The main thing to consider is, as your customer acquistion scales, does your headcount/labor cost scale as well? If so, that should be a factor in your CAC calc

The main thing to consider is, as your customer acquistion scales, does your headcount/labor cost scale as well? If so, that should be a factor in your CAC calculation. I don't think there's one canonical formula. But here are David Skok's thoughts: "To compute the cost to acquire a customer, CAC, you would take your entire cost of sales and marketing over a given period, including salaries and other headcount related expenses, and divide it by the number of customers that you acquired in that period. (In pure web businesses where the headcount doesn’t need to grow as customer acquisition scales, it is also very useful to look customer acquisition costs without the headcount costs.)" [0] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/