Cristian Munteanu
Cristian Munteanu
Jul 28, 2025
Product-led CAC
Instead of asking how much money you can spend to buy new users, ask how much engineering time you can spend to attract them.
When most founders think about acquiring customers, they default to the marketing budget. Ads, paid search, SDRs, trade shows. Customer acquisition lives in the sales and marketing column, and the CAC becomes a cost you try to minimize.
But that framing is too narrow. One of the best places to “spend” on customer acquisition isn’t marketing — it’s product.
I often challenge founders to shift their thinking: instead of asking how much money you can spend to buy new users, ask how much engineering time you can spend to attract them. What if CAC didn’t come out of the marketing budget, but from the product roadmap?
This flips the equation. Now customer acquisition is not just a growth function. It’s a design challenge. What feature can you build that brings in users on its own? What tool, what workflow, what bit of viral magic can pull others in? Think of Dropbox’s referral system, or Calendly’s scheduling links, or Figma’s multiplayer mode. These weren’t marketing tricks. They were product decisions.
You see it in Notion’s team sharing links, which naturally pull in new users via collaboration. Or in Loom, where videos sent to colleagues become demos of the product itself. Even Stripe built its adoption by making the developer experience so smooth that engineers evangelized it themselves. These features don’t just solve a problem. They create acquisition loops.
And the payoff is huge. Because a feature that acquires users doesn’t just lower CAC. It compounds. You build it once, and it works forever. Unlike an ad campaign, you don’t have to keep feeding the meter.
This doesn’t mean you stop spending on marketing. Marketing and product-led growth aren’t either/or. They’re two sides of the same funnel. Marketing tells people you exist. Product makes them tell others. A good startup does both. But only great startups treat product as a go-to-market weapon.
The best founders I know have internalized this. They don’t just ask, “How do we sell this?” They ask, “How do we build this so it sells itself?” That question doesn’t show up in most CAC models. But it’s the one that matters most.
When most founders think about acquiring customers, they default to the marketing budget. Ads, paid search, SDRs, trade shows. Customer acquisition lives in the sales and marketing column, and the CAC becomes a cost you try to minimize.
But that framing is too narrow. One of the best places to “spend” on customer acquisition isn’t marketing — it’s product.
I often challenge founders to shift their thinking: instead of asking how much money you can spend to buy new users, ask how much engineering time you can spend to attract them. What if CAC didn’t come out of the marketing budget, but from the product roadmap?
This flips the equation. Now customer acquisition is not just a growth function. It’s a design challenge. What feature can you build that brings in users on its own? What tool, what workflow, what bit of viral magic can pull others in? Think of Dropbox’s referral system, or Calendly’s scheduling links, or Figma’s multiplayer mode. These weren’t marketing tricks. They were product decisions.
You see it in Notion’s team sharing links, which naturally pull in new users via collaboration. Or in Loom, where videos sent to colleagues become demos of the product itself. Even Stripe built its adoption by making the developer experience so smooth that engineers evangelized it themselves. These features don’t just solve a problem. They create acquisition loops.
And the payoff is huge. Because a feature that acquires users doesn’t just lower CAC. It compounds. You build it once, and it works forever. Unlike an ad campaign, you don’t have to keep feeding the meter.
This doesn’t mean you stop spending on marketing. Marketing and product-led growth aren’t either/or. They’re two sides of the same funnel. Marketing tells people you exist. Product makes them tell others. A good startup does both. But only great startups treat product as a go-to-market weapon.
The best founders I know have internalized this. They don’t just ask, “How do we sell this?” They ask, “How do we build this so it sells itself?” That question doesn’t show up in most CAC models. But it’s the one that matters most.
When most founders think about acquiring customers, they default to the marketing budget. Ads, paid search, SDRs, trade shows. Customer acquisition lives in the sales and marketing column, and the CAC becomes a cost you try to minimize.
But that framing is too narrow. One of the best places to “spend” on customer acquisition isn’t marketing — it’s product.
I often challenge founders to shift their thinking: instead of asking how much money you can spend to buy new users, ask how much engineering time you can spend to attract them. What if CAC didn’t come out of the marketing budget, but from the product roadmap?
This flips the equation. Now customer acquisition is not just a growth function. It’s a design challenge. What feature can you build that brings in users on its own? What tool, what workflow, what bit of viral magic can pull others in? Think of Dropbox’s referral system, or Calendly’s scheduling links, or Figma’s multiplayer mode. These weren’t marketing tricks. They were product decisions.
You see it in Notion’s team sharing links, which naturally pull in new users via collaboration. Or in Loom, where videos sent to colleagues become demos of the product itself. Even Stripe built its adoption by making the developer experience so smooth that engineers evangelized it themselves. These features don’t just solve a problem. They create acquisition loops.
And the payoff is huge. Because a feature that acquires users doesn’t just lower CAC. It compounds. You build it once, and it works forever. Unlike an ad campaign, you don’t have to keep feeding the meter.
This doesn’t mean you stop spending on marketing. Marketing and product-led growth aren’t either/or. They’re two sides of the same funnel. Marketing tells people you exist. Product makes them tell others. A good startup does both. But only great startups treat product as a go-to-market weapon.
The best founders I know have internalized this. They don’t just ask, “How do we sell this?” They ask, “How do we build this so it sells itself?” That question doesn’t show up in most CAC models. But it’s the one that matters most.
When most founders think about acquiring customers, they default to the marketing budget. Ads, paid search, SDRs, trade shows. Customer acquisition lives in the sales and marketing column, and the CAC becomes a cost you try to minimize.
But that framing is too narrow. One of the best places to “spend” on customer acquisition isn’t marketing — it’s product.
I often challenge founders to shift their thinking: instead of asking how much money you can spend to buy new users, ask how much engineering time you can spend to attract them. What if CAC didn’t come out of the marketing budget, but from the product roadmap?
This flips the equation. Now customer acquisition is not just a growth function. It’s a design challenge. What feature can you build that brings in users on its own? What tool, what workflow, what bit of viral magic can pull others in? Think of Dropbox’s referral system, or Calendly’s scheduling links, or Figma’s multiplayer mode. These weren’t marketing tricks. They were product decisions.
You see it in Notion’s team sharing links, which naturally pull in new users via collaboration. Or in Loom, where videos sent to colleagues become demos of the product itself. Even Stripe built its adoption by making the developer experience so smooth that engineers evangelized it themselves. These features don’t just solve a problem. They create acquisition loops.
And the payoff is huge. Because a feature that acquires users doesn’t just lower CAC. It compounds. You build it once, and it works forever. Unlike an ad campaign, you don’t have to keep feeding the meter.
This doesn’t mean you stop spending on marketing. Marketing and product-led growth aren’t either/or. They’re two sides of the same funnel. Marketing tells people you exist. Product makes them tell others. A good startup does both. But only great startups treat product as a go-to-market weapon.
The best founders I know have internalized this. They don’t just ask, “How do we sell this?” They ask, “How do we build this so it sells itself?” That question doesn’t show up in most CAC models. But it’s the one that matters most.
