There was a time when acquiring an e-commerce customer was almost embarrassingly cheap. In the early days of DTC, brands like Warby Parker, Dollar Shave Club, and Casper were rewriting the rules of retail. They were acquiring customers for as low as $10 or $15 through Facebook ads. Dirty Lemon, a beverage brand, was spending $20,000 to $30,000 per day on Facebook and Instagram and acquiring customers profitably. The math worked on the first transaction. You spent money, you m

It's tempting to look at your business as a collection of individual metrics. CAC over here. AOV over there. Contribution margin in one report, retention rate in another. But your business doesn't work that way. It's a system—a network of interconnected levers where every change ripples through everything else. Lower your CAC and you might be acquiring worse customers who never come back. Raise your AOV and you might slow down purchase frequency. Improve your contribution mar

If you ask most founders whether their marketing is working, they'll answer with marketing numbers. Clicks are cheap. CAC is down. We're getting more conversions than last month. But here's the problem: none of those numbers tell you whether your marketing is actually helping your business. You can have a fantastic cost per click while losing money on every customer. You can hit your ROAS target while your bank account heads to zero. You can double your conversions while your

The CAC You're Calculating Is Probably Wrong There's a number every e-commerce founder obsesses over: Customer Acquisition Cost. It determines whether you can scale, whether your ads are working, and whether your business model actually makes sense. The problem is that most founders are calculating it wrong. Not because they're careless, but because the platforms they rely on are showing them a different number than the one they actually need. If you've ever looked at your ad

In 2020, Outdoor Voices founder Ty Haney stepped down as CEO. The activewear brand had raised $64 million from top-tier investors, built a cult following that rivaled Lululemon, and expanded to 11 retail stores. By every visible measure, they were winning. But internally, the company was burning through cash and struggling to find profitability. Within a year, the brand nearly collapsed. It's exactly the kind of story I wrote Margin of Growth  to help founders avoid. Outdoor