Every growth decision comes back to one question: how much can we afford to pay for a customer? I built a customer-level unit-economics model, and a simple view of it, so the CEO can answer that in seconds and see which levers move it most.
Ad platforms tell you what a customer costs. They don’t tell you what a customer is worth. For a subscription business the difference is everything, because value arrives month by month. The CEO needed one clear answer he could plan around.
For a subscriber I modelled product cost, shipping, payment fees, offer discounts, and acquisition cost, against the payments they make over their lifetime.
So: One honest number per customer, contribution after acquisition, that every other decision hangs off.
Modelling both showed how much of the outcome depends on how long customers stay versus how cheaply they’re acquired.
So: It made clear that retention and offer design were the biggest levers, bigger than day-to-day ad tweaks.
A grid of break-even retention across acquisition cost and product cost. The CEO can point at a cell and see what has to be true for it to work.
So: Planning conversations became "which two numbers do we move, and by how much?"
With confidence intervals on cost per order, 9 of 11 campaigns were statistically indistinguishable, so reshuffling budget between them wouldn’t have changed much.
So: Consolidate, and put energy where it moves the result.
The model became a 90-day plan run on two KPIs, with actions grouped by lever:
Business figures (revenue, spend, conversion and retention rates) stay private at my employer’s request. Happy to walk through the real work on a call.
I'd build this model before the first ad dollar. Unit economics should set the acquisition budget, not explain it afterwards.