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Andre Nader's avatar

Awesome post, and great work dogfooding. The biggest issue I run into with many product and growth users is that they are not using the actual products they build to understand the issues at play. I know you are going to end up with a much more nuanced appreciation for the writers by doing this!

CLV and LTV are some of my favorite topics too. Particularly the interplay with Marketing spend. The biggest mistake I see is companies start to use the LTV of their organic customers to start forecasting/opportunity sizing customers brought in through paid channels.

The intent, in most cases, of customers brought in through paid channels will nearly always be lower and the LTV lower as a result (especially when you factor in acquisition costs). So making sure to separate out the cohorts of customers based on acquisition source becomes incredibly important (although harder due to tracking/attribution). So the balance is keeping it simple yet actionable in a way that gives you confidence in what you can scale up and what doesn't make sense.

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Rob B.'s avatar

Great post Reid! Early on (too early on) I wanted to experiment with paid marketing for subs. A similar newsletter with a large subscriber base was recommended to me (recomendo which just moved to substack!). I paid $200 for a blurb and cta at the end of their weekly newsletter. The CAC was under $1 so I was thrilled! However months later taking churn into account that number CAC is much higher. So agreed - need to find the right balance

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