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Customer value and payback review
Give it first-order cohorts by month. Get repeat rate, LTV and true CAC payback, scored out of 100.
Customer value and payback review is a free AI skill for the job "Track your numbers". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.
Free · No account · Made by AI Blocks · Level: advanced · Thinking: high
What it does
Lifetime value (LTV) is the profit one customer brings you over their time with the store. Most stores work out payback by dividing CAC by one month's gross profit. That ignores customers who stop buying. In the source's example, CAC of $90 and $28 of profit a month gave 3.2 months on paper, and the cohort took about 8 months. The source says errors of 20% to 100%, and up to 200%, are common. That is one lecture's claim. This skill groups customers by first-purchase month (a cohort). It divides each later month by the cohort's starting count to get retention, builds running revenue per customer, multiplies by margin to get LTV, and finds the month cumulative profit passes CAC. It also gives a lifetime-order estimate for stores with no subscription. It extends a subscription-focused unit economics skill with that second path and the payback error check.
You give it
- Orders by first-purchase month, for each following month (a cohort table)
- Contribution or gross margin per order, and your CAC
- Monthly churn, if you sell subscriptions (optional)
- Product type, and how many months of data you have
- Your results (optional)
- Your question (optional)
You get
- A retention table and LTV per customer by month
- The cohort payback month beside the naive estimate
- LTV to CAC and the highest CAC you can afford
- A lifetime-order estimate for non-subscription customers, and a score out of 100
Use it when
- Your payback estimate says three months but the cash says longer.
- You want to know how much you can afford to pay for a customer.
- You are making a subscription or repeat-purchase offer and want to value it.
How to use it
- Start a chat with the skill. Open it if you added it to your AI, or copy it and paste it in.
- Paste or attach your cohort table, with month 0 as the first purchase.
- Add your margin per order and your CAC, and say whether any customers are on subscription.
- Read the payback month first, then the naive estimate beside it.
- Re-run it every month with a new cohort row.