Today's customer acquisition thoughts:

Is it a good idea to build a business that solves a problem in a person's life stage?

IMO, usually not a great idea, but like everything else, it depends and can sometimes be quite lucrative -- more thoughts here:

1) First, some quick context - Many yrs ago, I built affiliate sites. And one category was in weddings. A lot of my learnings are from doing customer acquisition on those ideas.

I've sold bridesmaid dresses. Cake toppers. Wedding dresses. Etc.

2) "Lifestage event problems" -- problems surrounding key life events like weddings or having a baby or Quinceaneras or Bar Mitzvahs or whatever at first seem like great ideas.

These areas are often underserved, and ppl spend LOTS of $$ on lifestage events.

3) BUT there are often 2 issues that come to bear. 1 is the short "customer lifespan" of that event and the other is intense competition for customer acquisition timing.

4) Customer lifespan refers to how long a person or group has this "problem" that you are solving. I.e. ppl don't spend 20 years planning for a wedding (ok some ppl do). A person can really only be a customer for at max 1-2 years. And other events, it's more like months.

5) So that makes retention really really hard. How do you get that customer to continue to pay you after the event has happened?

And if you can't convince the customer you can serve the next stage of his/her life, then you are constantly churning through customers.

6) As a side note, I did once have a customer get married twice within a yr. She realized she made a mistake w/ the first person and then eloped w/ someone else. That was my only repeat customer for that website.

7) There are def cos that have overcome this. The Knot is a great example. After you finish your wedding, they get you over to The Nest. Then later The Bump. They do a LOT of email mktg to move you through their funnel. I'd guess this extends their cust lifetime by 3-4 yrs.

8) To mitigate, you can pick "life event issues" that have naturally longer periods of time.

For example, we've invested in 3 cos in women's health. 1 helps prevent pregnancies. Another helps women get pregnant. And the last helps women through life when they can't get pregnant

9) The second issue beyond lifespan is competition for timing and cust acq dollars.

Unlike selling other products that are not tied to an event, there's a very specific timing window. This means the cust acq competition is pretty intense.

10) In gen this is tough, but there are ways to mitigate -- a) can go after spaces that have less competition (e.g. for a long time, no one looked at women's health). b) raise a lot of money to outspend (not recommended but I see this done). c) get "virality" on your prod...which

11)...brings me to my last point which is virality can also mitigate issues of high churn.

I don't know the virality co-efficient for Zola, but I'd imagine that sending out 200 wedding invitations would enable each wedding to lead to at least 1 new customer on ave.

12) So even if Zola is constantly losing customers after a wedding, it doesn't really matter, as long as their customers continue to bring in new customers.

Their issues of lack of retention and high CAC are then solved by this.

13) TL;DR building companies around lifestage events is generally harder than other companies that don't have these constraints.

But perhaps there are clever things you can do to extend the lifespan. Or bring in new customers for near-free to mitigate churn concerns.