Growth strategy

Strategy here means deciding what deserves money and what does not, using numbers everyone agreed on beforehand.

Guardrails before targets

Target CAC, payback window, cohort quality. Those three get set with finance before spend scales, because a CAC that looks fine in month one and loses money by month three is not a marketing success — it is a delayed problem with a nice dashboard.

The conversation this replaces

Most “we need more budget” discussions are really unclear economics. I put payback next to cohort retention on a single page and let that settle it. Sometimes the honest recommendation is to stop spending on the channel that looks best in the reporting, and say so early.

Where testing goes

A/B testing and landing-page CRO get pointed at the steps where a win actually moves the number — usually between the click and the qualified action, rarely the button colour. Tests are sized so a result means something instead of being read as a preference.

What you end up with

• Unit economics modelled with finance, not marketing alone
• A written guardrail per channel, agreed before the spend
• Scale and stop decisions made on payback, not volume
• Tests prioritised by their expected effect on CAC