I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc.

The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due diligence before building the app, it seemed cost per click for ads was around 20 cents per click. 20 cents * 2% conversion rate = $10 cost to acquire customer. My lowball avg. lifetime value of a customer was $18 if customers stayed for 3 months on average. $10 / $18 seemed like a decent ratio, and if I could get the conversion rate up or the churn rate down, it could be a good ratio.

So I set out to build the app, which took about a year and half. But, when I finished the app and went to launch my marketing campaign, I was shocked when I saw the cost per click had skyrocketed to $2 per click, meaning my cost to acquire a customer was $100 with an average lifetime value of $18. My backup marketing plans were content marketing based, with a networking campaign with Mommy bloggers, but this takes a lot more time to scale your customer base than blasting out an ad campaign. This caused me run out of runway with my cash timeline, and so the startup failed.

I learned that its important to not get too heads-down coding your product - its important to review your growth strategy every few months while you build your product, because things can come up that can dramatically affect the speed at which you can grow, and that can jeopardize the whole operation. In my case, if I had noticed the ad costs climbing, I could have started networking with more people earlier, doing more content marketing pre-launch, and slowly increasing the size of my waiting list, or evaluating alternative marketing plans before my runway got so small at the end.