OP here -- the numbers are in no way bogus, all sourcing information and methodologies are listed on the page itself (see the bottom left * on each 'slide').
Would love to understand what gave you that impression, as we work hard to build content like this, and hate to see it shrugged off.
OK -- the data is definitely out of date for at least one company (ours, custora). I wonder how common this is? Perhaps the cache was not cleared before generating the output?
I forked the repo, ran it on custora.com, and eNom was (correctly) listed as the registrar.
I'm re-running the full ycombinator list now, and will update when finished.
Is the data collection methodology described somewhere? I'm questioning the accuracy given an error on our data (GoDaddy is not our registrar, namecheap is).
It's also a bit suspect that namecheap is not listed as anyone's registrar after so many fled GoDaddy for namecheap a few weeks back.
Whoops! Thanks for the feedback! That's an old page that was supposed to be replaced on our latest redesign.
The simplest explanation is pattern matching: we analyze customer and transactional data to understand how different customers behave. Using this understanding we can make predictions for how each user will behave in the future.
We use all of that analysis to power actions - take actions on the right user at the right time, optimizing for CLV.
Felt it in south jersey. Shook my house quite a bit, even knocked some things off the kitchen counter. Lasted quite a while (felt like close to a minute).
As mentioned below, it is possible to determine the customer distribution. We employ a few methods to accomplish this. Stay tuned for more content soon.
Sounds like you have some fantastic customers/a great product!
It's possible (and likely) that your CLV is changing over time as the mix of customers you are getting is changing - the key is to be able to calculate CLV as early as possible while still getting an accurate number.
If you are going to earn $1500 in profit from a customer, why wouldn't you be willing to spend $1200 to acquire more? The issue you may run into is that, if your $1500 customers found you organically, you can't necessarily expect customers you acquire via different means to be worth the same.
There are some other variables at play as well: are you cash constrained? How soon do you need your acquisition expense to be paid back?
Absolutely - the next step is to calculate the CLV of different acquisition channels. Maybe Organic search results in a favorable mix of good vs mediocre vs bad customers, whereas affiliate marketing results in a poor mix.
You can use this information to help inform a new channel decision (a new paid search channel will likely be more similar to another paid search channel then it will be to an affiliate program).
Behavioral triggers (which Custora uses) get more complicated -- but maybe we'll touch on that in a future post.
Well, yes: average CLV is important for acquisition, but using an average retention rate to calculate CLV will lead to a grossly inaccurate CLV calculation.
Disclaimer: I'm the co-founder of Custora (YC W11), and one of the keys to our product is accurate lifetime value estimation.
This is a great rundown of how to do a descriptive revenue per customer analysis.
As many have pointed out here, true CLV really needs to account for the expected value of customers as well -- not just what we have seen, but how we expect customers to behave into the future. This information can help us determine how much to spend on customer acquisition. Even better, performing the calculations across acquisition sources helps us decide where to spend our advertising dollars in future periods.
The single most important thing to recognize when building a survival model is that there isn't a constant retention rate. Instead, when customers join, some are good (slow churners) and others are bad (quick churners). The key to an accurate survival analysis (and thus, an accurate LTV number), is getting a sense of this distribution of customers.
We've just updated the post. The correct date is: Thursday, January 31st.