“LTV at this stage I think is Fairyland I think it's like pitch deck metrics because the LTV in a business that's been around for two or three years or a business that just started to invest in growth it's a guess and you can extrapolate but it's not a really good system to understand in my mind your unit economics at that moment and so we've anchored the entire team in business to payback period”

Manage paid spend by payback period — LTV at year 3 is a guess, not a metric

LTV projections for early-stage subscription businesses are extrapolations built on tiny cohorts — they feel precise but they are not. Ladder replaced LTV/CAC with payback period: how many months until gross margin from this subscriber recoups the acquisition cost? This metric is concrete, computable from real data, and drives the right daily decisions. Ladder hit profitability on a per-user basis in low single-digit months and could see it improving in real time.