infrastructure — First-party data is the moat most DTC brands aren't building.

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