DTC1081: Whalies

Good morning,

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s DTC:

1️⃣ How True Classic handed its entire Meta spend to an autonomous media buyer, and what Triple Whale's Moby 2 means for the brands still deciding whether to follow.

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‍🐳 Long Live the Builder: Dispatches From The Whalies

Last week in downtown LA, close to 300 ecommerce leaders packed into Rolling Greens for the Whalies. The most interesting thing said all day didn't come from the host company.

It came from Ben Diamond, CEO of True Classic, on stage in the late morning. He told the room that 100 percent of True Classic's Meta spend now runs through an autonomous media buyer. The whole job. Budget allocation, creative selection, daily reallocation against whatever the brand needs that day. A stack of AI agents acting as a growth operator and creative strategist, pushing profit one day, clearing inventory the next.

True Classic went from zero to a billion in revenue in seven years and ships to 190 countries. They handed the work that used to need a department to an AI operating system.

Ben made the announcement on stage. They've gone all the way on agentic media buying for Meta, and they're glad they did. He also told the room not to copy them without talking to Triple Whale first. The agent runs the work. Someone with platform knowledge still has to steer the ship.

Triple Whale used the day to launch Moby 2, the system underneath True Classic’s success. Moby 1 was a query engine. You asked it questions, got answers back, then did the work yourself. Moby 2 does the work. Three specialists run inside it across media buying (The Moby Media Buyer True Classic is using), ad creative (Moby Creative Director), and conversion-rate testing on landing pages (Moby Conversion Optimizer). Underneath them is a contextual data layer stitched across your Meta, your Shopify, your marketing calendar, your brand bible. That's the part the agents actually run on.

Triple Whale also launched Compass, their incrementality tool, in another session that day. Zach Rego asked a panel what the biggest measurement shift over the next 12 months would be, and all three operators gave the same answer: incrementality. Attribution used to be a debate about which model to trust. That breaks down once software is making the calls for you. You can't hand budget allocation to an autonomous system if you can't measure what it actually did.

The day before, I was in Calabasas with Ben and Maxx Blank, Triple Whale's co-founder, recording a podcast at True Classic HQ. The conversation turned to the SaaS apocalypse. Brands building internal tools with AI coding assistants, ripping out subscriptions, going lean. Maxx doesn't think it touches Triple Whale, because data normalization across systems is the hard, unsexy work and you can't vibe code your way through it.

Then Ben said the line I've been chewing on since. "We're moving from SaaS to RaaS." Results as a Service.

He's right, and not just about Triple Whale. The SaaS companies worth watching from here on are the ones pointing themselves at outcomes instead of seats. Software and service are collapsing into one product, and the result is what you sell.

The panel I moderated showed both ends of the adoption curve. Ashley Kick runs ecommerce and digital marketing at DÔEN. Justin Parker runs ecommerce at Origin. Both apparel, both enterprise businesses. Justin is in the Moby 2 beta on the media buying side and bought all the way in. Ashley draws the line in a different place. Anything customer facing or brand facing at DÔEN stays 100 percent human. Their product photography is shot by artists, not generated. She wasn't alone. Most brand-side operators I talked to between sessions weren't ready to hand creative over yet, even the ones running agents on the buying side.

Ripley Rader, founder of her own apparel label, put it more bluntly when I caught her between sessions. "Ecommerce as we know it is dead. The boring white, no personality in the imagery. You're Blockbuster. If you're too palatable to everyone, you'll be palatable to no one."

The fear underneath the whole day, the one nobody quite says out loud, is replacement. Hiring is thinner. Some of that is real. The middle management layer that translated strategy into tasks is the layer an agentic system absorbs first.

The doom take misses the other half.

We've been running our own version of this at DTC. My co-founder Jeff has been training two agents on top of Claude that run one of our internal Meta accounts. Gary buys media. Blanche handles creative. They live in a Slack channel and ship updates throughout the day. Gary came out of the gate strong, then made calls wrong enough that we watched our CPA triple after acting on one of them. He doesn't see LTV the way a Shopify operator would, and Moby 2's data layer is exactly what he's missing. The agents work as well as the context they're given.

Jeff frames it like this. AI right now is a stack of two by fours. Free wood, stacked in your yard. By itself, you can't build anything with it. One person frames a house. Someone else builds a sofa. Same lumber, completely different houses.

The value isn't the wood. It's what gets built.

The next few years belong to the people closest to the work. The individual contributor inside a company, the founder running a brand, the agency owner on a small team, getting the output of a department they don't have to hire or manage. Org charts compress and the middle thins.

I've always been an IC, even in the company I run. What I saw in LA isn't AI replacing people. It's people who hold a point of view getting the leverage of a whole team without the headcount.

The ones who win the next decade will be the ones with something to say and the patience to teach an agent how to say it. But you can't build with warped lumber. Every order, every support ticket, every brand decision has to feed back into one consistent layer the whole company works from. Uniform lumber across the yard. Then it's up to you to decide what to build.

Triple Whale is the AI operating system powering ecommerce's biggest brands. See what Moby 2 can do for yours.

*This editorial piece was created in collaboration with Triple Whale.

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DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight and Frances Du. Edited by Eric Dyck.

Please note that items in this newsletter marked with * contain sponsored content.