GROWTH

Go to market

Parent to parent is the only sustainable acquisition channel at our unit economics. Everything else is a top of funnel experiment. This page shows the funnel, the channels, and the sequencing that keeps LTV to CAC honest while the organic loop compounds.

Current CAC

$30

Blended, referral-heavy pilot mix

Model sheet, implied (LTV / LTV_CAC)

Steady-state CAC

TODO(gtm)

Target 8x to 15x LTV:CAC band at scale

LTV : CAC

42.1x

Current, un-leveraged

Model sheet, ltv_cac

Active channels

Word of mouth, referral, content, placements, paid tests, schools, press

Paid conversion (trial to paid)

47%

Founding-100 baseline

Monthly retention

92%

8% monthly churn at steady state

Model sheet, churn_monthly

LAST UPDATED 2026-04-22

Paid acquisition on kid AI is expensive and distrust-laden. Parents do not buy kid products from paid ads. They buy from a friend's recommendation, a school pilot, or a shipped URL their own kid texts them. Our GTM is designed around that fact.

The sequence is: founder network first, viral badge loop second, parent referrals third, content and placements fourth, paid experiments fifth, schools sixth, press last. Each channel activates only after the previous one has cleared a named trigger. The discipline is the reason the LTV to CAC ratio clears 40x in the base case today, and why we expect it to settle in the 8x to 15x band when paid comes on.

Funnel

flowchart LR A[Parent discovery shipped URL / friend / content] --> B[Landing page] B --> C[Free trial signup parent account] C --> D[Kid activation first session] D --> E[Weekly session shipped app] E --> F[Paid conversion $149 / mo] F --> G[Referral shipped URL + badge] G --> H[New parent discovery] H --> A D --> X[Drop-off no ship in session 1] E --> Y[Drop-off no return in week 2] style F fill:#2EE87A,stroke:#0F1419,stroke-width:2px,color:#0F1419 style G fill:#FFD23F,stroke:#0F1419,stroke-width:1.5px

Parent discovery through to new-parent referral. The loop closes when a parent who joined via referral ships their own kid's apps and refers the next parent. Every shipped app is a funnel input.

CAC by channel

Current and at-scale CAC per channel, plus payback, attribution quality, and scalability. Rows expand for detail. Current CAC is founding-100 pilot data; at-scale CAC is the Y3 forecast.

	Current CAC	At-scale CAC	Payback	Attribution	Scalability
Word of mouth	$0	$12	< 1 mo	High	Compounds with weekly shipping; load-bearing channel
Parent referral (engineered)	$15	$22	< 1 mo	High	Primary scaled channel; viral badge loop is the core of it
Content + SEO	$18	$35	~1 mo	Medium	Secondary. The weekly parent newsletter is the anchor piece.
Podcast + newsletter placements	$45	$60	~2 mo	Medium	Tertiary. Specific parenting and education podcasts.
Paid social experiments	Not active	$85	~3 mo	Medium	Experiment only. Budget gated on LTV:CAC above 3x on organic.
School partnership	N/A	$180	~6 mo	High	Workshop tier lane; longer sales cycle, higher per-account ARR
Press	$0	$0	Instant	Low	Structural. Not a channel we can dial, but a channel we can seed.

All figures assume the Builder monthly tier at $149 per household. Workshop (schools) has its own CAC shape and is captured in the school-partnership row above.

Channel sequencing

Order of investment, dollars this year, and MAU contribution projections. Channels activate in order, not in parallel.

	Priority	Investment this year	MAU contribution Y1	MAU contribution Y3
Founder network	P0 (Stage 1)	Founder time only	~50 households	~50 households (cohort frozen)
Viral badge loop	P0 (Stage 2+)	~$15K (infra + incentives)	~400 households	~8K households
Engineered parent referral	P1 (Stage 3+)	~$40K (reward budget + product work)	~350 households	~12K households
Content + newsletter + SEO	P1 (Stage 3+)	~$60K (content lead + production)	~150 households	~6K households
Podcast + newsletter placements	P2 (post-seed)	~$90K (annualized)	~100 households	~3K households
Paid social experiments	P3 (after 3x LTV:CAC on organic)	~$75K (experiment only)	0	~4K households
School partnership (Workshop tier)	P1 (Stage 2+)	~$120K (GTM hire + pilots)	~20 classrooms	~500 classrooms	→
Press	Structural	Founder time only	Non-attributed halo	Non-attributed halo

Investment figures are directional and reconcile to the S&M line on the P and L by Y3. The specific split across quarters lives in the scenario sheet.

Word-of-mouth engineParent NPS is the moat. The shipped URL is the content. We engineer referrals, we do not beg for them.

Parent NPS is the only marketing spend that compounds. A parent who has watched her kid ship two apps and text them to a grandparent does not need to be convinced. She tells another parent at drop-off. We engineer the triggers that make that conversation happen: the weekly parent email, the shipped URL, the viral badge on the app itself, and the single sentence the parent quotes in the drop-off conversation.

The engineering is not "ask for a referral." It is "make the moment a parent has already earned impossible to ignore." The weekly email includes a one-line template the parent can forward to a friend, pre-written. The shipped app has a badge a grandparent will click. The kid asks the parent to text the URL. None of these is incentivized with a coupon. They are the product.

The KPI is unprompted referral share. Today, roughly 70% of founding-100 signups came from word of mouth. Target at scale is 40%, which would still make it the largest channel. Falling below 25% is a signal that the product has lost its ship discipline; that becomes a Stage 2 operating indicator.

Paid acquisition postureConservative until LTV to CAC is proven. Experiment framing, not acquisition framing. Gated on organic performance.

Paid acquisition is not a default. It is an experiment we run only after the organic loop is already clearing 3x LTV to CAC. The first tranche is budget-capped at an amount we are prepared to write off: roughly $75K annualized, framed as research rather than growth. Creative is shipped-app-led, not testimonial-led, because parents distrust kid-product testimonials with good reason.

The discipline is that paid CAC degrades as you scale it. The first $10K of paid delivers cheaply-acquired parents who already wanted the product. The next $100K reaches parents who need more convincing, and the CAC rises. We model the degradation explicitly in the scenario sheet and stop the campaign the moment payback drifts above 6 months.

The second-order reason to be conservative on paid is that a paid-heavy acquisition mix changes the parent-quality distribution. Parents who arrive via paid are a different cohort than parents who arrive via referral. They churn differently, refer differently, and complain differently. We would rather grow slower with the right cohort than faster with the wrong one.

School channel considerationWe deprioritized school-as-acquisition in favor of schools-as-Workshop-tier. Reopens if the home-market motion stalls.

The school channel as parent acquisition (district runs the tool, parents sign up at home after the kid uses it in class) has a long sales cycle, a low per-parent conversion rate, and a compliance complexity that would slow the home-market motion. We deprioritized it in Stage 1 in favor of a schools-as-Workshop-tier motion: the district pays directly for a classroom product at $79 per kid per month, and the home motion runs in parallel on parent word of mouth rather than school exposure.

The trigger to reopen the school-as-acquisition channel is a stall in the home-market motion. If the founding-100 cohort does not generate at least three unprompted referrals per household over the first 90 days, the home motion is not compounding and the school channel becomes the backup acquisition lane. We do not expect to hit that trigger.

Separately, the Workshop tier itself is a revenue line and a credibility line, not an acquisition line. A superintendent quote is worth more to the home motion than 100 school-acquired parents. That is the asymmetry that drives the sequencing.

Measurement and attributionWe track what drives retention. We do not chase metrics that do not drive retention.

We track four things on the funnel. First, first-session ship rate: did the kid ship a real app in the first session. Second, second-day return: did the kid come back within 48 hours without parent prompting. Third, weekly session cadence: two or more sessions per kid per week by week 4. Fourth, paid conversion: did the trial convert to paid by day 14. Those four numbers predict everything else that matters.

We do not track vanity metrics. No impressions. No aggregate time on site. No "engagement" without a specific session count. No NPS of kids (unreliable at these ages). No Twitter followers. The parent-side NPS is tracked after week 4 and quarterly thereafter, and the Workshop-tier teacher NPS is tracked at pilot end. Those are the only NPS numbers we take seriously.

Attribution uses a simple model: first-touch channel survey on signup, augmented by a UTM tag on every outbound link. We do not run multi-touch attribution because the organic loop dominates the mix and multi-touch models introduce more noise than signal at our scale. At Y3 we revisit the model if paid share crosses 25%.

Funnel

See also