This Week in Startups – Casey Winters and Jason Calicanis talk about CAC and Planning Sustainable Growth

In this great episode, Casey and Jason go in depth on topics around customer acquisition cost and how to measure the sustainability of your product or service’s key actions.

This feeds into a great conversation about what steps to take before a growth phase to make sure you can survive it. This leads into a great discussion about what investors and venture capitalists look for when making decisions or considering a Series-A.

Crucially, they also get into the importance of using multiple customer acquisition channels in order to maximize growth. There is an especially interesting conversation about the differences between channels that have high or low customer acquisition costs and high or low lifetime value.

For example, paid search results advertising has lower lifetime value because the customer may not have been looking for you, whereas grub hub’s transit ads had comparatively high lifetime value because those people naturally formed a relationship with the product.

There are lots of great examples from real startups they each have worked with on these issues, and then there are questions from CEOs in the audience about how the concept applies to them.

I will revisit this episode next time I am at this point in a project!