Why Merlin Exists
Every growing ecommerce brand hits the same wall. You’re doing $500K–$5M a year, you’re too small to justify an in-house marketing team, and you’re too big to ignore paid acquisition. The only option the industry offers is a $10K–$20K/month agency retainer that delivers uneven results, slow iteration, and zero transparency into what’s actually happening with your ad spend.
Merlin is the alternative. It’s a desktop app that handles the full marketing stack — paid ads on Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Reddit, and LinkedIn; email flows on Klaviyo; SEO content; creative generation; and performance optimization — autonomously. You connect your accounts once, tell Merlin what you sell, and it runs the playbook a seasoned performance marketer would run, 24/7.
Who Built It
Ryan Duranso is Merlin’s founder. Ryan co-founded Ivory Ella, an apparel brand that scaled past $10M ARR with 60M social followers through exactly the kind of performance marketing Merlin automates today. Ryan is also an angel investor in SpaceX, Hims & Hers, and more than a dozen other startups.
Merlin is built by operators, for operators. Every action Merlin takes — every ad launched, every audience expanded, every winner scaled, every loser killed — is a direct encoding of the playbook that actually worked at Ivory Ella and that works at the DTC brands running on Merlin today.
What Makes Merlin Different
It’s a desktop app, not a SaaS dashboard.
Merlin runs on your machine. Your ad accounts, Shopify data, and creative assets never leave your control. There’s no multi-tenant cloud database holding your brand data. API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM and bound to your hardware. OAuth tokens live in memory only.
It talks to you like a marketing coworker.
Most marketing tools are dashboards. Merlin is a chat window. You ask it what you’d ask a CMO: “What’s our ROAS this week?” “Kill the worst three ads and scale the winner.” “Write a Black Friday email flow.” “Build 10 UGC video ad variations for this hoodie.” Merlin plans the work, shows you the plan, gets approval, and executes.
It covers the full stack.
Ads, email, SEO, creative, analytics, competitor intelligence — all from one place. No stitching together AdCreative.ai for images, Klaviyo flows manually, Surfer for SEO, and a freelancer for reporting. Merlin is the agency stack in one app.
Pricing that doesn’t punish growth.
$99/month, flat. No percent-of-spend, no per-seat, no “enterprise” upcharge when you cross $1M. Agencies charge $10K–$20K/month for similar work. The arithmetic of running an ecommerce brand fundamentally changes when your marketing cost is an order of magnitude lower.
Mission
Every DTC brand should have access to the marketing playbook that gets a winner to scale — without paying an agency tax for it. Merlin is that playbook, encoded as software, running autonomously, priced like a SaaS tool instead of a service firm.
Get Started
Download Merlin, sign in with your existing Claude subscription, connect your ad accounts, and run your first campaign the same day. There’s a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. Read the blog for case studies, tactical guides, and deep dives into how Merlin thinks about ecommerce marketing.