How I Buy Customers (And Made $10.9M Doing It)

Most people think of customers as something you earn through hustle and hard work. I think of them as something you buy — the same way you'd buy shares in a cash-producing company or a rental property that pays you $2,000 a month. You can purchase customers who generate predictable income.

That's not a metaphor. That's the actual mechanic behind every business I've built.

Start With Lifetime Value

Before you can buy customers intelligently, you need to know what one is actually worth to you. That's your Lifetime Value, or LTV.

Simple example: you run an agency, charge $2,000/month, and your average client stays 6 months. Your LTV is $12,000.

Once you know that number, everything changes. You should be completely comfortable spending $6,000 to acquire a $12,000 LTV customer. Ideally you'd spend closer to $2,000 — but the point is, there's a ceiling on what you can spend and still win. Most beginners never calculate this, so they're terrified to spend anything at all.

CAC, ROAS, and Why 1x Isn't Crazy

CAC means Cost to Acquire a Customer. ROAS is Return on Ad Spend.

A 1x ROAS means you spent $150 in ads to get a customer who paid you $150. Sounds like zero profit — why would anyone do that?

Here's why sophisticated operators run this at scale, sometimes spending $20,000 a day at 1x ROAS: the backend.

If someone buys a $150 product from your funnel and their total LTV over time is $2,000, you're not losing money upfront. You're buying a future $2,000 customer for $150 in ad spend. That's the entire game.

Purchasers vs. Leads — The Gap Is Massive

There's a massive difference between a lead (someone who grabbed your free resource) and a purchaser (someone who paid you any amount of money).

For every 1,000 free leads, you might close 1 or 2 clients. For every 1,000 purchasers — even people who spent $5 — you might close 50 clients.

The value of a purchaser is 10 to 100x higher than a freebie seeker. This is exactly why self-liquidating funnels exist. You're not trying to profit on a $20 product — you're buying a list of proven buyers.

Time and Money Are the Same Thing

If you can't afford to spend money to acquire customers yet, that's fine. You spend time instead. They're the same resource in different forms — money is just the higher-dimensional version of time.

Here's the progression I'd follow:

1. Cold Outreach First

It's time-intensive but free. You cold DM or cold email prospects, get fast feedback, and iterate quickly. If 50 people ignore your offer, you change the message tomorrow and find more people.

Once you land a client and have cash, you start adding leverage. Instead of messaging 30 people manually each day, you scrape 2,000 targeted emails for $79 and automate the sends. You just traded money for time — and that's the ladder you climb.

2. Content Second

Once you have a client, you actually have something to talk about. You know what's working and what isn't. Make YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts, Twitter threads — and recycle the same core ideas in different formats.

Content is slow. That's why it comes after cold outreach, not before. You need clients first to have anything worth saying. Then you build an audience.

3. Paid Funnels and Ads Third

This is where self-liquidating funnels come in. My current setup for Listkit: I spend $1,500 to acquire a customer at a 1x ROAS. Their backend LTV is $900–$2,000. I break even immediately and profit over time.

I don't care about making money on the front-end product. I care about getting a buyer into my world so I can nurture them into my high-ticket offer — Client Ascension — where I actually make real money.

The Practical Checklist

If you're an agency owner doing $0–$10K/month, here's the exact order of operations:

• Outreach at scale. Find every prospect in your niche — 100,000 if you can. Hit all of them. There's no reason not to reach your entire addressable market.

• Make content weekly. A Loom walkthrough, a diagram, a rant on camera — anything that proves you're a real person who knows what they're doing.

• Build a low-ticket funnel. Sell a $10–$97 product: a swipe file, a template, a short-run trial of your service. The goal isn't revenue — it's buying buyers.

Once you have buyers, you nurture them. You email them. You send them to your YouTube videos. Eventually some of them want more help — and that's when you sell the high-ticket offer on the backend.

This Is Always How It's Worked

None of this is new. Read Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson. Read Alex Hormozi. The game has never changed: spend time or money to acquire buyers, then maximize backend LTV.

The only variable you control is how fast you climb the ladder — from trading your time, to trading your money, to running a machine that does both at scale.