GTM Sauce

Handwrytten · robot-written handwritten notes

Run Google search ads when most customers are worth very little

$5 per click vs ~$0.20 margin from a typical small sender

Failedpaid-search

What they did

Ran Google search ads; clicks cost ~$5, but many clickers are low-volume users (e.g. a realtor sending a few notes) worth ~$0.20 contribution margin, while value is concentrated in a few clients sending 20-50K notes/month. Stopped relying on SEM.

What happened

$5 click vs ~$0.20 contribution margin for a typical small sender

In their words

Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M

Play from 3:08
2:36

Whoa, okay. 5 million. What are you run rating note volume today? Like we're in April of 2026. How many notes do you think you'll send this month? That is a good question. We will probably do on that around four to five. Well, no, about three and a half. 350,000. My apologies. 350,000 notes. Across how many customers using you? I mean, we have 400,000 clients in our customer database of those active. You're probably talking 400. Interesting.

3:08

It's all over the place. I mean, we have a lot of people that just come on, sign up, and send one note, but then we have clients that send 20, 30,000 a month. Um, I was going to say you have power laws and you're in your notes sent numbers. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have clients that are sending easily 40, 50,000 a month. We've, but the, you know, they're, but the, so that's the problem is there's this huge skew and it also makes it really hard for us to get advertising that's working because if we do like a Google ad and then God forbid a realtor clicks it, you know, that's a $5 click and we get like, you know, 20 cents in contribution margin. So

3:42

it's like, it doesn't, it does the numbers that don't work that way. You know, we, yeah, here we go. So I know this is hard, probably hard to see, but these are all the robots racked up. We build them ourself in Tempe, Arizona, and we've got about 200 of them, but now it's not just about the robots. It's about the process. So we use QA or computer vision to QA the notes. I'm going to stop the screen share now. Wait, this is impressive. It reminds …

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Tags: google, unit-economics, customer-skew, low-ltv-clicks