Why I wrote this book

I once ran a company where I had no idea what a single customer was worth.

I remember approving a marketing budget one Wednesday morning. The team presented the plan: how much we would spend, which channels, how many new signups we expected. The numbers looked reasonable. I signed off. Then I drove to the next meeting, and somewhere between the office and the highway, a thought hit me. I had just committed €40,000 for the month without knowing whether the customers we were buying would ever return what we spent on them. Not in a theoretical sense. In a very literal sense: I could not tell you if a customer acquired through paid ads was worth €5 or €50 over their lifetime with us. I did not have the number. Nobody in the company had the number. And the strange thing is, it did not feel like an emergency. It felt like Tuesday. That is what running blind actually looks like. It is not panic. It is normalcy. You make decisions that seem reasonable, surrounded by people who nod, and the number that would tell you whether any of it makes sense is simply absent from the room.

I knew our revenue. I knew our headcount. I knew how much we were spending on marketing each month. But if you had asked me how much it cost to acquire one customer and how much that customer would return over their lifetime, I would have given you a confident answer built on nothing. I was running blind. And I could not see it, because I had no system for looking at the business through the lens of customer value.

At PizzaPortal, it was different. We tracked every zloty. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) was PLN 100. Contribution per order was about PLN 2.40. The math is in Chapter 3. That clarity changed how we made every decision, from which cities to expand into to how much we could afford to spend on a single campaign. When a channel stopped performing, we saw it in days, not months. PizzaPortal was eventually acquired by Delivery Hero for PLN 120 million.

Same founder. Same brain. Two very different outcomes. In one company, I measured. In the other, I guessed.

At iTaxi, I learned something else. We were competing against Uber and Bolt, two of the most aggressive, best-funded companies in ride-hailing. On paper, we had no business surviving that fight. But when we dug into our unit economics, we found customer segments where our Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) was strong enough to build on. Some segments were terrible. Others were surprisingly solid. We stopped trying to win everywhere and focused on the segments where the numbers actually worked. Today, iTaxi is profitable.

Looking back, there was a thread connecting these companies that I did not see at the time. PizzaPortal and iTaxi were both marketplaces with small basket sizes. A pizza order. A taxi ride. Contribution per transaction was measured in single-digit zloty, so everything came down to volume. When I started building SunRoof, the average order value was thirty to fifty thousand euros for a solar roof installation. The math felt completely different. But the question was the same: how much does this customer cost to acquire, and how much are they worth over their lifetime?

I have also been on the other side. We raised €15 million and built models showing everything working in year three. We expected 18 months of runway. The headwinds that hit us turned those 18 months into 9. When I realized what was happening and called my co-founder, the line went silent, and then I heard one word: “shit.” That call was the moment I understood something I could not unlearn. The two numbers this book is about would have shown us the problem a year earlier. We would have had time to fix it.

Hope is not a unit economics strategy. A spreadsheet projection is not proof.

Over the past 20 years, I have built five companies, invested in dozens more, and reviewed hundreds of pitch decks as a investor. One pattern keeps showing up. Founders do not focus on LTV and CAC early enough. They think these metrics are something you worry about later, when you have a lot of data and a dedicated analytics team. By the time you have that data, the damage is already done.

This is not a regional problem. I have been most active in Poland and Sweden, but the pattern is global. Search for “pitch deck template” online. You will find a similar structure every time: problem, solution, market, team, traction, financials. But one slide is almost always missing. A dedicated slide showing LTV and CAC, the company’s position on those metrics, and what the team is doing to improve them.

The trigger for this book came from a specific moment.

I was considering investing in a startup. The founder was growing fast, adding features, entering new markets. In every conversation, I kept telling him the same thing: expansion and new features are distractions right now. You need to check your LTV and CAC, because I think you have a leaking bucket.

He understood the concepts. He could define LTV and CAC on a whiteboard. But he could not implement them in his business. He did not know where to start, what to measure first, or how to turn the numbers into decisions.

So he asked me for a workshop. I did a two-hour session with his team. We went through the basics: how to calculate real numbers, where the leakage was, what to prioritize. They implemented the changes. One month later, he came back with a completely different company. Marketing spend was almost paused, because the data showed he was burning money on the wrong channels. Instead of expansion, the entire team was focused on stopping the leakage. His investors noticed. For the first time, he could show them real numbers and present concrete initiatives to improve them.

That experience made something clear. The problem is not that founders do not care about unit economics. The problem is that nobody teaches them how to apply it early, when the data is messy and the stakes are highest. The knowledge exists, scattered across blog posts, MBA textbooks, and consulting decks that cost more than some seed rounds. But nobody has assembled it in a way that a founder can use on a Monday morning with messy data and four months of runway.

I am writing this book because I want to change that.

I want every pitch deck to have a dedicated LTV and CAC slide, with founders who understand that these two numbers sit at the center of their organization. And I want the person reading this to close the book with a working system they can apply the next morning.

Let me show you how.