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Dan bootstrapped Unbound Merino from a Reddit-fueled obsession with merino wool into a brand approaching nine figures in lifetime revenue, with a warehouse sale, a growing women's line, and zero outside funding.
In his second appearance on the DTC Podcast, the Unbound co-founder gets specific about what actually moved the business over the last three years, why he almost lost 80% of his sales in a single day, and why he now cares more about the product and the friendships than any growth hack.
What you'll learn:
- Why the ads Dan loves flop and the cringe ones scale, and how he made peace with it
- The creative volume system that unlocked Meta scaling in 2023, and why Meta stopped working the same way
- How word of mouth (15% of new customers) and a 50/50 women's line changed the growth model
- The de minimis and tariff shock that nearly ended the company, and the scramble to open a Dallas warehouse before Liberation Day
- How Unbound uses a custom AI wired into Shopify, its ERP, Asana, Slack, and Drive to triangulate why products get returned
- Why 5% of sales now come from ChatGPT and Claude, and what that means for discovery
Who this is for: bootstrapped founders, DTC operators, and anyone selling a premium product who is tired of renting customers from Meta.
What to steal: the reorder-first mindset, the creative iteration loop, and the tariff survival playbook.
Timestamps:
00:00 Building a $90M travel apparel brand
02:12 Scaling Meta with creative volume
08:00 Why product quality beats acquisition tactics
16:00 How tariffs nearly killed the business
32:05 AI as a business advisor and data analyst
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Watch this interview on YouTube - https://dtcnews.link/video
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