The two knobs on this machine are customer lifetime value (CLV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC). Making more money from customers than you spend acquiring them is good, but the equation for success isn’t that simple. You still need to worry about cash flow and growth rate, which are driven by how long it takes a customer to pay off. One way to measure this is time to customer breakeven — that is, how much time it will take to recoup the acquisition cost of a customer.
