About
Paid marketing, run by an engineer.
Outlier runs the whole paid function — measurement, creative, and campaigns — for a small number of companies, very well. We want to be the agency founders quietly recommend to each other.
Who's behind it
Richard Dubach, Founder
Richard built the paid marketing function at Whatnot, where he ran growth across creative, campaigns, and measurement during the company's scale-up. Before that, he spent a decade in user-growth, data, and engineering roles at Instacart, Uber, and Zynga.
He started Outlier on a simple idea: paid marketing should be easy to run, predictable to plan around, and built on data you can actually trust. He treats it as an engineering problem — instrumented, iterative, tested against outcomes. That's what "AI-native" means in practice. Your account doesn't get handed down to a junior tier. The work doesn't get sliced across vendors who don't talk to each other. The person who runs your program is the same person who answers your email.
What we believe
The four ideas this company is built on.
Paid marketing should be boring to run.
Founders should not be learning to manage ad campaigns. Paid should be predictable, planned around, and mostly invisible — not a constant source of meetings, dashboards, and questions.
Paid is an engineering problem.
Conventional agencies staff up to make paid work — campaign managers, creative producers, media buyers, analysts. We staff down and engineer it. Instrumented measurement, automated optimization, version-controlled rules. The math is software, not headcount.
Discretion is part of the product.
What's working for our clients stays with our clients. We don't list logos, post case studies, share spend, or publish creative. Your competitors won't see what we do for you.
Trust beats lock-in.
You own your code, your data, and your accounts. We'd rather earn the next quarter than trap you in this one.