Ryan Tabb @rytabb

@thedanielokon A lot of people underestimate how far a few good SKUs can take you.

@zachtheoldham 7-day ROAS has people in a chokehold

This is true across the board… CAC does not scale linearly with customer value. If your best customers are worth 15x more than your worst customers (often times even more) they may be only marginally more expensive to acquire.

Colin Dougherty @colindougherty

2 months ago

"You're not winning a subscription box war with Butcher Box—they do $600M/yr." So @chrisorzy did the opposite for ranchers: Whole cow for $7,000. Cold traffic on Facebook. FREE freezer included. "The CAC didn't scale with the cost of the product. I recognized this. No one else

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@couuor 🤝

LEBRON JAMES STEAL LEBRON JAMES THREE TO TIE IT

@CJSlattery Every company lives/dies by CAC:LTV and then most of them completely ignore the LTV half of the equation. If CAC rises because CPMs rise, focus as much on improving LTV as reducing CAC.

LTV is also about who you acquire. People think about LTV terms of squeezing the most out of each customer (which is good and necessary), but not in terms of acquiring customers that arrive with hire potential retention/LTV. That is to say, post click/post purchase efforts are critical for maximizing the captured LTV of any given customer. But the maximum capturable LTV of said customer is a byproduct of who they are, not what you do to them. We can't skip the upstream question of whether the customers walking in the door have high retention potential to begin with.

What Cody’s referring to here is an issue we found a few weeks ago: Meta was no longer driving the type of revenue we wanted it to. Our travel category growth had slowed, and we used Northbeam’s product analytics to identify that the type of revenue we were generating from our Travel Ads was fundamentally different year-over-year. In 2025, 6% of Travel Ad-attributable revenue came from non-travel products. But for a short period of time, we were seeing over 40% of Travel Ad-attributable revenue come from non-travel products. Because of recent changes we had made in creative, pixel, and ad account setup — and the fact that we were in a promo period — Meta’s best way to drive lowest cost conversions was serving to traffic converting on our most popular products. Meta is extremely good at delivering the result you ask for (purchases, reach, etc), but this was more evidence that there are creative ways to better align a platform’s ad engine with your true business goals. This goes back to one of my 2026 predictions: Signal engineering, the deliberate design of what signals are sent to an ad platform, will continue to grow in experimentation & importance.

Cody Plofker @codyplof

2 months ago

Fascinating conversation on the latest episode of Marketing Operators about signal engineering and Ridges travel business . (I listened because I wasn’t on it) I think it's the most convincing evidence and data that I've heard that Meta does struggle reaching different

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@codyplof Have you experimented at all with paper.design? Could be good for what you’re describing, their MCP makes it really easy to connect to Claude. I’ve used it a bit but haven’t had any real need, so it’s been mostly exploratory.

@DTCMidas Most small changes are great for squeezing a few more dollars out of the average customer, but once you start making meaningful jumps in the value of your average session/customer, you're basically just acquiring different customers with higher spend potential.

@PhilKiel if you're selling consumables (which I suppose peptides are not exactly but also are exactly) then I think the brands which optimize for retention will win.

It’s time.

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"The obsession with short-term, bottom-funnel demand harvesting is causing us to shrink as ROAS slowly declines. How can this be? We’re spending more, reaching fewer people, hitting the same ones over and over. And ROAS is down?" ROAS is not a 7 day measurement. Your best customers are worth 16x more over their lifetime than your worst. You can in fact push Meta to target those customers who will spend more and repeat purchase with you over and over.

Preston Rutherford @PrestonRuther10

3 months ago

CEO: Why the f*** aren’t we growing? CMO: [Slacks screenshot of Meta ads account YOY] CFO: WTF? That can’t be real. CMO: I get we want “accountability” and “ROI,” but the obsession with short-term, bottom-funnel demand harvesting is causing us to shrink as ROAS slowly

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LTV:CAC absolutely should be the #1 metric for DTC brands. And most don't realize you can directly optimize for LTV with about 10 mins of setup.

Bar Bruhis @Bbruhis

3 months ago

Got to hang with some legends for day 1 of DTSki Some things I learned: LTV:CAC should be our number 1 metric. Ideally 3x Leverage suppliers for innovation. Ask them for feedback and launch a product with them Packaging is everything (duh) Team is everything. Makes

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Grüns wasn't acquired for $1.2b because Unilever can't create a greens gummy of their own. They got acquired for over a billion dollars because they had a customer base worth acquiring. They got off the ad->purchase->churn treadmill and prioritized LTV:CAC over everything. "I run the business — and I would encourage everybody to run their business — at a minimum 3x LTV, fully burdened, delivered-to-the-door gross profit to CAC. That’s best in class." “I grow as fast as the world lets me at that CAC ceiling. If there are 50k customers in a month I can go get at that efficiency, I’m going to go get them. If it’s 5k this month, I’ll go get 5k. “The output of that discipline is our growth.” Most marketers focus on driving that CAC down as low as possible to keep that ratio strong. Then, if you're most companies, you focus on increasing LTV as if LTV is a psychology problem. That all you need to do is convince your customers to purchase more or purchase again, and that you can push your way to a better ratio. You think that higher LTV is the byproduct of more emails, more discounts, more win-back flows. But elite companies like Grüns understand that LTV is not an value extraction problem. It's a value acquisition problem. Your customers arrive with their potential lifetime value largely set. The best lever isn't squeezing more out of the wrong people who arrive with low potential LTV, it's acquiring more of the right ones that are likely to spend. Pushing them spend more is only affecting the last few percentage points of the LTV that plays out for them.

Shaun Eng @shauneng

3 months ago

Almost every Ecom brand owner I know wants to make a BIG exit Yet even the ones doing $100M/year with MRR can't exit for $100M Meanwhile Grüns just exited for $1.2B Huel just exited for $1.1B Most of you build something that can't be sold Here's what they did differently:

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Your best customers don't become your best customers because you squeeze them harder. They were your best customers the moment they converted. They arrived with that potential lifetime value built in. Retention marketing captures what's already there. It doesn't create it. You can't turn a one-and-done deal seeker into a 4x repeat buyer with a win-back sequence. You can't make whales out of guppies. LTV is an acquisition problem, not an extraction problem. Grüns understood that, and it's why Unilever wrote a $1.2B check.

Aaron Orendorff @AaronOrendorff

3 months ago

Massive congrats to @chadjanis + the Grüns team on today’s acquisition 🐻 ~$1.2B in under three years! There’s a reason this was one of @9operators most popular episodes of last year. In fact, at least three reasons … 1️⃣ LTV:CAC Discipline “I run the business — and I would

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Ryan Tabb @rytabb

2 months ago

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This is exactly right. And what most brands miss is the input to this entire model: which customers are you actually acquiring? Your customers exist on a potential LTV curve, and you can nudge them up a little bit with marketing after you've acquired them, but you're much better off simply acquiring better customers in the first place. If Meta is filling your funnel with guppies instead of whales, your cohorts simply will never pay back the way they need to. LTV:CAC is the ratio. But LTV is not a dynamic number you achieve after acquiring a customer, it comes predetermined (mostly) with every customer you acquire. Brands that scale like Grüns (which is basically nobody) aren't just disciplined about the ratio, by definition they're disciplined about who they're acquiring in the first place. I wrote about why LTV is an acquisition problem, not an extraction problem - link in comments 👇

Drew Fallon @drewfallon12

3 months ago

How did Gruns actually scale the way they did, financially speaking? I dont have any inside info, but I can tell you how. Balancing inventory, CACs, opex, etc during hypergrowth is an extremely difficult task; however on a spreadsheet it can in fact all be reduced down to a very

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