customer acquisition cost

“CAC doesn't gradually go from 20 to 25 to 30. It goes from 21 day to 80 the next, and I think in many cases where you've created a online category leader, the best solution really is to sell it to a offline previous category leader that's looking to maintain t…”

“And those things don't really mean anything at one million of ARR, but it's the practice of starting to measure those things that helps you create the discipline to really understand how to run your business, In a way that will become long-term profitable.”

“In general, I would agree with you that both the data around CAC and LTV is far too early at the pre-seed stage. I think until you've started to kind of push more than seven figures of scale between both the CAC and LTV metrics, you really don't know those num…”

“Five to one is a good number. Most fintech is below that because CAC is higher, but the best fintech firms are definitely in that five or higher ratio.”

“The growth investors, what they do is they talk about CAC and LTV and unit economics. Look, that stuff is super valuable. It's just not valuable in those first 18 to 24 months when the entrepreneur is trying to turn that idea into something real.”

“So in my opinion, at least, seed stage is definitely too early to start measuring CAC and LTV, but they're still super important to keep in mind.”

“So I would agree that in the absence of new consumer distribution platforms, it's very hard to get a CAC to pencil for a new consumer company.”

“I always actually slightly diminish the importance of kind of analyzing CAC at seed because it's so transient. It changes so much. It's so platform dependent. And really, it's just such an unreliable metric in my eyes, especially at this early stage.”

“I think all these numbers matter, but they matter at scale. They just don't matter early on.”

“The concern I have on CACs is they typically go up in my experience as you try to scale the acquisition. And, you know, part of that could be competitive dynamics. If you're paying, you know, your, the 10 mattress in a box customers trying to buy the, find the…”

“I agree. I think it's bullshit. I think it's a really, as, like, a, the expectation that it's going to be a consistent metric across channels, and having, like, a full view of everything that could be included in that is, is impossible. Like, it's not, Unlikel…”

“We steer acquisition so that we recover the CAC with the first year, ok? So every time you get a yearly subscriber that pays back your CAC, you don't overspend”

“By forcing my team, our team, With this structure, we were able to unlock channels that we were not using at the time, and now we can deploy millions of dollars in these channels at an extremely efficient CAC.”

“And the reason why I think is wrong to just be obsessed with price reduction and time is often your CAC will not change linearly with the price. Meaning if you reduce the price of our product by 20%, the CAC is not going to go down 20%.”

“Yeah, I think for great companies, I know our CAC is really, really good. It needs to be below 20% of the price.”

“In most successful startups that grow fairly well, The CAC will rise faster than the brand can compensate for that rise.”

“I think most startups, when they make that argument to me, I think they're vastly underestimating the size of their market. That if you have a really, really big market, That, that you haven't picked all the low hanging fruit.”

“So in the US, the CAC would be two thirds sales and one third marketing because salespeople are so expensive if you're sitting in San Francisco and, or even London for that matter.”

“अमेरिका में CAC, दो तिहाई sales, और एक तिहाई marketing होगा, क्योंकि salesperson बहुत महेंगे होते हैं, अगर आप San Francisco में बैठे हैं, या उस मामले में London में भी”

“So if someone pays us 10,000 dollars a year, And it costs us 10,000 dollars to acquire them. We get paid back in 12 months, right? Anything above that, you start to question whether your economics work, anything below that, it's really good.”

“For everyone else, CACs almost by definition will go up over time for a couple reasons.”

“There's no CAC discussion. We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts.”

“So my view is that it's the only thing that matters. And if you ask me what's our retention, what's our activation rate, what's our CAC, I couldn't tell you really any of those things because I don't think they're real, like they're completely irrelevant. So t…”

“And so the CAC was incredible because the growth was non-commissioned because CS did not have commission, right?”

“If you think about standard SaaS metrics like LTV, CAC ARR, whatever, they never mention cash. Like, it's not about cash. It's like more about around accounting and predictability, but we always try to optimize for cash.”

“But my CAC is 16 dollars because I take this speed of value approach where I want to make you a happy customer immediately.”

“So for specific channels, they do tend to go up, but when you look at it broadly, and as you're adding new channels, when you're increasing the virality, when you're improving your activation rate, your conversion to paid, yes, you can kind of get that overall…”

“CAC only goes up, right? Like people just consistently get this wrong, right? And so I think that. Almost always up at scale, right? It's like, this is how the world works. And like, you know, the kind of argument that you're going to get good at something and…”

“We actually have done this funky move of we've led in a consumer product, which enables us to get the CAC incredibly cheap, and then people may move up to creator or even enterprise.”

“There are always ways to optimize efficiency on acquisition. There are always new channels, new brand campaigns, new, new growth avenues. But if you don't have a sticky customer and for some reason they're becoming less sticky, your product market fit, your pa…”

“At scale, I think with scale, with assortment, with brand value new channels become unlocked, new efficiency grows leverage accelerates with assortment. I think it often only goes one way, but I don't think always.”

“Our free trial credits get summed with marketing spend. If you're not doing that, then you're not really calculating your acquisition cost. So yeah trial credits or like anything free that you're giving away is cost, and it goes under, it is a marketing cost i…”