I had no luck generating full-size, NYT-style puzzles, but was able to generate 5x5 minis!
I pre-defined a handful of layouts (minis generally just have corners blacked out), and brute-forced puzzles with all 4 or 5-letter words (depending on the space available, given the blacked-out squares) using a word list from Wordnik. I used an LLM to generate clues.
Yeah $1,000 a month would be $250 a week, which is 2-3 person hours of a housecleaner or landscaper's time, so like a 2 person crew for an hour or 90 minutes.
If you and your spouse each make $150k (so $300k household income), paying 8% of your income ($24k/year) to have 6 extra hours a week to spend with your kids seems like a fair trade.
Two people working in tech could easily be making more like a $5-600k household income though, at which point $24k is only 4-5%.
At $250/visit, that's just weekly landscaping and housecleaning. More than I pay for myself (we have a housecleaner that comes monthly), but not unreasonable, especially for a well-paid dual-income household.
Contrast that with B2B where churn rates are generally <10% (or better yet, net-negative revenue churn) and LTV is often $10k+, and you can see why it's a lot more appealing.
At $15/month with 10% churn (which would be an unbelievably good churn rate for a paid B2C product) would make your LTV $150. An optimistic conversion rate from visitor to paid would be like 2% (imagine you convert 20% of visitors to a trial, and 10% of those to paid). In this incredibly optimistic world, you break even paying $3 to acquire a visitor.
Congrats you have a money printing machine!
More realistically though, you'll have like 33% monthly churn, $45 LTV, and 0.5% visitor-to-paid conversion. In that case you break even at $0.22 per visitor, which is a lot harder to make work.
The game is building a valuable product with good onboarding and retention, then finding ad creative that works. It's not easy!
The Medallion Fund does use a better strategy than REIF. It only worked up to a certain scale where they started moving the market though, which is why they ended up kicking out outsiders.
REIF just lets them use Medallion as marketing while getting those sweet AUM fees on a massive fund.
If your visitor-to-paid conversion rate is actually 1.5% (12% of 13%), with an LTV of $23 you break even at $0.34 per per click.
And again, I'd expect the conversion rate of ad-driven traffic to be quite a bit lower than that from organic word of mouth traffic, but worth testing out!
If we assume your LTV is $30 and a 5% conversion rate (since your organic traffic is likely to be higher intent than people who clicked an ad), a visitor is worth $1.50 on average.
The questions are:
1. What's your LTV?
2. What's the conversion rate of ad-generated traffic?
3. Can you buy clicks for less than $1.50 (or whatever the real number is)?