The Metrics · Article

The 5 Numbers Every DTC Founder Should Track

Before I touch strategy with any brand, I ask for five numbers. Founders who know them scale on purpose. Founders who guess scale their mistakes.

JS

Josh SnowFounder, AffiliateMarketing.com · $1B+ in online sales

I do not run a flywheel on vibes. I run it on five numbers, reviewed every Monday. If a growth lever is worth pulling, it shows up in one of these. If a brand is about to break, one of these saw it first.

These five are the scoreboard for Flywheel Stacking. Give them one owner and one weekly review, without mercy.

1. Blended CAC, fully loaded

Every acquisition dollar, all channels, including creator fees, agency retainers, and the cost of gifted product, divided by new customers. Not the flattering number your ad manager shows you. The real one. When the flywheel works, this falls as you scale. That is the halo effect at work.

2. Ninety-day LTV by cohort

How much contribution margin a customer generates in their first 90 days, tracked by the month they joined. Averages built on legacy superfans lie. Cohorts tell the truth about the business you run today. Pair it with CAC in the LTV:CAC calculator.

3. Hero SKU contribution margin, in dollars

After every variable cost, how many actual dollars are left per unit of your lead product. Not gross margin percent. Dollars. If your hero cannot afford to pay a creator well and still profit, the product is the problem, and no amount of marketing fixes it.

4. Views per sale

Total views divided by orders. The cleanest read on whether your content engine is getting sharper or just louder. Ten million views at 12,000 views per sale is a worse business than one million at 700. It is also your whitelisting cheat code: the angles that win at low views per sale are exactly the ones to amplify.

5. Inventory cover versus lead time

Weeks of stock on hand and inbound, measured against supplier lead time plus a spike buffer. Can you survive the exact success you are engineering? A stockout does not just pause revenue. It resets the marketplace rankings and creator momentum you paid months to build.

Your CAC is a scoreboard for how forgettable you are.

None of these five requires new software. They require one owner, one sheet, and the honesty to write down the ugly version. Every brand I have watched break out kept these current. Most that stalled could not tell me number three without a calculator and a debate.

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The whole machine, in one place.

The model, the ranking playbook, the creator briefs, the whitelisting setup, and the five-number scoreboard. Plus the tools I run to feed it.

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Frequently asked questions

What metrics should a DTC brand track?

At minimum, five: blended CAC fully loaded, 90-day LTV by cohort, hero SKU contribution margin in dollars, views per sale, and inventory cover versus lead time. Together they tell you whether growth is getting cheaper, whether the product can fund creators, whether content is improving, and whether you can survive your own success.

What is a good LTV to CAC ratio?

A common benchmark is 3:1 or better, meaning a customer is worth at least three times what it costs to acquire them. Below roughly 1:1 you are losing money on acquisition; far above 5:1 you may be underinvesting in growth. Always measure it on contribution margin, not revenue. Use the LTV:CAC calculator to check yours.

What is views per sale?

Views per sale is total attributed views divided by attributed orders on your shoppable content. It measures how efficiently attention converts to revenue. A lower number means a sharper content engine. It is more honest than raw view counts, because ten million views that rarely convert is a worse business than one million that do.

Josh Snow

Founder, AffiliateMarketing.com · @JoshSnow