How Much of a DTC Brand Can You Actually Read From the Outside, Before the LOI?
The hard part of buying a DTC brand is that the marketing story you get before the LOI is the seller's version. You don't see the ad account, the analytics, or the email numbers until you're already committed, so most buyers take the topline on faith and true it up after close. That's exactly when it's too late to move on price.
But a surprising amount of the real story is already public. Whether their visibility is earned or bought shows up in who's paying to bid on their own brand name. Whether demand is actually growing shows up in branded search over time, not in the revenue chart they hand you. Whether the reviews came from real customers shows up in how they're spaced. None of that needs the seller to hand you anything.
The buyers who get burned are usually the ones who waited for the data room to tell them what the open web already would have.
So for the DTC folks here, how far do you dig into the marketing before you sign, while you still have leverage? Or does most of it wait for diligence?