100% reliant on Meta. Plateaued around $10K/mo. Briefing new creative every month and watching almost none of it scale. The advice from every direction was the same: "you need more creative." They had been pushing on that lever for months and it wasn't moving.
The creative wasn't the layer that was broken. They were testing the same angle in different formats, not different angles. The funnel underneath wasn't built to convert paid traffic into subscription. And the KPI framework couldn't separate new from existing customer economics, so spend was getting allocated to the wrong customer type.
Built blended and channel-level CAC and MER targets from their new vs. existing customer profit targets. Surfaced that Meta was underspending on new customers and overspending on existing ones, and that Google was sitting unused. Each target was anchored to a 3:1 new customer 90-day LTV:CAC ratio.
Mapped their existing angles against their reviews, competitor creative and product positioning. Briefed mutually exclusive new image and video angles across new avatars, sourced UGC creators, and built a repeatable testing system. The unlock was variety of angle, not volume of asset.
Repositioned the brand around the assumption that "everyone uses this product," and built a dedicated new customer offer and education flow across ads, organic, landing page, partnerships and email. One KPI: new customers acquired at a 3:1 90-day LTV:CAC ratio.
"We were told for months that we needed more creative. The real unlock was someone breaking the business apart and showing us the three things underneath that were holding it back."
The engagement ended only because the brand was acquired by a private equity firm whose terms required them to move marketing in-house to the firm's team. The PE offer itself reflected the unit economics we'd built — efficient new customer acquisition at a 3:1 LTV:CAC, holding through a 7× scale of spend, was the value the buyer was paying for.