Your Meta ads aren't the problem. Your app is.

Hi, it's Sharan.

Every week I get on calls with people who are about to launch a marketplace, or already have one running, and at some point I ask the same question. What does it cost you to get a customer, and what is that customer worth over the next year?

Most people have a number for the first half. Meta tells them. Spent $2,000, got 400 app installs, so five dollars an install. The second half is where it goes quiet. How many of those 400 ordered? How many ordered twice? Which campaign did the repeat customers come from? Usually the honest answer is "I'm not sure, we don't track that."

And that is the whole problem with demand, in one sentence.

The easy take is that Meta ads don't work for delivery marketplaces. Too expensive, too much competition, the big apps outbid you. I don't think that's it. Meta ads work fine. What doesn't work is spending on ads with a product that can't tell you what the money bought.

CAC to LTV is a ratio. You need both sides. The acquisition side comes from your ad account. The lifetime value side comes from inside your product, from order history tied back to the campaign that brought that customer in. If your app was built as a quick white-label clone with no attribution, no customer-level order data, nothing that connects a click to a first order to a fifth order, then the ratio isn't a number. It's a feeling.

So you end up running ads on vibes. A good month feels like the ads worked. A bad month and you pause them. Neither decision is based on anything.

I've watched operators run this loop for a year and then conclude that paid acquisition doesn't work in their market. It might not. But they never found out, because the product never gave them the data to find out.

Here is the other half, which gets less attention. LTV isn't just something you measure, it's something the product creates. A customer who gets a working app, push notifications when their order moves, a reason to reorder, saved addresses and payment, that customer sticks around. A customer who hits a broken checkout on the first try is gone, and so is the five dollars you paid to get them. Product quality shows up directly in the denominator of your acquisition math. Bad product means low LTV means every CAC looks too high, no matter how good the ads are.

So the order of operations matters. Fix the product first, then spend. The founders I see getting a healthy ratio did it in that order.

With Enatega, this is what we built for. Orders are tied to customers, customers are tied to the campaign they came in on, and you can see the whole chain in your own dashboard rather than guessing from Meta's install count. The customer app is built to hold people, so the LTV side has a chance to grow. It's the same codebase whether you're doing food, grocery, pharmacy, or a clothing brand with its own delivery, and we've got operators running it in different countries on exactly that basis. More ad spend should mean more revenue, and you should be able to prove it.

One honest limit. If you're not spending on acquisition at all yet and you're under maybe 20 orders a day, you don't need any of this right now. Get to the point where you're ready to put real money into demand. Then the attribution question becomes the most important one you'll ask.

If you're there, or close, book a call with me. Tell me what you're spending and what you're seeing, and I'll give you a straight read on whether your current setup can ever give you a real CAC to LTV number, and what it would take to get there. This applies whether it's your main business or a second one you're building on the side for extra revenue.