Managing a subscription-based wellness brand means living with a paradox. High retention rates are exactly what you want for long-term success. But those same retention dynamics create financial modeling challenges that can keep founders awake at night.
Vasu Goyal, Founder of Dose, knows this tension intimately. His Los Angeles-based brand produces all-natural, organic wellness shots designed to support liver health, skin health, muscle recovery, and immunity. Since launching in 2020, Dose built a loyal subscriber base that kept coming back month after month—the kind of retention most DTC brands dream about achieving.
But that success created a complex financial planning problem that spreadsheets couldn't solve.
The Investor Feedback That Changed Everything
The wake-up call came during investor conversations. The feedback was direct and sobering: "Your financials are solid, but they're not best-in-class."
For a founder who cares about building a sophisticated business, that kind of feedback demands action. Vasu dove into the numbers to understand where Dose could level up their financial planning.
As a subscription-driven brand with strong retention, Dose needed to build predictive models that could answer the most critical question for their business model: "How much can we safely spend on customer acquisition before we run out of money?"
The answer required integrating years of historical performance data with dynamic information about ongoing marketing campaigns and acquisition channels. Every variable—LTV, CAC, AOV, retention curves—connected to dozens of others. Adjust one input and the downstream effects cascaded throughout the entire financial model.
According to Vasu, "The minute you adjust anything, it has an astronomical effect depending on whether it trends upward or downward." Building and maintaining that kind of predictive model manually? Nearly impossible at the speed the business needed to move.
Why Generic Tools Don't Work for Subscription Brands
Vasu looked at the standard options for financial planning software. What he found were platforms built for every industry and none specifically. They couldn't handle the unique complexity of subscription economics. They didn't integrate the data sources DTC brands actually use. They required Dose to abandon their existing workflows and adapt to rigid, generic templates.
More fundamentally, these platforms couldn't provide the predictive modeling capabilities a retention-focused brand needs. Understanding what happened last month matters far less than predicting what will happen over the next six to twelve months as cohorts mature and retention curves play out.
Then an investor made an introduction to Drivepoint. The difference became clear immediately. As Vasu remembers it: "As a founder, my gut tells me how to feel about any potential partner. The minute I spoke to Drivepoint on the phone, I knew they were the ones to work with."
Real-Time Financials Change the Decision-Making Game
The first transformation Dose experienced was moving from backward-looking financial reports to real-time visibility. Drivepoint's integrations meant the team could sync all their data sources with one click, creating a single source of truth that updated continuously throughout the day.
For a subscription brand, that real-time visibility unlocks a completely different level of strategic planning. Before Drivepoint, when Dose wanted to evaluate retention metrics, they were limited to comparing weaker versus stronger cohorts and making educated guesses from there.
With Drivepoint, the analysis became specific and tactical. Instead of "this cohort performed better," the platform could show: "Improve this metric by this percentage, or optimize CAC by this amount—here's which option will generate a greater upward trend within one month."
The difference, as Vasu emphasizes, comes down to predictive accuracy rooted in constantly updated actuals. "You do not have to worry about back-end metric updates not reflecting in the models. Drivepoint is all about baking in historical actuals and using that as predictive data. It's the biggest difference between them and their competitors."
Insights That Were Previously Invisible
Armed with real-time financials and predictive models they could stress-test endlessly, Dose began uncovering insights that had been hiding in their data all along.
One discovery proved particularly valuable. Drivepoint's modeling revealed that a majority of Dose's cash flow was tied up in inventory. That insight pointed directly to a solution: the team could secure working capital financing to free up that cash, avoiding more expensive options like raising a bridge round or taking on debt financing.
For Vasu, having this kind of clear visibility into the long-term financial roadmap delivered something beyond just better numbers. It delivered peace of mind. "Since onboarding, we have stopped relying on arbitrary numbers from basic calculations. Now, we're more comfortable operating at a higher scale and understand our CAC tolerance. That wouldn't have happened without Drivepoint."
That confidence to operate at a higher scale matters enormously for subscription brands. The unit economics need to work at volume, and understanding your true CAC tolerance determines how aggressively you can invest in growth. Get it wrong and you run out of cash. Get it right and you build a compounding growth engine.
Beyond Software: Strategic Partnership
What Vasu stresses most emphatically is that Drivepoint delivers more than just a platform. The strategic finance expertise embedded in the service proved critical for improving Dose's finance function.
The Drivepoint team brings collective decades of experience scaling consumer brands. For Dose, that meant access to best practices for financial hygiene specific to subscription businesses, proactive recommendations rather than reactive problem-solving, and highly responsive partnership through a dedicated Slack channel where Vasu can expect feedback within hours.
When Dose has requested custom models to handle more complex scenarios, Drivepoint has consistently delivered quickly and on schedule. As Vasu describes it: "Drivepoint has seen countless DTC brands in hyper-growth and beyond. They know what it takes. That's why it's not some cookie-cutter agency relationship where they recycle solutions. It's highly bespoke and it can get even more complex and personalized if you want it to. That's the genius of Drivepoint."
The Bottom Line: Strategic Finance at a Fraction of the Cost
The measurable results tell a compelling story:
$120,000 saved annually. Drivepoint's platform and strategic finance services essentially eliminated the need to hire an in-house CFO. As Vasu points out, Drivepoint understands budget constraints for emerging brands and prices accordingly. "We have seen a massive amount of savings with Drivepoint."
240 hours saved annually. Vasu estimates he personally saves 20 hours every month—plus countless headaches—by relying on Drivepoint to power Dose's financial planning and modeling.
3-4% gross margin improvement. With better financial visibility enabling more strategic spending decisions, Dose gained leverage to negotiate better terms with suppliers. The margin improvement compounds significantly at scale.
Why the Team Matters Most
For all the discussion about platforms and models and metrics, Vasu keeps coming back to the people. At this stage in a startup's journey, the team you work with matters more than any particular feature or capability.
"You just need someone who'll get you the answers you need and explain them well. Drivepoint absolutely provides that. They're easy partners, hardworking, and very kind all around. We're excited to work with them for the long run."
That sentiment captures something important about how finance should work for consumer brands. The goal isn't just accurate numbers or faster modeling. The goal is confidence—confidence to make bigger bets, confidence to operate at higher scale, confidence to sleep well at night knowing you understand your business deeply.
For subscription and retention-focused brands facing the unique complexity of predicting customer lifetime value across cohorts, that confidence has been nearly impossible to achieve with spreadsheets and manual processes. The math is simply too complex and the variables too interdependent.
Dose proves what becomes possible when you bring the right tools and the right expertise together. Retention stops being just a marketing metric and becomes a competitive advantage you can actually model, predict, and capitalize on with precision.
Building a subscription brand with strong retention? Let's talk about turning that competitive advantage into predictable, scalable growth. Request a demo.
