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Data Driven OS Decision Intelligence for Online Businesses | Powered by $3.1B+ in Revenue Analyzed | Surfaces What Matters and Drives Action

10/17/2026

Aleric asked about my shirt. It says LTV > CAC.

To me that's the relationship that decides how healthy a business actually is. Whatever you make per customer over their lifetime is the entire budget you have, to operate and to acquire the next customer.

The problem is that most businesses only see a fuzzy version of it. They can't tell you what the customers from Facebook, or from one funnel, or from one influencer, are worth on every single day of the journey.

Could you?

From my conversation with Aleric Heck on Marketing Minds, ep. 47. Full episode: https://youtu.be/JtKZAxCXw4A

10/16/2026

"You're amazing at the hardest thing, which is acquiring customers."

A lot of teams are genuinely great at it. Then everything after the first order gets a fraction of the attention.

The good news: the after part is the easy part to fix. "So you just fix the easy thing."

10/15/2026

The stoplight I use with media buying teams.

Green: what it costs to acquire a customer is at or below their day-30 LTV. You're profitable within 30 days.
Yellow: it takes 30 to 60 days to earn it back. Still okay, but too much of it for too long creates financial pressure.
Red: 60 to 90 days. Hard to sustain unless you have very deep pockets.

Put those three numbers in front of your media buyers every month. "It's like the fog's been lifted."

Save this for your next media buying meeting.

More at datadrivenos.com

10/15/2026

Aleric asked what the risks are when people put all their data into AI and ask it for the numbers.

AI is giving a lot of people false confidence. It's lowered the barrier so far that you can get something 80–90% good without any of the skills it would normally take.

All the danger is in the last 5–10%. And how long it takes to get to 95% tells you nothing about how long it takes to get to 99 or 100.

From my conversation with Aleric Heck on Marketing Minds, ep. 47. Full episode: https://youtu.be/JtKZAxCXw4A

Averages are useful. They can also hide what you actually need to see.When different customers, acquisition sources or b...
10/15/2026

Averages are useful. They can also hide what you actually need to see.

When different customers, acquisition sources or business segments behave differently, one blended number can smooth those differences into something that looks simple and easy to understand.

The problem is that simple doesn't always mean useful.

For operators making decisions about acquisition and growth, understanding what sits behind the blended number can be just as important as knowing the number itself. Otherwise, very different customer behaviors can end up being treated as if they were identical.

Clean reporting is useful. Clear decision making requires knowing when to look underneath it.

Where do blended numbers create the most confusion in your business?

10/14/2026

"I personally think that gross revenue is wildly overrated."

One business does $50M a year in sales and keeps a couple million in profit. Another does $10M and keeps significantly more.

The difference is what happens after the first sale.

The back end sets the floor of your business. When acquisition gets tough, or you have a bad couple of months on an ad platform, the thing that carries you is whether customers come back and buy again.

Which number do you watch more closely: revenue or profit per customer?

10/13/2026

No selling in the first 30 days.

Put yourself in the customer's shoes. They just bought from you and they don't even know if it works yet.

Hit them with the next offer now and the message they hear is: "these guys don't actually care about me, they just care about the next thing I'm going to buy."

Use the first 30 days to prove you're not one of those companies. Sell after they've seen it work.

10/13/2026

Ask any business for revenue, customer count, orders, AOV, refund rate. They'll have it. All of those are calendar math: pick a window, add it up.

LTV doesn't work that way. 10,000 customers are on 10,000 different schedules. Some are a year old, some 275 days, some one day, some 20.

Someone, or something, has to line every one of them up on a shared schedule and work out how the revenue builds day by day. That's the hard part.

From my conversation with Aleric Heck on Marketing Minds, ep. 47. Full episode: https://youtu.be/JtKZAxCXw4A

10/12/2026

The cost of a refund isn't just the refund.

"Every time you pay for a refund, you're essentially also paying to never make money from that customer again."

And the sneakier part: the customers who didn't refund went through the same first seven days as the ones who did. Not refunding doesn't mean they had a good first impression.

Fix what's driving the refunds and everyone who stayed gets a better experience too. They buy again.

"There's this incredible compounding effect of improving your refund rate."

10/12/2026

If you hired the best analyst in the world, you wouldn't tell them what to do. You'd want them to tell you what to ask.

Ask them "what's my LTV?" and they wouldn't say $300. They'd know you need it for every day of the customer journey, by product, funnel, traffic source and affiliate. Or they'd ask you back: why are you asking? What's the context?

That's the bar. A process built on deep expertise, not one you have to direct.

From my conversation with Aleric Heck on Marketing Minds, ep. 47. Full episode: https://youtu.be/JtKZAxCXw4A

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