From $0 to $800K monthly.
In 70 days.
Mortero is an eight-figure-capable CPG beverage line. The retail side worked. The brand worked. The product had pull. What it didn’t have was a direct-to-consumer business — no page that converted, no backend that compounded, no paid engine that scaled. Seventy days later it was running at an $800K monthly run rate, and the team they kept on staff was the team running the system.
// 01 · THE ROOM WE WALKED INTO
An eight-figure brand with no DTC business.
Mortero had everything the playbook says you need. Retail distribution. A beverage product people actually came back for. A team that knew the category cold. What they didn’t have was a way to sell direct.
Their website existed. It didn’t convert. Their email list existed. It didn’t sell. They had run paid ads in the past. The ads got clicks. The clicks didn’t turn into orders. So they did what most operators do — they pulled spend, blamed the channel, and waited for someone to fix it.
We walked in with one question: what would this brand look like if the back end was built like the front end?
// 02 · THE DIAGNOSIS
The page leaked. The backend didn’t exist.
We looked at the actual surface area. The landing page wasn’t built to convert — it was built to look nice. The cart abandoned at industry-standard rates because nothing pulled it back. There were no flows. No post-purchase sequence. No browse-abandonment logic. No reactivation path.
Paid spend was leaking into a structure that couldn’t hold it. ROAS wasn’t bad because the ads were bad. ROAS was bad because everything downstream of the click was missing.
The problem wasn’t the channel. The problem was the engine.
// 03 · THE MECHANISM
We rebuilt the page. Installed the backend. Then turned on spend.
The order matters. Most agencies turn on paid first and hope volume papers over the leaks. We did the opposite.
- Page rebuild — converted the home and product pages into a system that did one job: sold beverage. Above-fold proof, friction stripped out, social proof structured, post-add-to-cart paths mapped.
- Backend install — Klaviyo flows for welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment, post-purchase, and winback. Compounding revenue baked in before paid touched the front door.
- Paid engine — only after the system held. Cold creative built around the actual buyer, not the brand deck. Scaled spend tied to backend lift, not to vanity ROAS.
- AI agents on staff — the team kept the system because the system ran itself. Creative briefs, weekly reports, customer triage — all running on the agents we left behind.
// 04 · THE OUTCOME
$0 to $800K per month. Seventy days.
The DTC line went from a closed channel to $800K in monthly run rate. The team retained the system after the engagement closed. Mortero is now scaling internationally — same engine, new markets.
The product wasn’t the bottleneck. The system was.
// 05 · THE LESSON
Backend was the unlock. Not the ads.
If you have an eight-figure-capable brand and a DTC line that won’t move, the answer is almost never “spend more on Meta.” It’s a structural answer: the page leaks, the flows are missing, the engine doesn’t exist behind the click.
Build the engine. Then turn on the channel. That’s the order.
// CALL.SH · FOR YOUR BRAND
Same diagnosis. Your brand.
30 minutes. You and me. Diagnostic call. Yes-or-no on whether we build the engine for you.
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