There is one major flaw in this thinking. He says LTV should be at least 4x cost of customer acquisition (CAC) and that he would pay $60 for a warm lead. So let's assume he follows this and 4 x $60 is his LTV = $240. With 22 leads from TechCrunch the total potential value of those leads is 22 x $240, not 22 x $60<p>TC leads were potentially worth $5,520 if fully converted (not $1,320 - which is the <i>cost</i> he's willing to pay for equivalent leads)<p>Of course, very rarely do all conversions occur but I think when doing marketing it is important to know the fully converted value of each channel (in this case PR) so that you can figure out how much to spend. In general $5,000 of potential revenue (or TCV) is my minimum bar for a PR story, for example, so this story makes the cut just barely. I think the TC traffic they got was pretty abysmal, probably would be worth it to hire PR next time since they've got a B2B product that can afford $60 per warm lead<p>Conversion rates can change and constantly be improved on the product/sales side (public pricing, free trial, free + premium features for upsell, etc) but I've found that often growing the TCV (total converted value) of the channel is more worthwhile than trying to optimize in the early days when fixing conversion is harder than just finding attention opportunities. If you can find channels that consistently drive you leads worth 10-20x CAC and continue opening the channel more (getting more TC stories for example) you can figure out where its limit it.<p>This topic has been on my mind a lot, needs a whole blog post on DistributionHacks to dig into channel methodology and running multiple experiments to find the TCV of leads for each, stack rank, and implement system for scaling that as a business machine with predictable inputs and outputs --- but I haven't had time. Maybe this weekend.