Essays, not content. Written to be true in ten years.
Nothing here is timed to an algorithm. Each essay works through one idea, slowly, with the reasoning shown.
fig. 5.0 one idea, refracted
Your CAC isn't rising. Your product's honeymoon is ending.
Every founder eventually opens a dashboard and finds the same villain: the cost of acquiring a customer, climbing quarter after quarter. The instinctive diagnosis is external. The platforms got greedy. The auctions got crowded. The creative got tired.
Sometimes that's true. Usually it isn't. Here is the pattern we see instead.
When a product launches into its right audience, acquisition is artificially cheap. Early customers are the ones who needed you most. They convert on weak creative, forgive rough funnels, and tell their friends unprompted. Your first CAC is not your real CAC. It is a honeymoon rate, subsidised by the enthusiasm of the people easiest to reach.
As you grow, you exhaust the pre-sold audience and begin marketing to people who need more convincing. They click less, compare more, and forgive nothing. CAC rises, not because your marketing got worse but because the remaining market is genuinely harder. The number on the dashboard is not measuring your ads. It is measuring the distance between your product and the next tranche of customers.
This reframe changes what you fix. If rising CAC were a marketing problem, the answer would be better ads. Because it is a distance problem, the answers live elsewhere: a sharper offer for the harder audience, pricing that survives comparison, retention that repays a higher acquisition price, positioning that shortens the distance instead of shouting across it.
The dashboards will keep blaming the auction. The auction is innocent. The honeymoon simply ended, and the businesses that keep growing are the ones that planned their second act before it did.
fig. 5.1 cac follows distance, not ads
plan the second act early
Evergreen, in reading order.
The founder's funnel: why you close deals your ads never could
Founders convert at rates no campaign can match, and most companies scale by removing the founder from the one place they were irreplaceable.
Positioning is a pricing decision wearing a copywriting hat
Where you sit in the buyer's mind decides what they'll pay long before any words are written. Most positioning work starts at the wrong end.
Retention is the only channel with negative acquisition cost
Every kept customer is revenue you didn't have to buy again, which makes retention the one channel where the price goes down as you scale.
What we tell clients who want to "go viral"
Virality is variance, not strategy. What compounding businesses build instead, and the one question that reliably ends the conversation.
essays arrive by email, on request. no feed, no algorithm