Free teardown · for founders of subscription & mobile app companies
Your cost to acquire is climbing. You probably don't have a media problem.
A short teardown of how one mobile subscription app fixed rising CAC, and why the fix wasn't a new channel, a performance hire, or tighter media buying.
When growth gets expensive, the symptom always shows up in the same place: CAC creeping, conversion softening, channels throwing off less than they used to. So the obvious move is to go work on the media, swap a channel, tighten the buying, hire someone to own performance.
In my experience that's usually the wrong end of the funnel. The cost shows up at acquisition. The constraint almost always lives upstream of it, and spending against the symptom makes good operators more efficient at scaling the wrong thing.
This teardown walks through a real company that thought it had a media problem, where the constraint actually was, and the four questions worth running before you spend a dollar against it.
What's inside.
- The single upstream constraint that was quietly inflating CAC, and why no dashboard pointed at it
- The exact sequence that built $4M in new revenue from zero, under capital constraint, at a 2× LTV:CAC ratio held at scale
- A 90-second self-scan to run before your next channel swap or growth hire
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Written by John Dobharchú, Fractional CMO/COO. Twenty-plus years in the marketing seat at DDG, Delivery Hero, Fox Mobile, and Zalando, long enough to watch the same growth problems get misdiagnosed as marketing problems, over and over.
As CMO at DDG: grew revenue $44M → $63M, expanded EBITDA margin 19% → 30%, cut CAC 44%, scaled from 6 to 12 markets in twelve months.
Already know the symptom you're chasing?
Skip the read and bring it to a call. 30 minutes to find out whether you're about to fix the right thing, no deck, no pitch. If I'm not the right person for it, I'll tell you.