We Paid $200 To Make $12 — Here's Why It Failed

28 May 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief interview, Speaker A asks about the startup "When in Rome," a service that sold human‑crafted, $29 tours and travel packages. Speaker B, presumably the founder, explains why the business failed: the customer acquisition cost was about $200 while each customer generated only $12 in revenue, making the unit economics unsustainable. They tried a wide range of growth channels—including PPC, SEO, and referrals—but none scaled. The experience was painful yet valuable, teaching the founder lessons about building a product, a company, and collaborating with developers.

Chapters

You come up with When in Rome. When in Rome is something that I've wished existed. You created a tool where I forget what the price was. It was like $29. Real human beings will create a tour for me, a package. The whole thing is, is taken care of. My one issue with that is where's the continuous revenue in that? Why didn't it work out?
We're paying $200 to acquire a customer that's, that's worth $12 to us. That doesn't work. We had to go down every marketing channel. to see if it would scale. PPC, SEO, uh, referral. There's like 25 ways to grow a company. Yeah. We tried every one of them. None of them worked. A lot of these startups, like, they'll get through the product market fit stage and they don't find the unit economics, they go out of business, right? So that's what happened is I basically, I, I walked into that buzzsaw and was like, oh my gosh, we, we can't scale this thing. It's not gonna make it. It was a blessing in disguise. It's very painful. But, uh, the blessing there was it was a great learning experience. I learned how to build a company and like how to build a product and like work with developers and, and that whole thing.