Sequencing and week one — Request for Employment

Three horizons ordered by dependency rather than ambition, and the six things I'd need in the first week before any of it is worth starting.

Ordered by dependency, not by ambition. Nothing in Horizon 2 works if Horizon 1 is skipped, and once the order is written down, a reversal has to be argued for.

Horizon 1 — instrument before spending

Funnel event schema through to first credit purchase. Per-channel community response measurement, right-censored, so that a two-hour-old thread with no reply is counted as new rather than abandoned. An answer-engine citation baseline panel, built before anything is optimised against it. A retrospective on the coupon cohort, which is the one activation that has already run and is still readable.

INFERRED None of this requires new budget, and all of it is prerequisite to defending any. The weak point is one axis: if marketing touch cannot be joined to usage revenue at account level, Horizon 1 stops being a marketing project and becomes an engineering dependency with a different owner and a different timeline. That is the fourth question below, and it is the one whose answer I would want first.

Horizon 2 — prove one channel and one harvest

One paid channel taken to statistical significance behind a pre-registered holdout, rather than four channels taken to anecdote. In parallel, one high-volume community topic harvested into canonical public pages, with citation lift measured against the baseline panel from Horizon 1. Two proofs, one paid and one earned, read off the same funnel definition.

INFERRED Running them in parallel is deliberate, and it is the argument of this whole document in miniature: if the paid proof and the earned proof are measured on different funnels, the comparison between them is unavailable, and the question of how to split the next dollar has no evidence behind it.

Horizon 3 — scale what cleared, kill what didn’t, then hire

Apply the kill rule as written, without relitigating it once the failing channel has a champion. Put a standing experimentation cadence on the credit-purchase flow. Run events as a calendar with a retention metric attached rather than as a series of nights.

Hiring comes last on purpose, and it is the ordering the horizons above already argue for: a team built around a proven engine inherits a measurement, and a team built ahead of one inherits a forecast. I’d rather be judged on the first.

What I’d need in week one

Every item below is something I do not have and cannot get from outside. They are listed so that nothing else in this document reads as though it assumes an answer.

ARPU and gross margin per routed dollar. These set every CAC ceiling in the paid section, which is why that section states the rule and not the number.
Current blended CAC and channel mix, and which channels have already been tried and stopped.
Signup to first-purchase conversion, broken out by source.
Whether marketing touch can be joined to usage revenue at account level in the warehouse. If it cannot, that is the actual first project.
MEASURED The team’s own read on the 77% post-launch no-reply rate on the product-feedback forums. Capacity or deliberate triage — the two call for opposite interventions and I would not assume the first.
Whether Disallow: /seo/ conceals an existing programmatic effort, in which case the answer-engine pillar is a different pillar.

INFERRED If the answers to the first three show ARPU is bimodal — a long tail of small accounts against a short head of production apps — blended CAC is the wrong metric, and the paid section needs rewriting around segments before a dollar moves. Discovering that in month two would cost a quarter.