SSubida Skills

Esc to close · results from all notes, skills and people

Marketing›Funnels & offers

Funnel economics "dirty math" — day-zero gross profit and the four levers

Stefan Georgi's back-of-napkin funnel math for DTC, info and high-ticket offers (CPA, day-zero AOV, COGS, gross profit), the four levers (lower CPA, lower COGS, raise AOV, raise LTV), and his peptide-funnel case that went from −$146 to +$56 per customer with three changes.

Updated 2026-10-24·1 source·unit-economicscpaaovcogsltvcroabandoned-cartdtcsupplements

Funnel economics “dirty math”

TL;DR

  • Pick the goal first: max net profit, max revenue (for a sale or exit), max new customers/leads, or a low-headache lifestyle business. The goal decides which levers you pull.
  • Know four numbers: CPA (cost per acquisition), day-zero AOV, COGS (product, fulfilment, processing fees) and the gross profit left when a customer is acquired.
  • Four levers: lower CPA (better ads, higher conversion rate, cheaper traffic, cart recovery), lower COGS, raise AOV, raise LTV.
  • Conversion rate matters only because it lowers CPA. A stable, lower CPA is what lets you scale and recruit affiliates at that CPA.
  • Find benchmarks from peers, then fix the biggest leak. In Stefan’s peptide funnel, a simpler intake flow, a better landing page and call-centre/SMS cart recovery took CPA from ~$300 to ~$98.

Details

The four numbers, with Stefan Georgi’s examples.12

OfferCPADay-zero AOVCOGSGross profit
Supplement A$150$220~$50 (22.7%)+$20
Supplement B$300$150~$50−$200
Low-ticket info$40$60~$0+$20
High-ticket (calls)$1,000$3,000$1,000 (closer, coach)+$1,000

At 100 sales a day, Supplement A is a healthy lifestyle business. Supplement B is a common launch reality, and someone with $5K saved can’t buy enough data to optimise their way out of it.34 He says low-ticket info looks alluring but is harder to scale than physical products.5

Lever 1: lower CPA.

  • Better ads (higher CTR, lower CPM). At $3K/day and a 2% conversion rate, going from 1,000 to 2,000 visitors cuts CPA from $150 to $75.67 Better creative on bought email drops works the same way.8
  • Higher conversion: sales-letter rewrites, A/B tests and journey fixes, such as a quiz that’s leaking people.8
  • Cheaper traffic: a new agency or media buyer, YouTube instead of Facebook, or affiliates who accept a lower CPA.9
  • Branded search ads. Bid on your own brand name, where buyers are checking you’re legit. Stefan expects ~$20 a sale against $80–150 elsewhere.9 SEO, Amazon and a solid web presence lower blended CPA too.10

Lever 2: lower COGS. Cutting $5 to $3 per bottle on 5-bottle orders at 1,000 sales a day is ~$300K a month. Halving merchant fees from 5% to 2.5% at that volume is ~$80–90K a month.1011

Lever 3: raise AOV. Options are “AOV close” copy pushing the biggest package, adding a 6-bottle option to a 1/3-bottle grid, a checkout order bump (a $20 supplement costing $3, or a $27 info add-on), and better upsells (a 20% → 40% take rate adds $15–25+ per buyer). Test each, because a bump can hurt upsell take-up.1213 He later argued AOV tactics backfire on Meta; see Do order bumps and upsells still pay on Meta? (AOV up, CAC up).

Lever 4: raise LTV. Use subscriptions, keep people subscribed longer, monetise the email list (affiliate deals, warm-traffic bundles) and use a phone sales team.1415 See First-order profitable or go negative? How much you can pay to acquire a customer for how rebills change what you can pay.

Case: Stefan’s telehealth peptide (GLP-1) funnel, 2024. CPA ~$300 (swinging $113–300+), first month $299 then $399, COGS $145, so −$146 per customer. 964 Facebook visitors gave 10 sales (1.04%).1516 He asked top media buyers for benchmarks and learned CPA should be ~$100.1617 Google Analytics, VWO and Hotjar showed the drop-off in the medical-intake questionnaire, and competitors’ flows had less friction.1718 His modelled path:

  1. Simplify the intake flow to double conversions → CPA $150.19
  2. Test landing-page variants to 2.5% conversion → CPA $125.20
  3. Recover abandoned carts. Of ~300 a day, a call centre (paid $125 a sale) typically converts ~20% (he models 10%), and SMS + email recover another ~5%. That’s 69 sales a day, a blended CPA of $97.82 and +$56.18 per customer.2122

New ads, affiliates, upsells such as anti-nausea add-ons, and price tests were still untouched.23

Disagreements / caveats

  • The peptide numbers are partly “hypothetical but not far off” projections made before the tests ran. They’re not results.16
  • Day-zero gross profit leaves out payroll, overhead and refunds. Compare with Hormozi’s 80% gross-margin bar for services in Gross margin targets (80%+ for services) and why small gaps are huge.
  • Branded-search and call-centre economics depend on brand demand and the category. A call centre fits high-ticket or medical offers better than a $30 product.

See also

Footnotes

  1. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 03:05 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  2. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 04:36 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  3. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 06:09 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  4. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 07:40 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  5. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 09:13 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  6. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 13:50 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  7. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 17:02 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  8. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 18:35 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2

  9. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 20:12 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2

  10. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 21:42 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2

  11. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 23:15 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  12. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 24:50 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  13. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 26:22 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  14. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 27:57 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  15. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 29:28 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2

  16. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 31:02 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  17. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 32:32 — Stefan Georgi ↩ ↩2

  18. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 34:03 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  19. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 35:36 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  20. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 37:07 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  21. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 38:44 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  22. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 40:19 — Stefan Georgi ↩

  23. Funnel Economics - “Dirty Math” and Numbers You Need to Scale in eCom and D2C @ 41:54 — Stefan Georgi ↩