Preston 🩳 Rutherford — Co-Founder

Chubbies founder. Now solving the problem that held us back for years: how to measure the long-term impact of brand. At Chubbies, we scaled past $100M/year in revenue while maintaining a 25% EBITDA margin. But for the first 6 years, we were obsessed with direct response. It felt measurable. Predictable. Accountable. We avoided brand because it felt like a black box. And eventually, performance plateaued. CAC went up. ROAS went down. Growth slowed. The real issue wasn’t our creative or spend—it was that we had stopped generating demand. We were just paying more to capture the same pool of buyers. So we made a change. We figured out how to measure the future revenue that comes from non-purchase actions like social follows, shares, branded search, and direct traffic. That gave us the confidence to invest in brand again. And when we did, revenue grew—but profit grew even faster. That experience led to Marathon. Marathon is a predictive measurement platform that helps modern consumer brands measure the long-term incremental revenue impact of brand building—using causal, not correlational, data. Most brands today hit the same wall we hit: Performance channels get more expensive ROAS declines Teams get stuck optimizing for short-term revenue The brand gets starved—and future growth dries up Marathon helps brands break that cycle. We measure how top-of-funnel brand actions (social engagement, reach, branded search, direct traffic) lead to real, future revenue—so you can justify brand investment to your CFO the same way you justify paid performance. Here’s how we do it: A predictive measurement model trained on your data, built by the best marketing science PhDs in the world A geo holdout testing engine (the same type of causal testing big brands pay $1M+/yr to run internally) Hands-on advisory and guidance to help you shift from 95% demand capture to a 50/50 brand-performance mix—without hurting short-term revenue Most importantly, we give your team the confidence to invest in long-term brand growth without taking your foot off the short-term gas. Because when you invest in brand and measure it well, it makes your performance marketing work better. It builds a resilient base of organic, high-margin demand that compounds. Every brand hits this point eventually. We’re here to help you transition through it—and come out more profitable on the other side.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and Brand Marketing expert with a strong entrepreneurial background.

Location: San Francisco, California, United States

Experience: 18 yrs