A small studio
with a long memory.
The Dope Story LLC is a performance marketing studio for direct-to-consumer founders. We have done this work since 2020 — through every algorithm change, every iOS update, every "Meta is broken" cycle. We don't promise tricks. We promise discipline, taste, and a level of ownership you almost never get from an agency.
We sit somewhere between an in-house team and the agency you wish you had. Senior on every account. Hands on every deliverable. Accountable to a single founder, every time.
Most performance marketing agencies are built on a hidden trade: senior people sell the work, junior people deliver it. We don't do that. The studio is small on purpose. The roster is short on purpose. The people you talk to during the pitch are the people running your account on a Tuesday morning.
We work best with founders who already have product-market fit and want a partner to help them scale without losing the things that made them work in the first place. We work less well with brands looking for a vendor to plug into a content brief. The relationships we keep are operating partnerships, not retainer agreements.
The studio operates from a registered office in Sheridan, Wyoming, with a fully remote team and partner network across the United States. Most of the work happens remotely; we travel for kickoffs, quarterly planning, and the moments that matter.
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— 01Senior, end-to-endNo account managers shielding you from the people doing the work. The strategist who scoped the engagement is the one writing the briefs and reading the dashboards.
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— 02Creative is the moatIn 2026, the bid is commoditized. The creative is not. Most of our edge comes from authoring better ads — concepts that respect the audience and convert anyway.
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— 03Measurement before optimizationIf the numbers can't be trusted, the optimization is theatre. Every engagement starts with a measurement audit and ends with a dashboard the founder actually reads.
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— 04Profitable first, scaled secondScale on bad unit economics is a slow-motion failure. We anchor every plan to a contribution margin target and grow from there. Vanity ROAS is not a strategy.
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— 05Long horizons, short feedback loopsWe plan in quarters and ship in days. The compounding value of an engagement only shows up around month four; everything before that is the discipline of getting there.
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— 06Honest with the founderIf a channel isn't working, we say it. If a creative direction isn't selling, we kill it. The point of a small studio is that you get told the truth, faster.
How an engagement actually runs.
Engagements typically run as quarterly contracts with a defined growth target and a working cadence we publish in advance. The standard model is a fixed monthly retainer plus a performance component tied to a single, agreed-upon metric — usually a contribution-margin target, sometimes a defensible MER.
Two weeks
Account audit, measurement audit, creative audit, and a written plan for the first 90 days. You get the document whether or not we proceed.
Days 15—45
Account architecture, tracking foundation, and the first wave of creative production. We do the heavy structural work before we touch the daily spend.
Days 46—90
Daily media management, weekly creative refresh, monthly performance review. We start scaling spend only after the foundation reads clean.
Quarter 02 onward
Quarterly planning, channel diversification where it earns its place, and the steady compounding of a creative library that gets sharper every month.
Currently accepting two new engagements for Q3.
If you're a founder doing $50k+ per month in DTC revenue and you want a senior partner instead of an agency, send a note. We respond personally to every inquiry.
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