Imagine you see customer acquisition costs start creeping up for three straight months in your dashboard.
If you're like almost every founder I talk to, your response is the same: new creative, new targeting, maybe a new agency.
I'd look somewhere else first.
Every visitor to your site costs you something and earns you something. The job, as I see it, is widening the spread between:
1. Cost per visitor
2. Revenue per visitor
Why do I frame it per visitor instead of per customer?
Because it forces you to look at both sides of the ledger at once. CAC only tells you what you paid. Revenue per visitor tells you what you made from everyone who showed up, including everyone who didn't buy today. When the spread between those two numbers is wide, you can outbid everyone in your category and still run a healthy business. When it's narrow, no media buyer on earth can save you.
The two sides aren't equally yours
The cost side is an auction. You're bidding against every other brand that wants the same eyeballs, and strong unit economics on paper don't protect you when acquisition eats the whole margin.
The revenue side is yours: price, bundles, average order value, post-purchase offers, how fast a subscriber turns profitable.
What this looked like at Hiya
We were subscription-first and fully bootstrapped, with 50% off the first month. That meant every acquisition started in the negative, and the faster we grew, the deeper we went before the cohorts paid us back. We had to hold our breath underwater.
I was watching our cash flow forecasts constantly, and the thing that kept us alive wasn't a lower CAC... it was everything we did to earn more from the customers we'd already paid for.
The best cure for a high CAC is a high AOV.
Where this does and doesn't apply
If you're pre product-market fit, ignore this. You're still in the messy middle of figuring out what converts at all, and optimizing a spread you can't yet measure reliably is noise.
If you're spending serious money on paid, this is the lens I'd use before any channel decision. Same logic applies in retail, by the way.
So the shift I'd make this week: when your CAC climbs, ask "what widens the spread?" before you ask "how do we lower CAC?" You'll notice how many more levers you suddenly have.
This is a way, not the way.
Put it to work this week
By Friday, you'll have your cost per visitor, your revenue per visitor, and one lever you're pulling to widen the spread.
Pull: last 90 days of total sessions, total marketing spend, and total revenue from your analytics and ad accounts.
Calculate: spend divided by sessions (cost per visitor) and revenue divided by sessions (revenue per visitor). Write both numbers down next to each other.
Find: which side moved more over the last two quarters. If cost rose faster than revenue, you've found your problem.
Decide: whether your next dollar of effort goes to the auction side (creative, targeting) or the owned side (price, bundles, post-purchase offers, payback window).
Act: pick ONE revenue-side lever and ship a test this week. A bundle, a price test on your hero SKU, or a post-purchase offer are all small enough to launch in days.
Check: re-run both numbers in 30 days. Same source, same math. Did the spread widen? Now you know whether to keep pulling that lever.
One next step
Run the two calculations before you open your ad account tomorrow. They take ten minutes and they'll change what you look at all week.
If you want to work through your spread with me directly, this is exactly the kind of thing we dig into on the weekly calls inside The Builder’s Room.
