In One Company I Measured. In the Other I Guessed.

At PizzaPortal we knew what a customer cost: roughly 100 złoty to acquire, against about 2.40 złoty of contribution per order. Those two numbers were not a reporting exercise. They set how aggressive we could be, which channels we kept, and how long we had to wait before a customer paid us back.

At another company, in the same years, with the same founder involved, nobody was tracking that. And inside what looked from the outside like a success, one channel was buying customers at around €45 who were worth around €3.

Once those numbers sat next to each other, the decision took about a week. Before they sat next to each other, it had been running for months without anyone raising a hand.

Why the guessing version is so easy to fall into

Nobody decides to guess. What happens is that growth arrives from several places at once and the aggregate looks healthy. Orders are up. The chart points the right way. The board is pleased. Underneath, one channel is subsidising a number that will never come back, and the good channels are hiding it.

Averages are what hide it. An overall acquisition cost that looks acceptable can contain a channel at €45 and a channel at €4. You do not see it until you split it, and splitting it is nobody’s job unless you make it somebody’s job.

The part that stings

The two companies were not far apart in time. It was not that I learned this later in my career and applied it forward. I had the discipline in one place and did not carry it to the other. The knowledge was there. The habit was not.

That is why I stopped thinking about this as a skill and started thinking about it as a standing routine. A skill you have. A routine happens whether or not you remember to have it.

The routine

Once a month, per channel, not in aggregate: what did we pay to get a customer here, and what has a customer from this channel actually paid us. Two columns. If a channel cannot be measured separately, that is itself the finding, and it gets a budget cap until it can.

It takes an hour. The month I skip it is the month the €45 channel comes back.

Source: adapted and translated from the przedmowa to the Polish original Siła Pędu*, with the €45 channel as told in the author’s third book on lifetime value and acquisition cost.*