The numbers in the headline are real. The story behind them is less interesting than the numbers suggest and more useful than the tactic implies.
I ran a $10M+ marketing budget at GOJEK at a time when the company needed to grow new user acquisition and reduce spend in the same year. The result was a 32% reduction in marketing spend with a 27% YoY lift in new user acquisition.
People sometimes ask me what the clever tactic was. There wasn't one. There was a discipline.
What the discipline looked like
Most marketing orgs run a portfolio of channels, each with its own owner, each defending its budget on internal metrics that the channel owner controls. The org-wide CAC looks reasonable because the bad channels are subsidized by the good ones, and no one has the standing to call this out.
The discipline was to stop subsidizing.
The mechanics
Three things, in order:
- Build a unified view of CAC, contribution margin, and LTV by channel — owned by a central team, not the channel owners
- Set a per-channel CAC ceiling tied to LTV, not to historical performance
- Cut any channel-week that breached the ceiling for two consecutive weeks, no exceptions, no narrative defense
The third one is the cultural lift. Channel owners are not used to being told their budget gets cut next Monday because the math says so. The first time you do this it is genuinely uncomfortable. The second time it becomes a process.
A budget cut that's tied to a clear, pre-agreed rule isn't a punishment. It's a discipline. The team that internalizes this stops defending channels and starts proposing experiments.
Why this grew acquisition
Cutting weak channels freed capital that the strong channels could absorb productively. The same dollar that was producing a $9 CAC in one channel was producing a $4 CAC in another. Shifting it didn't require a new strategy; it required permission to stop running the weak channel.
That permission was the actual unlock.
What the playbook isn't
This is not a "cut your way to growth" story. There's a version of this discipline that strips muscle along with fat, and I've seen orgs that did it. The difference is what you protect.
Things to protect when you cut:
- Brand investments with diffuse measurement that you have good prior reason to believe are working
- Experimentation budget, even when finance asks why
- Tooling and analytics infrastructure, because the discipline collapses without measurement
Things to cut without sentiment:
- Channels that have been defended on the same narrative for three quarters
- Agency relationships that have stopped producing fresh thinking
- Audience expansions that haven't moved the underlying CAC in two cycles
The hardest part
The hardest part of this work is political, not analytical. The math is straightforward once the data is clean. The challenge is being the person who tells a peer team that their budget is getting cut on Monday because of a rule everyone agreed to in January.
Most growth leaders don't have the stomach for that conversation. The ones who do tend to produce numbers like the ones in this headline.
That's the whole tactic.