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How much of your customer lifetime value are you willing to spend on customer acquisition?

As the title mentions. How much of your total customer lifetime value are you willing to sacrifice for acquiring said customer?

I've found myself wondering this over the past 6-12 months as I continue my customer growth journey.

Some background: I run a bootstrapped SaaS business (https://caniphish.com/) as the solo Founder. My overheads are relatively low with hosting/infrastructure/CRM/collaboration platforms costing approx. $600/month, I don't pay myself a salary and I put all profits straight back into advertising.

As I've expanded functionality, I've noticed conversion rates have slowly gone up but I still find that acquiring customers via paid advertising channels such as Google/LinkedIn/Reddit cost between 100-110% of the total customer lifetime value.

I've put alot of work into SEO which then adds a bit more revenue on organic acquisition.

For those who have read this far - for an early stage bootstrapped startup would you be willing to spend 100% of the customers total lifetime value on acquisition just for growth purposes? Or would you take a step back and re-evaluate?

on July 16, 2022