Eric Dyck interviews ecommerce founders and brand operators on the DTC Podcast, then shares their practical lessons on topics such as pricing, retention, product launches, and brand building.
Eric Dyck is most useful for specific ecommerce business cases and the reasoning behind operator choices.
Best for
DTC ecommerce brands working on pricing, retention, and Black Friday campaigns.
Not for
Enterprise or B2B software firms seeking sponsored podcast series with guaranteed impressions and published rates.
Key takeaways
Discounts should be treated as a cost with a job, not a lever.
Last Crumb raised price from $110 to $140 with packaging supporting premium positioning.
Terra Kaffe took 10,000 pre-orders for an espresso machine that did not exist yet.
Check first: Confirm listener or download figures and audience seniority before contacting them.
Main ideas
Discounts should be treated as a cost with a job, not a lever · Brand fundamentals hold, but the work is now made inside other people's channels · Hold small awareness budgets for one campaign big enough to register
Eric Dyck hosts the DTC Podcast and shares practical lessons from conversations with ecommerce founders and brand operators.
Their posts make those discussions easy to scan: they set up a business problem, explain the guest’s decisions, and surface the tradeoffs.
The examples cover discounting and retention, premium pricing, product launches, and brand approvals.
Dyck also describes DTC Dines, an in-person gathering for founders and executives.
Follow their work for specific business cases and the reasoning behind the choices, rather than abstract marketing advice.
Dyck’s strength in this sample is turning interviews into decision-focused stories.
A post about repeated 30% discounts explains how to distinguish customers accustomed to promotions from new customers, then gives examples of offers with distinct jobs—including a gift card redeemable in the next quarter.
A Last Crumb post connects a price increase from $110 to $140 with deliberate packaging choices, showing how the product experience can support premium positioning.
The Terra Kaffe account offers a different lesson: how a founder managed pre-orders, feature cuts, and limited awareness spending.
These are guests’ accounts, not evidence that Dyck personally ran those businesses.
A post about DTC Dines steps outside the interview format to describe an event with no talks or selling, extending the work into in-person community building.
Eric Dyck interviews ecommerce founders and operators on the DTC Podcast and writes up their arguments.
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Across these posts, a specific decision provides the way into a subject: a price change, a pre-order page, a discount calendar, an approval bottleneck.
Dyck traces the sequence and tradeoff behind each decision, not just the headline result, and keeps the operator's numbers and exceptions intact.
The arguments share a theme: the price customers repeatedly see becomes the price they believe; brand fundamentals still hold, but the work is now made inside other people's channels; small always-on awareness spending buys nothing, while measured word of mouth compounds.
Discounts should be treated as a cost with a job, not a lever
Eric Dyck frames discounting as a system, not a series of promotions.
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The price customers keep seeing becomes the price they believe, so promo-driven customers have to be separated from new arrivals, and each offer needs a stated purpose rather than a place on the calendar. Two guests answer the same discounting challenge from different directions: one starts with customer segmentation, the other with offer economics.
The discounting challenge Eric Dyck brought Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi was a brand that had run 30% off sitewide five times in a year, with full-price conversion slipping, an email list that mostly opens promo sends, and Black Friday ahead.
Jordan Gordon accepts that customers who got 30% off all year now treat it as the price: split them out, keep sending them that price, and protect new customers by controlling which offers they see.
For Black Friday, go to at least 35% so the week feels different.
Rafael Gi treats discounts as media spend in the P&L, so every offer needs a job: a one-day drop on the best seller to collect new-customer emails, or a deal on a SKU existing customers love, with the inventory to back it.
Gi's closing tactic sets an average-order-value threshold, rewards it with a gift card, and makes the card redeemable only in the next quarter, turning a Black Friday discount into a January order.
The post also covers Meta spend continuing in two regions that held 8% of one brand's market, and an email audit that found 700 live flow messages at one brand.
Brand fundamentals hold, but the work is now made inside other people's channels
Eugene Healey's argument, as relayed here, is that consistent associations and distinctive assets still matter, even as the production of brand work has changed.
Read more
Brands reach people through creators, partners, communities and collaborations, each with their own brand, so handing over a brand book is not workable.
Instead, you hand over assets that still make sense in someone else's world.
That changes who approves what: senior people approve the overall pattern, while junior and mid-level staff own the day-to-day calls.
Healey illustrates the approval problem with a CEO at a financial company who still approves every radio ad — workable when a brand makes six assets a quarter, but not at the volume Meta now asks for.
On AI, Healey argues that media keeps getting more expensive, so using AI to save on copy cuts costs on the one part that drives the return.
Healey has packaged this thinking into a seven-week live course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, with live sessions and small studio groups critiquing each other's work.
The post also touches Everlane's sale to Shein, what Gap got right with its dance covers, and Sydney Sweeney's rage bait.
Hold small awareness budgets for one campaign big enough to register
Sahand Dilmaghani's budget rule, as Eric Dyck relays it, is that a $15,000–$20,000 monthly awareness spend will never buy recognition.
Read more
Instead, hold that money for a single campaign large enough to be noticed, with the rest going to community and performance. The claim is grounded in a recurring post-purchase survey, not an attribution model: word of mouth has been named the top reason people buy every month for five years.
Terra Kaffe put up a pre-order page for an espresso machine that did not exist, with no reviews and no user-generated content, and sold 10,000 units.
Before the page came years of preparation: leaving investment banking, eating one meal a day for a year and a half, and carrying a 30-pound prototype around New York in an IKEA bag for blind taste tests with strangers.
Two and a half million dollars into development, whether the machine would ship was still uncertain.
Money arrived as small checks, one milestone at a time, so features were cut: the clicking milk dial went, and the auto-connecting milk carafe was pushed to a later release that finally arrived this year.
Terra Kaffe replaced an engineering firm that had spent double the budget to cover half the plan while it still held most of the product knowledge.
The episode also covers giving the manufacturer the rights to the first design, a $30,000 video that flopped on Meta and took off on CTV, and raising $2.6 million in 13 days.
The missed ship date and milestone-by-milestone funding sit alongside the demand result, not smoothed out of it. The pre-order page worked as evidence of demand, but the feature cuts and delay are part of the same account.
Price can carry the positioning, and the product experience has to defend it
Derek Jaeger's argument is that a price change can shift what people talk about: at a lower number, the product is judged as expensive; at a higher one, the box itself becomes the conversation.
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The higher number is not a margin decision but a positioning choice that has to be backed by the physical experience — packaging, unboxing and small details of how the item is presented.
Last Crumb launched at $110 a box; when Derek Jaeger moved the price to $140, the company took off.
Behind the number: a year on the brand before shipping a single box; a shipper box and gift box built as the same box, with a pull tab so the unboxing carries the experience; and every cookie placed at a 35-degree angle so 90% of the lettering is readable when the box opens.
Jaeger called it an egregious box and kept it anyway.
The decision that complicates the story came later: scarcity had made the brand famous, but Jaeger killed the drop model anyway to find out whether there was a real company or a hype company. The episode also covers the affiliate years that produced a no-paid-ads rule, moving the company from Los Angeles to New York, and why GLP-1 medications are seen as helping a premium cookie brand.
Subjects are entered through a decision and the sequence behind it
Across these posts, the editorial approach is to open on a single decision and work backward through what produced it — the prototype, the funding, the approval bottleneck, the survey — then close with the tradeoff or exception, not just the result.
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This approach keeps numbers and specifics in the write-ups instead of reducing them to summaries of positions.
A pre-order page leads back to two and a half million dollars of development and features cut one milestone at a time.
A price change leads to the year spent on the brand before the first box shipped.
A monthly survey leads to how budget is split between community and performance.
An approval bottleneck leads to who owns day-to-day calls.
Each post then lists the secondary threads covered and links the full episode.
In-person community is kept deliberately sales-free
Alongside the interviews, Eric Dyck says another priority is convening operators in person.
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The format has no talks or selling; founders and executives meet in the same conditions, and attendance is by application. The posts describe who is in the room and how the evening runs.
The first DTC Dines dinner was held in Vancouver on a January evening, with conversation ranging from retention rates and the true cost of TikTok affiliates to lighter topics.
Dinners followed in Los Angeles and Austin, and the series returned to Vancouver on October 29 for a reception with cocktails leading into a seated dinner.
The post says the room was almost half filled at the time of writing; attendance goes through an application link.
Start here to explore whether a product can be sold before it ships, and how a small brand budget should be split between awareness and everything else.
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This is the clearest example in the set of a launch built on pre-orders, feature cuts, and customer word of mouth rather than paid reach.
This post retells the Terra Kaffe story as founder Sahand Dilmaghani told it on the DTC Podcast.
Dilmaghani left investment banking, ate one meal a day for a year and a half, and carried a 30-pound prototype around New York in an IKEA bag to run blind taste tests on strangers.
Two and a half million dollars into development, the machine still might not have shipped.
Funding came in small checks, one milestone at a time, so features were cut: the clicking milk dial went, and the auto-connecting milk carafe was pushed to a later release that finally arrived this year.
Terra Kaffe replaced an engineering firm that had spent double the budget to cover half the plan while it still held most of the product knowledge.
The company's post-purchase survey has named word of mouth as the top reason people buy every month for five years, driving well over a third of orders, with almost nothing spent on brand awareness.
Dilmaghani's budget rule is specific: a $15,000 or $20,000 monthly awareness spend will never buy recognition, so that money is held for one campaign big enough to register.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful for briefs involving a physical product launch or pre-order page. The post's concrete decisions — consolidating awareness spend into one large push instead of spreading it thin, and protecting a feature cut list on a fixed budget — translate directly into a launch plan or interview topic.
Open this to explore how brand governance changes when distribution runs through creators and partners.
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It answers who should approve what, and where AI does and does not belong in the production process.
Eugene Healey argues that the fundamentals of brand have not changed — strong, consistent associations and distinctive assets still matter — but the way work gets made has.
Most brands now reach people through creators, partners, communities, and collaborations, each with their own brand, so you cannot hand them a brand book.
Instead, you hand them assets that make sense inside someone else's world.
That shifts who approves the work: senior people approve the overall pattern while junior and mid-level staff own day-to-day calls.
One example is a CEO at a financial company who still approves every radio ad, which works at six assets a quarter but not at the volume Meta demands now.
On AI, Healey argues that media keeps getting more expensive, so saving money on copy with AI means cutting costs on the one part that drives the return.
Healey has packaged this thinking into a seven-week live course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, with live sessions and small studio groups that critique each other's work.
For brands planning a campaign
Relevant to briefs about creator partnerships, brand consistency across partner channels, or approval workflows at scale. Healey's split — pattern approved at senior level, daily calls owned lower down — offers a concrete structure for a brand bottlenecked on sign-off.
Open this to explore what to do when discounting has already become the norm.
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The answer pairs a customer-splitting approach with offers that each have a stated job, rather than one blanket promotion.
The two guests were given a scenario: a brand had run 30% off sitewide five times in a year, full-price conversion was slipping, its email list mostly opened promo sends, and Black Friday was ahead.
Jordan Gordon's answer starts by accepting that customers who got 30% off all year now treat that as the price: split them out, keep showing them that price by email, and protect new customers by controlling which offers they see.
For Black Friday, Gordon would go to at least 35% so the week feels different from the rest of the year.
Rafael Gi treats discounts as media spend — a cost in the P&L, so every offer needs a job.
Examples include a one-day drop on the best seller to collect new customer emails, or a deal on a SKU existing customers love where extra inventory is available to back it.
Gi's favourite tactic, delivered with fifteen seconds left, was to set an average order value threshold, reward it with a gift card, and make the gift card redeemable only in the following quarter, so a Black Friday discount returns as a January order.
The post also covers why Meta kept spending in two regions that held 8% of one brand's market, and an email audit that found 700 live flow messages at a single brand.
For brands planning a campaign
Directly useful for a retail calendar or retention brief: separate customers who anchor on the promo price from new arrivals, set the Black Friday discount above the year's usual level, and use a gift card redeemable in the next quarter to move January revenue.
Start here to explore how pricing and product experience reinforce each other.
Read more
The post shows a case of testing price upward and then building the unboxing that makes the higher number defensible.
Last Crumb launched at $110 a box.
When Derek Jaeger raised the price to $140, the company took off — not because the margin funded anything, but because the number itself was the positioning.
At $110 they were an expensive cookie; at $140 people talked about the box instead of the price.
The post lists the work behind that number: a year on the brand before shipping a single box, a shipper box and gift box built as the same box with a pull tab so the unboxing carries the experience, and every cookie placed at a 35-degree angle so 90% of the lettering is readable when the box opens.
Jaeger called it an egregious box and kept it anyway.
The harder decision came later: scarcity had made the brand famous, and Jaeger killed the drop model to find out whether there was a real company or a hype company.
The full episode also covers the affiliate years that produced Jaeger's no-paid-ads rule, moving the company from Los Angeles to New York, and Jaeger's view that GLP-1 medications help a premium cookie brand.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful for briefs about pricing posture, packaging, and premium positioning.
The downloadable lesson lays out the sequence: set the number as positioning first, then invest in the physical experience that supports it.
Ending the drop model offers a concrete example of a brand choosing repeatable business over periodic hype.
Open this to explore how Eric Dyck's work extends beyond interviews into an in-person network of brand founders and operators.
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It describes what the DTC Media community looks like offline and who tends to be in the room.
This post describes a DTC Media event series rather than a podcast episode.
The first DTC Dines dinner was held in Vancouver on a January evening, with conversation moving between retention rates, the true cost of TikTok affiliates, and lighter topics.
Dinners followed in Los Angeles and Austin, and the series returns to Vancouver on October 29 for a reception with cocktails leading into a seated dinner.
There are no talks or selling, just founders and executives from west coast brands, and the room was almost half filled at the time of writing.
Attendance is by application through a linked event page.
For brands planning a campaign
Relevant when a brief calls for industry relationships or in-person convening rather than content placement. The format — dinners with no talks or selling, by application, for founders and executives — offers a specific model a brand could sponsor or join around a launch or category push.
What replaces the brand book when creators and partners ship the work1
Launching a product that does not exist yet1
Word of mouth as the growth engine and how the brand budget is allocated1
Pricing upward as positioning1
Offline community events for brand operators1
Discount architecture and Black Friday
In an interview post, Eric Dyck presents two operators tackling the same problem: a brand that has run 30% off sitewide five times in a year, seen full-price conversion slip, built an email list that mostly opens promo sends, and faces a Black Friday week when everyone expects a discount.
Read more
Jordan Gordon starts by acknowledging that customers who got 30% off all year now treat it as the price.
The brand should segment those customers, keep offering them that price by email, and let them continue until they wander off, while protecting new customers by controlling which offers they see.
For Black Friday, Gordon would go to at least 35% so the week feels different from the rest of the year.
Rafael Gi treats discounts as a cost in the P&L, so every offer needs a job: a one-day drop on the best seller to collect new-customer emails, or a deal on a SKU existing customers love, backed by extra inventory.
Delivered with fifteen seconds left on the clock, Gi's tactic sets an average-order-value threshold, rewards customers with a gift card, and makes it redeemable only in Q5 so the Black Friday discount drives a January order.
The post also covers Meta spend continuing in two regions that held 8% of one brand's market, and email audit finds that included 700 live flow messages at a single brand.
Two operators address the same campaign need from different angles: Jordan Gordon starts with customer segmentation, while Rafael Gi focuses on offer economics.
Before using the Q5 gift-card tactic, confirm the brand can restrict gift-card or credit redemption to a future period.
For brands planning a campaign
Brands with promo-heavy calendars can use this as a pressure test of their discount structure: segment customers who only buy on promotion, give each offer a specific job, and use carryover tactics such as a Q5-restricted gift card to turn a discount into a later order rather than a permanent price cut.
What replaces the brand book when creators and partners ship the work
Eugene Healey tells Eric Dyck that a brand book governing everything a brand ships today would need to run to twenty thousand pages.
Read more
The fundamentals still hold: strong, consistent associations and distinctive assets.
The pressure is on how brands make the work, because they now reach people through creators, partners, communities and collaborations, all of whom have their own brands.
You cannot hand those partners a brand book; you give them assets that make sense in their world.
That changes who approves the work.
In Healey's model, senior people approve the overall pattern while juniors and mid-levels make day-to-day calls.
A CEO approving every radio ad works when a brand makes six assets a quarter, but not at the volume Meta demands now.
On AI, the argument is that media keeps getting more expensive, so using AI to save money on copy means cutting costs on the one piece that drives the return.
The post also mentions Everlane's sale to Shein, what Gap got right with its dance covers, and Sydney Sweeney's rage bait.
It points to a seven-week live course, The New Fundamentals of Brand, with live sessions and small studio groups that critique each other's work, starting October 12.
For brands planning a campaign
For brands working with many creators, partners and collaborators, this makes two briefing decisions concrete: what a partner gets instead of a brand book, and which decisions require senior approval versus which belong to people making daily calls.
Terra Kaffe put up a pre-order page for an espresso machine that did not yet exist, with no reviews, no user-generated content, and a ship date it would miss by six months, and sold 10,000 units.
Read more
Sahand Dilmaghani walks Eric Dyck through what came before that page: leaving investment banking, eating one meal a day for a year and a half, and carrying a 30-pound prototype around New York in an IKEA bag to run blind taste tests on strangers.
Two and a half million dollars into development, there was still no certainty the machine would ship.
Money came in as small checks, one milestone at a time, so the team cut features: the clicking milk dial went, and the auto-connecting milk carafe was pushed to a later release that finally launched that year.
The team replaced an engineering firm that had spent double the budget to cover half the plan while it still held most of the product knowledge.
The episode also covers giving the manufacturer the rights to the first design, a $30,000 video that flopped on Meta and took off on CTV, and raising $2.6 million in 13 days.
This is a single operator's account. The missed ship date is part of the story as told, not presented as a practice to copy.
For brands planning a campaign
Relevant to pre-order and hardware-adjacent launches: what evidence supports demand before a product exists, which features can be cut as funding arrives in milestones, and how a missed ship date factors into the demand result.
Word of mouth as the growth engine and how the brand budget is allocated
Terra Kaffe's post-purchase survey has named word of mouth as the top reason people buy every month for five years, and it drives well over a third of orders, according to this account.
Read more
The brand spends almost nothing on brand awareness; the money goes to the community, with the rest going to performance.
Sahand Dilmaghani's reasoning on brand budgets, as relayed by Eric Dyck, is that a $15,000 or $20,000 monthly awareness spend will never get a brand to recognition, so the money is held for one campaign big enough to register.
The summary describes the whole approach as survival by a thousand band-aids.
A brand weighing small, always-on awareness spending against fewer, larger moments gets a concrete alternative model here, along with a measurement mechanism: a recurring post-purchase survey tracking customers' stated reasons for buying over time.
Last Crumb launched at $110 a box, and Derek Jaeger raised the price to $140, when the company actually took off, according to this post.
Read more
The reason was not margin: at $110, the cookies were expensive; at $140, people started talking about the box instead of the price.
Eric Dyck flags the work that went into defending that number: a year on the brand before shipping a single box; a shipper box and gift box that are the same box, with a pull tab so the unboxing carries the whole experience; and every cookie set at a 35-degree angle so you can read 90% of the lettering when you open it.
Jaeger called it an egregious box and kept it anyway.
Later, the company faced a harder question: scarcity made the brand famous, but the drop model was killed to find out whether it was a real company or a hype company.
The episode also covers the affiliate years that produced a no-paid-ads rule, moving the whole company from LA to New York, and why GLP-1s are seen as helping a premium cookie brand.
The operator later retired the drop model that created the scarcity, showing that scarcity tactics need not be permanent.
For brands planning a campaign
For premium or gift-positioned brands, price can carry the positioning, not just the margin. Packaging and unboxing details help make a higher price defensible.
Across these posts, each operator's decision leads into the sequence behind it.
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A pre-order page leads back to what came before it; a price change, to how the conversation around the box shifted; a customer survey, to how the budget is allocated; and an approval bottleneck, to who owns day-to-day calls.
Each post points to the full episode and lists the secondary threads covered.
Topics include discount structure, brand systems at creator and partner scale, pre-order launches, community-driven demand, price positioning, and seniority-level events.
Podcast interview, with a written post summarizing the operator's reasoning and linking to the full episode.
For brands planning a campaign
The structure works as a briefing device: decision, sequence, evidence, tradeoff. A brand can use the same shape for a founder interview slot or an internal campaign brief without copying the podcast format.
DTC Dines launched in Vancouver on a misty January evening, bringing conversation around retention rates, the true cost of TikTok affiliates, travel plans and streaming recommendations.
Read more
Dinners followed in LA and Austin, and the event returned to Vancouver on October 29th as a signature reception, with cocktails before a seated dinner.
The description promises no talks or selling—just interesting people in the same choppy waters.
At the time of writing, the room was almost half filled with founders and executives from Vancouver brands.
Attendance is handled through an application link.
The room was almost half filled when the post was written.
For brands planning a campaign
A brand seeking low-format, seniority-heavy access can treat dinner-format events as a channel. The post describes who attends and how the event runs; ask for outcome data before assessing its impact.
Eric Dyck promotes DTC Media’s events and appears across its podcast and show formats, while featuring brands such as Terra Kaffe and Last Crumb in DTC Podcast episodes.
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The posts do not state whether there is a sponsor, affiliate, client, or investment relationship, or whether Dyck owns or works for DTC Media, the DTC Podcast, or the DTC Rundown. Ask about any commercial or formal role with these organizations.
DTC Media
Disclosed partnership
Promotes DTC Media’s DTC Dines event series and writes as part of the organizing “we” for dinners in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Austin.
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Ask whether Eric Dyck owns or works for DTC Media.
Explore Eric Dyck's work through interview posts that open with an operating decision and trace what produced it.
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Start with the discount and Black Friday conversation with Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi for concrete offer mechanics, then read the Eugene Healey interview for brand systems that creators and partners put into practice.
For launch and positioning stories, see the Sahand Dilmaghani and Derek Jaeger write-ups.
The DTC Dines post shows the in-person side: operator dinners with no talks or selling.
Use the tags to browse by subject and the comparison list to see how their interview-led format differs from operators who publish tactical playbooks directly.
Both focus on DTC discount and Black Friday economics.
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Patrick O'Driscoll's posts offer a break-even formula for discounts and a six-part scaling sequence, overlapping with the Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi interview write-up.
O'Driscoll publishes tactical math and checklists directly; Eric Dyck writes up guests' decision sequences and tradeoffs.
Both examine email and Black Friday promotion decisions for ecommerce brands.
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Rachel Caborn's posts cover panic-sending when email sales dip and a two-part Black Friday trend report for personal-brand-led businesses.
Caborn offers direct commentary on email marketing and promotional calendars for personal-brand businesses; Eric Dyck's posts are interview write-ups spanning discounts, brand systems and launch stories.
Both discuss Meta ad spend and performance decisions for DTC brands.
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Ladie Pabillar's posts offer a step-by-step scaling framework for $1M+ ad accounts and a competitor-ad angle playbook.
Pabillar writes tactical ad-account playbooks in the first person; Eric Dyck's posts summarize founders' decisions, including one about Meta spend continuing in two regions.
For a DTC brand working on pricing, retention and Black Friday, Eric Dyck’s audience appears aligned with those goals: the posts are written for ecommerce founders and operators, and the guests are people making pricing and retention decisions.
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Treat this as a way to reach practitioners, not a verified audience segment.
The posts do not provide a measured breakdown of listeners or followers by role, company size or geography.
The only measured audience number available is the LinkedIn follower count on Eric Dyck’s profile: 9,629, observed 8 October 2026.
The content shows the company a brand would be keeping: Sahand Dilmaghani of Terra Kaffe on a pre-order page for a machine that did not exist yet and the 10,000 units it sold; Derek Jaeger on raising Last Crumb’s box from $110 to $140 and later killing the drop model; Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi on how to split discount-habituated customers from new ones going into Black Friday, including an AOV gift-card play that pays back in January.
These examples show who is on the show and what they discuss, not who listens.
The clearest audience signal comes from the format and venue, rather than a measurement.
The events post describes DTC Dines as dinners in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Austin with founders and executives from Vancouver brands, and expects about half the October 29 room to be filled from that group.
It’s an in-person, operator-level channel alongside the podcast.
Ask for recent podcast listener or download figures and, if available, an audience survey covering job title or seniority.
Follower counts and post content cannot establish whether attendees are decision makers for a campaign focused on pricing, retention and Black Friday.
LinkedIn followers
9,629
Eric Dyck's LinkedIn profile (linkedin.com/in/ericdyck) · 2026-10-08
The posts show the two things Eric Dyck publicly runs, but neither has published partnership terms.
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The DTC Podcast features long interviews with ecommerce founders and operators — Sahand Dilmaghani of Terra Kaffe, Eugene Healey, Derek Jaeger of Last Crumb, Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi — who explain their thinking on pricing, launches, retention and brand spend.
DTC Dines, run through DTC Media in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Austin, hosts dinners with no talks and no selling.
The only published route is an application for west-coast brand leaders to attend the 29 October Vancouver reception.
That is an attendance application, not a sponsorship, media-placement or advisory package.
To scope or budget a partnership, buyers should ask for the current sponsorship policy, rate card and official inquiry route.
Strong fit for a DTC ecommerce brand working on pricing, retention and Black Friday.
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The three questions at the heart of that campaign have already been put to operators on the DTC Podcast, with their answers covered in Eric Dyck's posts.
Discount architecture gets direct treatment.
In one episode, Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi tackle the same problem: a brand has run 30% off sitewide five times in a year, full-price conversion is slipping, the email list mostly opens promo sends, and everyone expects Black Friday week to be discounted.
Gordon’s answer starts by accepting that customers who got 30% off all year now treat that as the price: separate them, keep showing them that price by email, and protect new customers by controlling which offers they see.
Set Black Friday at least at 35% so the week feels different.
Gi treats discounts as a cost in the P&L, so every offer needs a job.
One carryover tactic is an average-order-value threshold rewarded with a gift card redeemable only in the next quarter, turning a Black Friday discount into a January order.
The Last Crumb episode covers pricing as positioning: launch at $110 a box, then move to $140.
The shift is explained as the number itself doing the positioning, backed by a year spent building the brand before shipping, a shipper box and gift box designed as one box with a pull tab, and cookies angled at 35 degrees for readability.
The same operator later killed the drop model to find out whether the company was real or hype.
The Terra Kaffe episode covers retention and word of mouth: a post-purchase survey identified word of mouth as the top reason people buy every month for five years, driving well over a third of orders.
Almost nothing was spent on brand awareness, and a $15,000–$20,000 monthly awareness spend was described as too small to buy recognition.
The survey offers a practical measurement mechanism, not just an anecdote.
The format is also a good fit.
Episodes follow one operator's decision, the steps behind it and the tradeoff—a natural match for a brand that wants a named operator to reason through its actual promo calendar rather than offer generic advice.
For the in-person side of a DTC pricing, retention and Black Friday campaign, DTC Dines is described as dinners in Vancouver, Los Angeles and Austin for founders and executives, with no talks or selling.
Attendance is by application; the room was almost half filled at the time of writing.
Reach cannot be promised: the posts publish no podcast listener figure, attendee count or role breakdown.
Ask Eric Dyck directly about the engagement route—a guest or interview slot, event attendance, an advisory arrangement, or a mix—and its terms.
Do not present a productized advisory retainer as an existing offer.
When to choose a specialist
Weak fit for an enterprise or B2B software company selling to supply-chain directors and seeking a sponsored podcast series with guaranteed impressions, defined deliverables, a published rate card and an audience defined by seniority and industry.
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The first gap is commercial terms.
Eric Dyck's posts describe no sponsorship offer, format, rate, deliverable, lead time or official inquiry route.
A buyer would need to ask for all of these before scoping or budgeting a series.
The only comparable published mechanism is an attendance application for the October 29 DTC Dines reception, not a sponsorship or media-placement package.
The second gap is audience proof.
The only measured number in the posts is a LinkedIn follower count of 9,629, observed 8 October 2026.
There is no listener measurement, download figure, seniority breakdown or geography split.
These details cannot support a guaranteed-impressions commitment, and follower counts and post content do not establish that the audience includes supply-chain decision makers.
The third gap is subject range.
The demonstrated topics are consumer and DTC: discount structure, pre-order launches for hardware, premium packaging and price positioning, community-driven demand, brand governance when creators and partners ship the work, and operator dinner events.
The performance-marketing discussion concerns a consumer brand's Meta spend holding in two regions that covered 8% of its market; that does not transfer to enterprise software demand generation.
This is a poor fit for that enterprise/B2B sponsorship need, not a verdict on Eric Dyck overall; the same posts support a DTC pricing and retention campaign well.
For guaranteed-reach sponsored media, look elsewhere.
Revisit only if the company wants consumer-style operator interviews or a seniority-heavy dinner format and is willing to negotiate undefined terms.
A worked campaign example
A workable angle for the DTC pricing and retention campaign: use the brand's own discount history as the on-record setup for an operator episode, then turn the recording into a retention test.
Step 1: Settle the route before spending.
Ask Eric Dyck in writing what is available—a guest or interview slot on the DTC Podcast, presence at a DTC Dines dinner, an advisory arrangement, or a combination—and ask for rates, deliverables and timing.
The posts publish none of these, so treat any figure as negotiated, not published.
If the brand wants its retention lead interviewed alongside an outside operator, ask whether the two-operator format used for Jordan Gordon and Rafael Gi is available; it produced two distinct answers to the same discounting scenario.
Step 2: Bring the actual numbers.
The brand should bring its own anonymized or named figures: how many sitewide promotions ran in the past year, the full-price conversion trend, the share of the email list that opens only promo sends, and the current Black Friday plan.
The strongest content in the posts came from real scenarios answered by named operators, not general questions about discounting.
Step 3: Build the expected content around the recording.
Cover customer segmentation that separates promo-anchored customers from new arrivals; a Black Friday discount deliberately set above the year's usual level so the week feels different; offers assigned specific jobs rather than one blanket discount; and a carryover mechanism, such as an average-order-value threshold rewarded with a gift card restricted to the next quarter.
Pair this with a measurement tool: a recurring post-purchase survey asking why the customer bought, the method used to track Terra Kaffe's word-of-mouth figure monthly for five years.
Step 4: Plan distribution and use.
The recording becomes a briefing for the retention team, not just promotional content, and the same reasoning can inform the brand's next promotion before it runs.
If a DTC Dines dinner fits the calendar, note that the format is seniority-heavy and deliberately low-format, with attendance by application.
Confirm availability for the brand's executives before promising a date.
Step 5: Set a success test for 90 days.
Check full-price conversion among new customers and the share of January orders arriving through the gift-card carryover.
If the brand will not share numbers, the episode becomes general advice and the specific fit claim weakens; say so rather than implying a measured outcome.
Step 6: Name the risks up front.
The posts describe no engagement route or terms, so nothing can be committed until the details are agreed.
The January carryover depends on the brand having a gift-card or credit mechanism it can restrict to a future period.
Planned reach cannot be promised because no listener or attendee measurement is available.
Choose Patrick O'Driscoll when the brand needs to know how deep a discount it can afford and how to build an offer beyond a straight markdown.
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The posts put the arithmetic and alternatives in one place.
A break-even formula—gross margin divided by gross margin minus discount—is worked through with plain examples: 50% margin with 20% off needs 1.67 times normal unit volume, 60% margin with 30% off needs 2x, and 40% margin with 30% off needs 4x just to stay even.
The posts then outline offer structures that change the shape of a promotion rather than its depth: bundles with 25–35% savings that pair a low-cost, high-perceived-value item with the main product; a gift with purchase at a spend threshold, where the gift costs a fraction of what it feels worth and average order value usually rises; tiered spend thresholds that reserve the deepest discount for the biggest spenders; a free-shipping threshold just above current average order value; and a limited-quantity bonus for the first few hundred orders.
A second post sets out a six-part scaling sequence covering story, one scalable offer, angle testing, landing pages matched to the working angle, unit measures such as new-customer acquisition cost and lifetime gross profit, and retention.
For a brand already planning a Black Friday promotion and needing to settle the margin decision before creative, this is the most directly usable material among the alternatives.
The tradeoff is format and route.
This material teaches written frameworks and checklists, not recorded conversations with named founders.
A brand that wants its operators on record reasoning through their actual promo calendar, or a seniority-heavy dinner format, will need to ask for a separate engagement.
Retention is presented as a teaching point, not a working measurement instrument; a brand looking to track why customers buy, as the Terra Kaffe post-purchase survey does, would need to design its own.
Choose Rachel Caborn when the constraint is the email programme, not the discount, and the seller is a person-led business rather than a stocked product brand.
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The stronger of the two posts is a Black Friday trend report aimed squarely at coaches, service providers and creatives selling courses, masterminds and experiences.
It separates what landed in people's inboxes from what happened behind the scenes, covering segment sends, secret waitlists, last-minute pivots and launch messaging trends, with client launch numbers in a second part.
That makes it a closer match than the other alternatives for a brand whose Black Friday work centres on a launch sequence to a warm list.
The other post addresses retention diagnosis: when email sales dip, the instinct is to send more, but that usually fails because data sits in different platforms, making it hard to tell which emails led to purchases or where people dropped off.
For a brand that has already chosen a promotion and needs to improve how it measures and segments the sends around it, this is the relevant starting point.
Two constraints.
First, audience: the trend report focuses on personal-brand-led businesses and explicitly contrasts them with big ecommerce brands.
Its segmentation and waitlist tactics transfer to a DTC product brand only with judgment, and it does not address pricing or discount depth.
Second, provenance: one of the two posts is a paid partnership promoting a named email platform's ecommerce features, including a specific trigger increase and reported time savings.
Treat that material as vendor messaging, not independent operator reasoning.
Choose Ladie Pabillar when the deciding question is media buying and creative testing, not pricing or retention.
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One post walks through ad-account scaling at a million dollars a month and argues that return on ad spend alone can mislead: a 3.2x ad was scaled while a 1.8x ad was cut, even though the lower-performing ad was the only one still finding new customers.
It lays out an order of checks: click rate first, conversion rate separately, cost per thousand impressions against click rate, frequency per ad, view-through conversions, and weekly new-reach tracking with a 20% floor as the signal to test new angles rather than pull budget.
A second post offers a repeatable weekly routine for mining competitor angles from ad libraries: cut a competitor list to five, pull active ads per product, extract six to eight angles per library, group saved ads by angle rather than format, and test each angle against the brand's own customer.
A brand whose Black Friday problem is telling whether creative, offer or audience changed—and that wants a standing process rather than a one-off promotion plan—is better served here.
The tradeoff is topic coverage.
These posts do not address discount structure, price positioning or retention economics, and Black Friday appears only as ad scouting.
A brand deciding how deep to discount or how to hold a price through January should ask for material that addresses those questions.
The playbook is written as a shareable step-by-step, suited to a team adopting a routine rather than a brand seeking an outside operator's on-record reasoning about its own promotion.
Based on five full LinkedIn posts by Eric Dyck about DTC Podcast interviews and DTC Dines.
The posts have no publication dates.
Linked podcast episodes and the event page were not reviewed, so this account reflects the posts and does not establish episode details, audience measurements, or commercial terms.
