Acquisition
Acquisition is everything that gets a person to show up in the first place: the ads, channels, partnerships, and referrals that take someone from never having heard of the offering to landing on it and signing up. Where a team chooses to acquire decides not just how many people arrive but which people, and which people arrive sets the limits on what the offering can do for them once they're in.
Definition
Acquisition is how a provider gets prospective users to sign up — the channels and spend that bring people to the signup event.
Paid and unpaid channels
Acquisition takes two broad forms, distinguished by whether the provider pays directly for reach:
- Paid: ads, sponsorships, affiliate payouts — spend that buys impressions or signups directly. The volume scales with the budget.
- Unpaid (organic): SEO, content, word of mouth, referral — reach the provider doesn't pay per impression for, though it still costs time and effort to build.
Most offerings run a mix. The mix matters because channels don't deliver the same kind of user: a signup from a branded search differs from one bought through broad display, and those differences show up downstream in whether the user sticks and pays.
How acquisition shows up in the framework
Acquisition spend is what the cost instruments are built from. SAC is that spend divided by signups; CAC is the same spend divided by customers. Both feed payback analysis — the question of whether a cohort's revenue covers what it cost to bring in.
Channel differences also create a lever. When signups from a given channel become profitable customers at a higher rate, buying more of that channel raises cohort quality at the source.
Example
A SaaS tool acquires through paid channels (Google Ads, LinkedIn) and unpaid ones (SEO articles, customer referrals). The referral signups cost nothing per head and reach CAC payback far more often than the display-ad signups, which are cheap to buy in bulk but convert poorly. Both are acquisition; they just deliver users of different downstream value, which is why the framework reads acquisition through cost and cohort quality rather than signup count alone.