A founder mid-raise, a creative bottleneck, and an agency partnership starting from scratch.
When the founder of this DTC consumer goods brand first spoke with CTC, the business was already on a strong growth trajectory. The brand had demonstrated real unit economics, was attracting meaningful investor interest, and was in the final stretch of raising a formal seed round. The founder was also, by his own admission, the largest bottleneck on the creative and paid media side. His time was almost entirely consumed by the raise.
The practical implication was significant. The brand needed a team that could operate with real independence on Meta and Google, but the stakes were higher than typical onboarding. The founder wasn't just evaluating an agency's ability to run ads. He needed a partner whose outputs could stand up to investor-level scrutiny, because the numbers CTC would be producing were going to feed directly into how he told the growth story to the people writing him checks.
CTC officially kicked off the engagement in mid-March. What happened in the following six weeks reflects something important about how the team approaches new clients: the best version of this work isn't running good ads. It's becoming a reliable operating layer for the business, quickly enough to actually matter when it counts.
The founder needed more than media buying. He needed a system investors could trust.
From the earliest calls, it was clear that the founder's mental model of the CTC engagement was different from how many clients think about agency partnerships. The questions he was focused on were not purely tactical. He wanted reliable spend forecasts. He needed a clear view of customer cohort payback periods. He was thinking about the balance between top-line growth and profitable months, and specifically about how to communicate that balance to investors who might want different things from the same round.
Part of what made this engagement particularly high-stakes was the structure of the capital he was building. In addition to the equity round, the founder was working with a revenue-based lender who would fund a substantial portion of the brand's monthly ad spend, with repayment tied directly to when customer cohorts paid back. That structure meant the lending facility's entire repayment logic was built on the same cohort economics CTC was measuring and validating.
Within the first two weeks, the CTC data team had validated the brand's P&L against what was being ingested into Statlas, stood up the cohort model, and begun building the spend and efficiency infrastructure that would drive forecasting. It was unglamorous work, but it was the kind of foundational data integrity that investor conversations depend on.
An investor meeting in an hour, a question in Slack, and a live report built from scratch.
The clearest illustration of what CTC delivered came about three weeks into the engagement. The founder dropped a message in the client Slack channel with a pair of questions from an investor he was about to meet: what was the brand's return on ad spend by channel, and how had it trended as spend scaled? He also needed a quantified view of what percentage of new customer acquisition was organic versus paid. He added that he had about an hour before the meeting.
Investor questions dropped in Slack. A live data report delivered before the meeting started.
The CTC team confirmed the data existed in Statlas and committed to having it ready. Within the hour, a live report had been built directly from Statlas data, complete with the channel efficiency trend and the organic versus paid acquisition breakdown. The founder walked into his investor meeting with the numbers in hand. The organic share wasn't a rough estimate. The CTC team was specific: roughly 29% of new customer revenue was organic, rising to around 37% when branded search was included.
What made that kind of turnaround possible was the Statlas infrastructure the team had been building since day one. Because the data was already clean, modeled, and organized around the business questions the founder was being asked, the team wasn't scrambling to build something from scratch. They were surfacing work that already existed.
Statlas became the source of truth for how the founder told his growth story.
The live investor report was the most visible example of CTC's role in the raise, but it wasn't the only one. Throughout the following weeks, the team was actively configuring attribution settings within Statlas specifically for investor reporting purposes. The team treated the question of which settings to show investors as a live operational deliverable, not an afterthought.
By the time the round closed, Statlas had become the primary tool the founder reached for when putting together investor communications. That kind of workflow integration, where a founder treats the agency's data platform as the authoritative source for business performance, is not something that happens automatically. It is a function of how the team built the system and how consistently they kept the client connected to it from the earliest days of the engagement.
Equity round closed. Lending facility signed. All within six weeks of onboarding.
By the end of April, roughly six weeks after the engagement officially began, the equity round had closed, the revenue-based lending facility had been signed, and the founder had hired the brand's first VP of Marketing.
What CTC delivered was not just media performance, though the brand finished the month 15% above its contribution margin plan. The more durable contribution was the infrastructure: a clean, validated data system that the founder could point to in investor meetings and use when writing investor updates.
The best version of this work has never been running ads. It's becoming infrastructure.
This engagement is a clear example of what distinguishes CTC's approach from conventional media buying. The speed at which the team built investor-grade reporting, answered real diligence questions under time pressure, and kept performance on track while a founder's attention was split across an active capital raise reflects something that goes well beyond campaign execution.
When a founder describes reaching for your platform when writing investor updates, that's the clearest possible signal that the work has crossed from service to partnership. That's what CTC is building toward with every client. This one got there in six weeks.
- More than 230% YoY growth by April
- 16.31 ROAS during the two-week campaign
- Over $180k in donations to local gyms
- 882.11% increase in average quarterly sales with 30% year-to-date margins