Luis Camacho: Building a Fast, Scalable Growth Campaign For Unforgettable SaaS Companies

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Thanks again, folks. Thanks. Hello, hello everyone. This is your host, Akeel Jabbar, and welcome back to another episode of SaaS District. In today's episode, we'll be talking about building a fast, scalable growth campaign for unforgettable SaaS companies. Today we have our guest, Luis Camacho, joining us. Luis is the founder and CEO of Phantom Agency. Which is an elite digital marketing agency for SaaS and B2B companies alongside the strongest community where they help SaaS companies over the $20K MRR mark who are trying to scale up via predictable and strategically thought-out customer acquisition process. Luis has helped many SaaS companies increase lead and subscription volume, penetrate new markets, decrease CACs, decrease churn, and become recognized brands within their vertical through paid media. Aside from consulting and growing companies through Phantom, he's also mentored hundreds of people via multiple platforms, including Growth Mentor as well as AdLeaks. So welcome, Luis. Super excited to have you on the SaaS District show today.

Thanks so much, Akeel. Pleasure to be here. Kind of a long-winded introduction there, but I appreciate it. Um, yeah, super happy to be here, man. I've seen you in multiple places, um, you know, with other great people in the software Uh, space, right? Nathan Latka, for example, a huge fan of them. So it's a pleasure to be here with you.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, we always like to do the fun long intros to put people in an awkward situation, start this off. Uh, so, uh, so, you know, let's start off. Tell us about your background, your experience at Growth Mentor. Uh, you've also founded GetAds and how you discovered the opportunity for launching your own agency, Phantom.

Yeah. So I think Uh, marketing has always been part of me. Um, and, and maybe, you know, I think it sometimes goes back to my dad. He, he's a, he, he, he was marketing, uh, advertising for big semiconductor companies. And I never really knew what he did when I was little and just kind of, you know, it was almost like a mystery. Like I never knew what to ask. Like, what, what am I even supposed to ask my dad? Like, what does he do and stuff like that? Um, so that was kind of cool. And then I went into, uh, marketing advertising, I think at an early age.

Right.

So I think in, Uh, like late high school, early college, I started playing around with the idea of like creating an online, um, you know, before it was cool to start like clothing companies online. And I started doing that very early and it was good. I got a little tired of it for a while and I started to like target the wrong people, uh, eventually leading to just like, I fell in love more with the process of marketing the actual thing than You know, the thing itself, which was the clothing, right? And so I kind of started going into that route. This was when I was in college, so I still—I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do. I really liked fitness, kind of wanted to go into like nutrition stuff like that, but I didn't see it as lucrative of a career. I guess you could say like nutrition or like cooking or something like that. And I really liked business too, just from like you know growing little company early on. And so I started going into that. I remember I had a. friend in college tell me that getting into the agency space was really difficult. And I'm a person who likes challenges, and that kind of drove me to, you know, oh, well, now I want to get into an agency. So I started looking for local agencies, started working at a couple, and then when I was there, really, like, I realized I really liked doing that, right? Working with a lot of different companies, helping them grow, and seeing, like, where they go from, you know, the day they sign a contract to whenever they decide to leave the company or stay there forever. Uh, some companies stay there, some other companies just hire, uh, you know, internally. But I started to learn the ins and outs of, you know, what does the agency space do? What do they all do? What's the problems, right? Like they all had very broken processes. And I think this is still an issue with most agencies, especially when they're full service, because there's so many moving pieces. Um, and that kind of leads to me in the background, um, working on Phantom Agency, right? And the name there kind of a little bit of a play because it was a conflict of interest. So I had to keep it, you know, it was a ghost. Nobody knew about it.

Okay.

Which is kind of cool. And, uh, so started working on that. Then I had the opportunity to work another agency that was fully remote, which I enjoyed. Um, but also gave me more time to work on Phantom at the same time. So started building that out, looking at the processes they were doing, how they were dealing with clients, communication and all those things. Um, and same thing, right? They were full service. They did SEO, creative, all these different things, but they're always there wasn't like a very— it was collaborative, but something always seemed to go wrong, whether it was client side or like internally, there was always like too many moving pieces to keep track of everything.

Yeah.

And what I was really passionate about and what I was doing at both of those agencies was paid media, right? So I fell in love with just all the analytics, um, the, the, the buying process, the creative process behind putting campaigns together. And I realized, you know, like, this is what I want to do. And I don't want to deal with everything else that, you know, SEO and, and I wasn't an expert at that other stuff. Right. So I didn't, I naturally didn't want to like dive into it either because trying to build everything was already super, super busy and time-consuming. Um, so fast forward while I was at those companies, at those agencies, I worked with a couple of software companies too. And I think that was the type of client that I enjoyed working most. Um, they understood technology well, right? So like all the little, uh, more technical stuff that goes behind the scenes, they, they, naturally understood. Um, they like to work online, which I liked, and it just made the entire remote process a lot easier, um, which was cool. And so started doing that, um, started growing the podcast too, interviewing people, becoming more of an integral part of the community and stuff like that. Um, which kind of like led here now, right? And you mentioned GetAds. Um, so GetAds is essentially, you've, you guys, some of you may have heard of Design Pickle or like Pengi and companies like that where they are offer creative, uh, unlimited, right, in quotation marks, creative. Um, which I found really cool. And we used them because, like I said, we didn't do any sort of creative, but there were some issues that we noticed with that specifically. Um, which was sometimes in regards to quality, right? Um, specifically with advertising, because that's everything that we use them for. And the people that designed for them, they're kind of like, you know, jack of all trades, master of none, where they could design everything, but the ads. Like, if you wanted something really good, something specific, they didn't really understand advertising. I think it's hard to really grasp, and the people that were designing didn't really get it. Um, so I saw this, this big disconnect between, you know, like clients, um, delivering creative for us essentially, right, the agency, or we building because we didn't have the team. So just Built that process. And now GetAds is really a frictionless, you know, banner design service that you subscribe to. You can get, you know, as of now it's like 3 brands on the basic, on the basic one. And it's usually, it's mostly aimed towards agencies, but we do have a couple of products that are using it. Um, but people are liking it so far and trying to work on also, um, being able to produce video ads for, for people as well. But the main focus is advertising, right? Which keeps the process very, very simple and seamless for us.

It's good.

Instead of having to work on landing pages and brochures and all these different things.

Right. Yeah. We have more focus too.

Right. Uh, I feel like I'm just blabbing on here, but the other thing that you mentioned was Growth Mentor. Um, so a lot of the things that have happened for us, right, have, have kind of been fueled by the podcast, um, SaaS Ad Lab. Um, and that's where I met Foti. He's the founder, co-founder. I'm not entirely sure. I think co-founder of Growth Mentor, which is a community of Um, really a lot of growth marketers, right? So you have anywhere from like paid media to SEO to like CRO, very like product design, UX, all those different things. Um, and he, he, he did a really amazing job, uh, just building that marketplace out. And now it's a, it's a really close-knit community. Um, and what I do there, a lot of times, um, earlier stage companies, mostly startups come You know, on the platform looking for help, whether it's for paid advertising or, you know, CRO and all that other stuff. But I've been able to mentor people through there, um, pretty much on a daily basis, right? Just, they have some basic questions. They don't really know where to start with advertising and stuff like that. So it's just, you know, it's a sounding board and they can come there and just get answers very quickly, which is pretty cool.

Very cool. You know, before getting more into the details of the paid ads, you know, I just want to speak about, you know, conversion rate optimization because, you know, at Horizon Capital, one of our growth playbooks is CRO or conversion rate optimization, which is usually the first kind of channel we like to apply. So whether it's landing, you know, design, copy, you know, pricing optimization, we look at that as kind of the lowest hanging fruit to generate the quick wins. What does your CRO process look like? Because, you know, as part of the entire funnel, I'm assuming that's Quite important. You can control a lot on the ad side, but if your entire funnel is not kind of fine-tuned, um, you know, you're not, you're not going to get the best results. What are some general areas you see SaaS companies maybe failing at optimizing for in their entire funnel?

So I think it's important to know, right? I feel like CRO typically has a connotation of being tied specifically with like website-specific things, um, or landing pages, right? Where it's like, oh, you're going to tweak this. It's a CRO element or something like that. But CRO can be far Um, beyond just website and landing page stuff. Uh, and we do, uh, in, in certain cases we do design landing pages for our clients. It's not something we do all the time, mostly because, uh, software companies do typically have very, very good homepages and they've been converting, uh, et cetera. But at landing page level, right? Like we do zero there. If we're working with a client and we notice a big area of opportunity, we'll bring it up and say, hey, like, this is something I think we should try out. Um, let's run an A/B test.

Right.

And all, most of our CRO process is backed with some sort of experiment slash A/B test, uh, just because you get that back-to-back data that you can compare apples to apples essentially. Right. So it's landing page CRO, uh, whether it's, you know, let's test the free trial or a free demo, whatever the case may be. Uh, it can go to testing different bidding strategies. And we were actually touching on this right before the podcast started recording. Right. But you have different bidding strategies on things like display or PPC campaigns, right? You got Google, Facebook, and all those different things. And when people are starting off right off the bat, they don't really know the differences between these. But for example, you could do something where, you know, and again, this is an experiment, right? So it's split. I mean, you can split it multiple ways, but typically we like to do a 50/50 split between, uh, whatever variants we're testing. So we're talking about, say, a manual CPC where you want to control whatever you're bidding for, you know, each specific keyword or the other Other option would be, you know, uh, um, maximize conversions where essentially you're letting the system, in this case Google, right, bid whatever it needs to bid in order to get as many conversions as possible for whatever budget you have set at the campaign level. So that's another type of CRO. Like we're trying to see, you know, what we, how we can see some sort of increase in conversions, uh, through just like different bidding strategies. Same thing with Google, or sorry, same thing with Facebook. You can do the same thing there. Um, and also with creative testing, right? So that's one of the things that we're trying to push now more of, uh, and mainly because of the things that are happening with Apple iOS 14 and like tracking capabilities, right? So I think a lot of it is going to come down to like in the past, um, advertisers kind of had A little bit of an easy time, uh, because the systems were so, um, just advanced, right? Like you have Google, you have Facebook, you have these crazy targeting methods. So like in the past, right, like you were able to target people based on income on Facebook, like very specific income levels. Now you only get, uh, you know, like what? you know, percentage they're in, uh, in the socioeconomic kind of like bracket. Um, so it's less specific. Uh, you were able to target people based on what car they drove, what year the car was and stuff like that. Right. You can't really do that stuff anymore. So people need to get more creative. Um, so really doing A/B testing at the creative level, right? Different, uh, creative assets, different videos, different ad copy targeting different angles. So I feel like advertising is slowly going back to what it used to be back in the, you know, like more traditional times where you had to be creative and you didn't have like, oh, this person drives a 2016 Honda. So let's target them with a light bulb for that car specifically or something like that. But yeah, so a lot of SEO on that level. And like I said, content copy, stuff like that.

If you were to give a weight, just to add to that, when you're doing a conversion rate optimization, how much weight would you give the value of the copy Versus the actual like design, how much, uh, you know, output does that, does that generate? 50/50?

It's hard to put a number on it because typically what we like to do, right? Like we'll write the copy first and we've noticed different processes for people. Um, because like specifically now that we rolled out GetAds, because people will ask for a design before they have copy written. And what we've always done is we write copy and then we get the design to be designed specifically for that piece of copy so that it's very cohesive, it's congruent. Um, and, and it's just contextual, right? Like you don't want to have an image that says something and then add copy that completely like touches on a different pain point or angle or something like that. Um, so it's something that I think we're like, we're very specific on it. And when, I would say they, they have equal weight, right? Like if somebody's going on an ad and they only see the image, you want them to be able to get the same value than they would if they didn't see the image and they just read the ad copy.

Right. Yeah. It just kind of adds emphasis to the actual copy. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, so with paid So with paid media specifically, what channels are you generally finding the best success for, you know, B2B SaaS companies on an ROI basis, whether that's cost per trial, cost per demo, lead basis? And because I know you work with across, right? Like LinkedIn, you work with Facebook, you work with Google Ads. What are you seeing kind of better results with?

So better results we've always seen, and everybody's gonna, like anybody you ask is gonna say the same thing, right? It's gonna be search. Very clear, um, reason that there's just intent, right? Like you have people that are actively searching for whatever it is you offer. Um, so it just, you're not going to get anything like you could potentially see more results. Like what we've seen typically, right? Like we will see, you know, better CPAs or CPLs, right? Cost per leads on Facebook, which is cool. Um, But you still get a better actual conversion from, say, a free trial to a paid signup, or from a lead to a paid signup from Google, because they were already looking for that solution. Whereas, yeah, we have a 60% cheaper lead on Facebook, but they're not gonna convert at as high a rate. So it's, you're still looking at the, without the math involved, you're still looking at a very similar CPA essentially.

Mm-hmm.

Like if we're going off vanity metrics only, right. But you said, uh, obviously return on investment, uh, definitely search. Um, there's, there's no doubt about it, especially like it's harder too when you have really long sales cycles, because then things start to get foggy. Uh, your attribution models aren't going to be as clear as, you know, if you sign up and you start your paid account within 7 days, it's very different than If you sign up for a free trial and, or maybe not a free trial, but a demo, right? Where you don't have like a cutting date and you don't sign and you don't end up signing up for another 3 or 6 months, then that's a very different story. Uh, and your attribution, you know, like reports are gonna, they're going to trick you. Um, so you don't really know where things are coming from. You start to kind of lose track of, you know, which one is actually the more, um, sustainable channel. And I feel like that's where we've had most of the, like, what do you call it? Like more difficulty with clients, right? It's really figuring out, and then they'll start to, you know, try to, try to do cohorts by, okay, let's pause this campaign on Facebook and let's see how Google does alone. But the thing is, when they tell you to pause it, you're pausing it for 1 month. But if they have a 3-month sales cycle, then you still kind of, you know, you don't really know. And maybe you're getting sales from Facebook that were signed up in the past 3 months. So it's, it's, it's a little foggy, but, um, definitely search is like the quickest win. The other one is retargeting, right? Like these are people that had previously been on the website. Um, and we do something that we call like high-intent retargeting. So we're not just retargeting people that have been on the website, you know, the past 90 days, right? Like if we're able to, and we have the data, we'll target people that have visited specific pages. Uh, and we'll ask this too of our clients is, are there any blog posts or any pieces of content on your website that you have specifically seen, you know, lead to a higher conversion rate? Like, and this is a good exercise for anybody that's out there trying to figure out even like, how can we get more, more signups? Uh, in reality, just go back specifically with paid, right? Go back. Look at your traffic, uh, the behavior and like the flow maps and see where are people dropping off? What's the like hottest content piece that you have on your, on your website? And just put that in front of more people. If you're seeing that, you know, this is converting at a 10% higher rate than all the other content, there's a reason for it. So, you know, make more like marketing collateral from that, turn that into a white paper, turn ebook, and just distribute it as lead magnet. And then you, You're gonna see, you know, ideally a very similar conversion rate from those people, even if they're somewhat cold, given, you know, you have a good lead nurturing process.

Yeah, that makes sense. And then when you're coming into these, these new, you know, B2B SaaS companies, you're looking at their, their funnel of what they have in place. Generally, when you're coming in, what's the best strategy in most cases? Are you, you know, a newly set up campaign where you can start from scratch, or do you prefer coming in where they have a a funnel and you can go and just optimize it?

Oh, definitely. When they already have stuff going, it makes the job way easier. Like a lot of times when, when companies, um, well, it depends though. Like if you come in and they have a pretty good grasp on what they're doing, it's really cool because you just take a look and see, okay, like what needs to be optimized here? Like what new things need to be set up? But sometimes it's very minimal compared to, you know, when you're going completely fresh. I mean, the setup is, it's time-consuming, but typically it's very straightforward. Um, but the only thing is you don't have anything to base off results from, right? In the past, like if a new client signs up and they have a lot of data that we can take a look at, we you know, immediately know, okay, we need to turn this back on. We need to turn this off. Uh, we need to restructure this right here, or what do we do with this? Um, when you don't have that, you're not really shooting blind in the beginning, but you just don't have like that baseline that I think most marketers would, would like to have, right? Because they have somewhere to base their judgment off of.

That makes complete sense. And then I know a lot of SaaS companies that when they set up their new campaigns, they're, I guess they're kind of struggling to establish like a baseline or measuring the performance mainly because I feel they change or they cancel or they modify campaigns way too early. In your opinion, how often should you be testing and modifying and what kind of metrics should we really be paying attention to whether it's general goals you want to achieve per campaign or Or just kind of general metrics, then you say, okay, we need to, we need to start making changes and start fine-tuning the campaign.

Right. So I think, I think people, it's like, it's a hard, I feel like it's a loaded question because there's, there's so many different scenarios. Um, but let's, let's say, like, I'm just trying to keep it as broad as possible, like with what we see most often. Um, Well, for example, people definitely, I think, turn things way too— turn things off way too quick. Um, and that usually comes from a place of not having confidence in what they're doing, right? Like, and typically, like, especially for earlier stage companies, like the founder will be the one messing around with, with like advertising stuff. He doesn't really, like, he's read a couple of blog posts. Um, he doesn't like, he, he just doesn't have confidence in what he's doing. So he won't wait it out too long before he kind of starts to feel that pain. Uh, you know, like, oh, I'm just losing money here.

Um, but I want to get specific. Like, uh, like if you're, are you looking at like cost per lead? Are you looking for cost per, like, are you spending $500 and you say, look, I'm getting zero conversions. I'm not getting, or is it the cost per, you know, CTR rate? Is it the CPC, the cost per click? And then you're like, okay, this is the CPC is just way too high. And, uh, you know, I spent $1,000 and it's not worth it. Or like, what are, what are you looking at?

It depends again. Right. Like, if your product is— so it kind of goes back to the lifetime value thing.

Mm-hmm.

If somebody, you know, has a product that has an LTV of $5,000 and they're spending money, I feel like I would be spending maximum a third of that to see if I get anything from it. Right. But the thing is like, it's a very long period of time. So the other thing is, I think the amount of budget that you're spending, the rate at which you're spending is important because somebody has LTV $5,000, they're spending $1,000 a month. Right. And for some reason, I don't know why, that's usually what people are spending when they first start off. Right. Oh, let's just throw $1,000 at this. Like that's the magic number. Number. Um, and when that doesn't work, they kind of pause things for a while and then they start scrambling at new things. But like you said, like usually I would be looking at cost per lead, right? Um, the thing with that is like the cost per lead for a $5,000 LTV product can sometimes be a little expensive and people don't realize that. Um, and the reason they don't realize is because they're usually not tracking that because they haven't done advertising in the past. Right. And a lot of, At least products that I've worked with, they're not actually tracking their human capital, um, you know, as an expense. So they don't see the actual cost of a lead generated if they're not running advertising campaigns or something like that. So it's, it kind of, it puts it into a foggy, um, situation, I think. But I would like— Definitely pause too soon. Um, they don't let the campaigns run long enough. And when they do, like, they don't know what things to tweak because they're not, they're not, they're not, they don't understand what they're looking at. Right. Um, I think from a very starting point, like things that they should be looking at to see if their advertising, um, you know, efforts are being well taken by the audience is take a look at click-through rates. Like, um, you know, you, you're seeing whether or not people are resonating with this. If you, if you're seeing like, 2, 3% click-through rates is doing okay. If you can get it like 5 or above that, you're probably in a really good spot. Aside from that, you're looking at things like your cost per lead and stuff like that. But I would say people definitely pause things way too fast.

So what is the magic time? So you mentioned, say $1,000 a month for 3 months. How long should they be waiting for? How much time should they wait to see that results and improvement? Before, you know, pausing it or shutting it off.

$1,000 for 3 months.

I would say like, it doesn't have to be that number. It could be in general. Yeah. Okay. Let's say $10,000 and you're spending it in a month. If you got $10,000, you want to spend it in a month.

I would say, you know, like $10,000 or $5,000 in a month. That's a pretty good amount of money in one channel, right? Like you, like, then you're saying $10,000 and spread it out between 3 channels. It's not a lot of money. Um, but yeah, like $10,000, $5,000 per channel. If you're spending that within a month, like, I think you have enough data to make a pretty educated decision whether something or not is working.

Mm-hmm.

Um, now if you're spending more money than that, right, like in some cases that tends to be like baby money, right? Like you're looking at big companies spending that in a month, on a daily basis. Um, if you are, like, I think of money as a resource to speed things up, right? Um, you can, throw $10,000 into one thing and learn very quickly whether or not it's going to work. Um, so I think if, if you, if you have the capacity, like if you're a very well-funded, uh, SaaS company and you're able to like test things out that way, definitely do it. Um, because you're going to figure things out faster and you're just buying yourself time essentially. Um, but yeah, I think a month is a, it's like typically when we run experiments, Right. Uh, like it depends on traffic and stuff like that, but usually like a benchmark from, and you'll see this across the board on like, on things like Google or Facebook, right. They'll give you like, they'll pre-fill when it's over and it's usually that 4-week mark. So it's usually about a month. I would say it's a, it's a good enough testing period to, to find out whether or not something's working.

Got it. So you should, you should be, you should thinking of this as a commitment for at least a month and a decent amount of budget. Like you said, at least $5,000 for $10,000.

Right.

Um, is there any instances where, you know, B2B SaaS companies where you think it's not a good idea and it's not a good strategy to actually run paid media campaigns? If so, what is— when do you see that?

Yeah, I think, um, and I think a lot of advertisers can relate to this, and it's like the biggest nightmare. Um, but whenever the company doesn't actually have A whole of their sales process, right? A lot of the times, like, they'll try to— it's funny because in the past, like, marketing and sales were completely separate from each other. Like, you wouldn't blend the two. Like, you'd never see that in the past. Nowadays, everybody thinks that marketing equates to sales, and in some cases it's true, right? Um, but I I think that's usually more the case with like smaller products. Like I'm talking about like direct-to-consumer, uh, you know, like e-commerce type of things where there's a very short sales cycle. Like you can be very direct response in, in the sense that somebody will see the ad and you can make them want it right away. Um, in B2B, it's a different game because you're showing something. A lot of the times the person you're showing it to is not the decision maker, um, depending, right? I think whether you have like a bottoms-up product or a top-down product, like you have to know who you're going after.

Hmm.

Um, but I think that the worst thing that, you know, companies can do is spend money on marketing, on advertising specifically, and expect a sale, especially if they've not cracked that sales process. Like if you're not seeing sales just come from whatever you're doing now, I don't think you should expect to see them come from advertising, um, because you need to be able to sell those people, right? And it makes sense. So one of the things that we look at is like, if you don't have like lead nurturing campaigns, um, probably not the time for you to start advertising.

And does your marketing strategy change or your campaign change, like how you approach the, the entire kind of strategy when the LTV values are different? Let's say You know, $500 versus $5,000 versus $10,000, do you look at it differently?

Yes, for the most part. Um, I would say whenever you— like, I think marketing strategy doesn't have to change as much as the expectations have to change, right? Um, like a lot of times it's for bigger products like that, like bigger LTVs, you want to go, uh, and it depends too on the sales process, right? Um, if you have a top-down sales process, I think content is very, very important because you want that content to make its way into the person that will eventually be making that decision. When you have a bottoms-up, uh, like sales process, like Slack or anything like that, you can, I think you can get away with things like free trials and, you know, very direct response things. Um, because you're, you're wanting to get that user to sign up. And then that's when the product kind of takes a life of its own, right? It starts to make its way into like other people into the company. Um, but I think for like longer LTVs, like definitely, uh, like content and just think of it as the top of the funnel approach where you need to do a lot of education before you can sell that product. Uh, so same thing, like longer, like Like lead nurturing cycles, longer sales cycles. Um, but I think content is a good place to play for those people that do have those like longer sales cycles. And I think typically a longer sales cycle equates to a higher LTV. Um, and that's when you see like a lot of enterprise companies do a lot of content, like, oh, here's like the benchmark report for 2021 and stuff like that, that they push on things like LinkedIn and Facebook.

Makes sense. Um, so I want to kind of put this all together and using kind of a specific example, if let's say, You know, whenever somebody in our audience has a B2B SaaS company, maybe their average LTV of $5,000 and their entire sales cycle, let's call it 40 days. So from the time they become a lead to maybe they go through a demo to then actually, you know, pay to sign up, uh, how do you, you know, can you just walk us through an example of how you'd approach getting this baseline and maybe structure that campaign? What are you looking at?

So typically I would say like there's not enough data, right, to, to like Like we go back to the client and say like, what's your churn rate? Like, what's your, you know, like I would love to see previous marketing, uh, um, what do you call it? Like data to kind of create that benchmark and also ask for like conversion rates and things like that from them to see, okay, how can we actually pull up any sort of projections for this where, you know, we're going to be making decisions based off of, um, if it's Like that, I would say, you know, you take a look at your, uh, like, I feel like this is an industry benchmark of like 1, uh, LTV ratio of 1 to 3, right? Where you don't want to spend more than a third to get that specific acquisition. So I would just keep that in mind for, for, you know, most of these things. And you can spend a little above because I feel like sometimes Right as you start to get to that 1/3, um, you know, of the LTV, I feel like people start to hit that tipping point and they start to see those results kind of slowly trickle in. Um, so definitely, like, if, if you're gonna be like spending money, just keep that, you know, keep that number in the back of your head, um, as a good benchmark to just kind of aim at. Obviously, if you can do better than that, you know, by all means, um, no reason to increase your, your CAC just because you want to be part of that benchmark. But, um, yeah, I I definitely just like, I think in this case it'd be about $1,600. So I'd aim for that $1,600 CAC, right? And by CAC meaning an actual paid signup, not a cost per lead, and just do the math, you know, to get to that cost per lead essentially.

Makes sense. And then when you're coming into these campaigns, uh, you know, maybe they already have an existing funnel in place. What do you say are some of the main reasons why SaaS companies are maybe, you know, that, that their efforts has failed or maybe are underperforming?

I think it comes down to like a lot— you mean they already have everything set up and they're now they're trying to advertise and they see some, some—

No, they have it. Let's say it's that founder you were talking about. He tried to do it himself, he ran it for 3 months, and then you go in and you say, look, uh, what are you seeing wrong there? What have you seen that why they've underperformed? And other than, you know, giving it more time Uh, what do you typically see wrong that they're doing?

Honestly, I think in those cases, typically it's the, the way that they approach it and the way that they, um, they structure the campaigns, right? So a lot of times it's like there's not a lot of thought into it. They just go in, like, for example, like usually you would, you, um, you structure your campaign in a way that you can see what's driving any sort of performance, right? Like you want to break out your audiences. You want to break out, you know, age groups. If you can, like the more granular you get, the better results you're going to see, uh, in the long term, because you can see where things are coming from. Uh, and you can, you can break things out after the fact, but I think starting off with a good structure is one of the most important things because you're able to see, okay, uh, maybe a specific city is driving all the sales, right? So you want to be able to, to throw more money at that. And a lot of times it's The same thing, like just kind of shooting blindly in a sense that like even though they're targeting everything that they need to target, they're not breaking it out. So they don't actually know what's happening. So if they get a lead for, I don't know, say $100, but that's above budget, they don't know where it came from and the likelihood that it came from a place that is a place, an audience, you know, a factor or whatever that is. viable, but they don't know. So they don't, they don't really know where it came from. So it's just usually it's account structure. Um, a lot of the times it's not having like the right messaging to the people that are going after. Um, and a lot of times it's just not knowing their numbers too. Like they just, they just go in and spend money and think they're gonna get something back, but But they don't know the actual math behind it. So that kind of, you know, doesn't really put them in a good place.

So it sounds like tracking and attribution seems to be a major problem for a lot of founders.

Tracking too. Yeah. Um, a lot of the times, and one of the things that I like to tell people, like, I think by the time, you know, they do start, um, getting on with advertising agency or they bring somebody on board to do this, it's like, it's too late. Um, but I think being able to like, just like if you're in a, in a position where, you know, you're eventually going to advertise, I think one of the best practices that people can do is start setting up all that tracking beforehand. Uh, because it's going to give you those baselines that you're looking for to get off with the right foot forward. And you're also going to have an aggregate of data that you can leverage later on, whether that's, you know, on Google for like retargeting or lookalike audiences, whatever the case may be, but it's things you can use and And you can get a lot out of it.

Yeah, that makes complete sense. Luis, so just kind of switching gears here, going kind of to the rapid-fire questions, which we like to kind of end the show with. So just a couple here. What's one piece of advice you wish you had known and would tell your 25-year-old self?

Ah, 25, that's only 2 years ago.

Okay, let's get 2022 maybe. Let's go, let's go 5 years at least.

I think just to move fast, like very fast. I feel like in the past, and sometimes even to this day, I feel like we get caught up in thinking, what's going to happen if I do this thing? Or what am I going to lose? What am I going to gain? I feel like a lot of people just get caught up in the what-ifs. And that kind of put, like, even if you end up doing it at some point, you would've saved so much time if you would've just done it the moment you like thought about it. Um, so definitely just to move fast and, and, and, you know, just take action.

Love it. Um, what, what are, or who are the best 3 resources, whether that's books, uh, or people, maybe mentors or people you follow who you say have been the, the most instrumental to your success over the last couple years?

These are actually all very recent, but I feel like in hindsight I can see a lot of, you know, like what I did and stuff like that from that specifically. But so a book that I really like, and I think that it can have some application in business, I think it's just like mindset, you know, overall. It's called A Happy Pocketful of Money.

Mm-hmm.

I don't know if you've heard of it before. It's a very good book. Um, talks about like, it's kind of like The Secret, if you've heard of that book. I've actually haven't read it, but people told me it was very similar to it. So it's kind of like that. Uh, very good book. Also Naval Ravikant, I'm sure you know about him.

Sure.

Yeah, he, he, he's, he's amazing. Um, there's a lot of reasons to look, to look up to him. Um, and, uh, I just love where his mind is at with, with a lot of things. Um, I recently went into a huge rabbit hole, um, of his content and his, the, the Almanac that was written, and it's just amazing. I definitely recommend that to anybody that's just looking to be a better human, I think. And another person is actually my friend Blake Janiver. He's a client. He is over at Janiver Ventures, and they do multifamily financing and like commercial real estate loans and stuff like that. But the guy's just brilliant, very cool guy, and I feel like I've learned a ton from him too. So if you, if If you, you know, want to reach out to him or something, I'm sure he'd be pretty open to a conversation or just saying what's up.

For sure, for sure. Thank you, thank you for sharing that. Yeah, I love Naval. I'd love to have him on the podcast at some point as well, if you know him.

Get him on here.

Um, Luis, what does success mean to you today, whether that's personally or financially or business or life? There's no right answer.

Yeah, um, so now that you know that I am aware of Naval, I feel like you have an idea of this, right? But it's Like, I think in the past, like, I think at a young age everybody thinks of success as like something monetary. Um, but that's definitely changed for me in the last couple years, you know. Like, just, I think success, uh, is being able to provide, um, you know, for those around you. And not necessarily just financially, or like physically, mentally, like being all there, being just like a rock for those that I love. Uh, definitely what I think success is. And, uh, Just being able to help people as much as I can, whether that's, you know, doing something manually or like giving them advice on how to, you know, get their campaigns to work and stuff like that, but just providing value essentially.

Nice. So if everybody, if anyone's looking for advice, reach out to Luis, he's happy to help out. Yeah. Luis, what are your future plans for Phantom Agency? For those people listening, it's Phantom with an F. And where can our audience get touch with you and maybe learn more about what you're working on, working on, and maybe get some advice on, on their own, uh, paid marketing campaign?

Yeah, definitely. So the, the plans for Phantom is obviously to scale it, right? Um, definitely work with bigger companies. I'd love to, to be able to work with, you know, some well-known brands in the space. Um, so that grow, get ads, scale ads. Um, I think we, we can really do some cool stuff there just because of the, the What do you call it? The the reaction we've gotten so far since we launched in October. So definitely want to scale that up, and I would love to get into you know like investing and stuff like that. So Akil, if you ever have a minute and we can chat about that stuff, that'd be cool. For sure, for sure. Yeah, that and then to know about what I'm doing, what I'm thinking, you can follow me on Twitter. It's Camacho. That's C A M A C H O underscore F T N. Which stands for Phantom, but you can check me out there. You can follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. But yeah.

Cool. We'll add all those links to the show notes for everybody to check out. Thanks again, Luis. Really appreciate you jumping on SaaS District show today.

Thanks so much, Akil.

It's a pleasure. Thank you all for watching this episode and joining SaaS District today. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell for future episodes where we interview interview top leaders in the SaaS industry. If you're a SaaS company looking to grow and unlock the true value of your business, get in touch with us at Horizon Capital, and myself or one of our consultants will provide a free assessment to help you get there and hit your goals. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this podcast, please comment down below and help us improve our content for you all. Thanks again, and see you on the next one.

Thank you.