Dear Reader,
Welcome to the 45th edition of the good reads newsletter by Malpani Ventures. Sharing your weekly dose of articles for this weekend’s reading!
LTV:CAC is a misleading metric to measure performance — here’s what to track instead
A good piece that reminds us that both LTV and CAC are to be measured over cohorts vs point-in-time metrics
In summary when looking at cohort performance, we want to ask two questions:
Is the payback improving, i.e. are we able to breakeven on CCAC sooner in more recent cohorts as compared to older ones?
Are cohorts growing and showing signs of expansion over time? Do we see new cohorts expanding faster than older cohorts in the CVA?
How Kuku FM got “non-English speaking” India to pay for subscription
https://thehardcopy.co/how-kuku-fm-got-non-english-speaking-india-to-pay-for-subscription
A deep dive into Kuku FM’s content and growth strategy. For context, Kuku FM provides audio content like book narrations, book summaries, courses and stories, in 7 languages and ended 2022 with 2.3M paying subscribers. The startup employs a ‘sampling-based’ model - All content can be sampled, but unlimited ‘premium’ access costs ₹99 a month and ₹899 a year
Some points:
Customer interaction is part of the company culture and the teams speaks to 100-150 customers per week
“Our marketing north star is sampling. We know that it takes multiple samplings to finally convert a download to a subscription, so we focus on how to get the cost of marginal sampling as close to zero as possible”
Your guide to product-led sales
A good-explainer on marrying PLG with sales:
We focused on making sure our efforts on SEO, paid, affiliates and others bring users that activate. Activation is the North Star metric and it drives the optimization of all tactics.
The critical piece of product-led sales is understanding when sales should reach out to users.
Until next time folks!