Paid Ads — Chaos Era Funnel
Paid acquisition strategy for the 2026 Chaos Era. Designed around a single hard constraint: fully-loaded acquisition cost (ad spend + delivery cost) must be recovered by the customer’s first bill, with Day 60 as the outer-bound average.
Status: planned. No paid ads deployed yet as of May 2026.
What’s in this folder
paid-ads-formula.md— the planning document. Core constraint, funnel timing, first-bill revenue math, delivery cost, decline-at-delivery tax, conversion cascade, max CAC by audit-to-acceptance rate, channel viability, the annual-mix lever, cash-float requirements, validation unknowns
The core constraint
Total acquisition cost must be recovered by the first bill, with Day 60 as the outer-bound average. This is non-negotiable.
This is unusual in SaaS — most paid funnels rely on 6-18 month payback assumptions and bet on retention. We’re betting on the first transaction alone. Everything beyond is pure margin.
What this means in practice
- Cold acquisition channels (Meta, Google search, LinkedIn) are mostly unprofitable at Day-60 payback
- Retargeting and the lowest-cost slice of YouTube TrueView are the only reliably-viable cold channels
- The annual-vs-monthly mix is the single highest-leverage lever in the funnel — every percentage point shift toward annual moves max-CAC dramatically
How this connects
- Front of funnel: church-chaos-index audit at churchchaos.com is the conversion event paid traffic drives toward
- Conversion mechanics: makeover-funnel is what runs after the audit
- Distribution leverage: existing organic audience (see company) keeps retargeting CAC low enough to make math work