Startup OS #16 | How 7-Figure Brands Use 5 Simple Metrics to Scale Predictably 📈

Scaling an ecommerce brand doesn’t start with bigger ad budgets — it starts with better visibility.

The fastest-growing brands I’ve worked with — from Seedlip to Live It Up — all had one thing in common:

1. They didn’t wait until the end of the month to “see how things were going.”

2. They tracked five key numbers every single week — and made decisions in real time.

Because when you know your metrics, you control your growth. When you don’t, your brand controls you.

That’s what today's newsletter is about. But before we get into it..

I’ve started sharing more of these frameworks on YouTube — short, practical videos breaking down the exact systems I’ve used to scale brands past seven figures.

Please go like, comment & subscribe - and if you have any feedback or topics you want me to cover, I’d love to hear from you!

Here’s one recent video is called The 5-Step Blueprint to Your First $1M Ecommerce Store:

Metric #1: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

How much you spend to acquire a new customer.
This is your North Star for paid growth.

🧮 Formula:
Total Ad Spend ÷ Number of New Customers

🎯 Target:
Your CAC should be no higher than 35–40% of your AOV for a healthy payback period.

📊 Action:
Track CAC by channel (Meta, Google, TikTok). If one’s trending up week-over-week, pause and review your creative testing cadence.

Metric #2: Conversion Rate (CVR)

The percentage of visitors who make a purchase.

🧮 Formula:
Total Orders ÷ Total Sessions × 100

🎯 Target:
2–4% for DTC stores, higher for niche or returning traffic.

📊 Action:
Install Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity. Watch 5 recordings of your product page sessions this week — note where people stop scrolling. That’s where you’re leaking sales.

Metric #3: Average Order Value (AOV)

How much each customer spends per purchase.
Small tweaks here can double your revenue overnight.

🧮 Formula:
Total Revenue ÷ Number of Orders

🎯 Target:
Increase 10–15% with bundles, post-purchase upsells, or free shipping thresholds.

📊 Action:
Add an “Upgrade & Save” bundle above your “Add to Cart” button. Track AOV for 7 days and compare.

Metric #4: Lifetime Value (LTV)

The total revenue a customer generates over their entire journey.
Your most important long-term growth driver.

🧮 Formula:
Average Order Value × Average Purchase Frequency

🎯 Target:
Your LTV:CAC ratio should be at least 3:1 to scale sustainably.

📊 Action:
Audit your post-purchase email flow. If there’s no upsell or replenishment email within 10 days, you’re missing your easiest LTV lift.

Metric #5: Retention Rate

The percentage of customers who come back and buy again.
If you’re always chasing new customers, your acquisition model breaks.

🧮 Formula:
Returning Customers ÷ Total Customers

🎯 Target:
25–35% at 90 days for consumer products.

📊 Action:
Set up a “Winback” flow in Klaviyo that triggers 45 days after purchase with a soft reminder — “It might be time to restock.”

Why These 5 Matter Together

Most founders look at their metrics in isolation — CAC one week, conversion the next, maybe LTV if they remember.
But the truth is, these five numbers are connected. When one moves, the others move with it. Understanding how they interact is what separates the brands that scale from the ones that stall.

When your conversion rate increases, your CAC automatically drops. You’re simply getting more customers from the same ad spend.
When your average order value grows, your profit per customer rises — meaning you can afford to spend more to acquire the next one.
And when your retention and lifetime value increase, you expand your overall growth capacity. Every returning customer adds new cash flow, which lets you reinvest more confidently into acquisition.

Think of it like a flywheel:

• Conversion fuels profitability.

• Profitability fuels confidence to spend.

• Retention multiplies every pound you spend on ads.

That’s the compounding engine of ecommerce — and it only works when you can see all five metrics together.

When brands like DIRTEA or Lucky Saint scaled, they didn’t just have one channel working — they had the feedback loops between these numbers dialed in.

They tracked how every change in CAC, CVR, AOV, and LTV affected the others. When conversion ticked up, they noticed CAC falling. When AOV increased, they knew they could test higher ad budgets.

Each week became a small feedback cycle — learn, adjust, expand.

And that’s the real secret:

Growth doesn’t come from huge, sporadic wins. It comes from small, consistent improvements across these metrics — and the discipline to track them together as one system.

That’s the difference between guessing your way to £100k and engineering your way to £1M.

Talk soon,
Robert

Thank you for reading. I hope this becomes useful reading before the work week starts again.

Feel free to DM me here.

Have a great week,

Robert