Zero to 100 customers under $15 CAC — a profitable Meta launch

The challenge

Printlab is an established e-commerce printing business with over $1M in annual revenue, but they were launching a brand-new product line — printing stickers — under its own dedicated brand and website. They had a great product, a finished website, and zero marketing. No pixel data, no creative library, no audience signals — a true cold start.

Their goal was specific and measurable: prove they could acquire 100 paying customers at a CAC under $15 before scaling further. The challenge was hitting that target with no historical data to lean on, and doing it through Meta as the primary channel.

What we did

We treated the launch as a structured proof-of-concept rather than a typical “spend and see” campaign:

• Set up the full Meta tracking foundation — pixel, Conversions API, server-side enrichment — before spending a dollar
• Built a creative testing program from scratch, shipping multiple ad concepts spanning UGC, statics, and short-form video
• Mapped the audience strategy specifically for a sticker buyer — segmenting by use case (decorative, business, hobbyist) rather than broad demographics
• Set conservative initial budgets to gather signal cleanly, then scaled the winners aggressively once early CAC data came in
• Built a weekly reporting cadence tied directly to the 100-customer milestone so the client always knew where they stood

The result

We hit the 100-customer milestone profitably, with CAC well under the $15 target. More importantly, we built the foundation — clean attribution, a creative library that converts, and validated audience signals — that Printlab needed to scale Meta confidently as a long-term acquisition channel.

The relationship continued past the initial milestone into ongoing scale work.