alexe-ev Analyze Unit Economics
Purpose
Help teams understand and interpret core unit economics to assess business model health and identify improvement opportunities.
Skill type
Conceptual skill with calculation-aware components
Use this skill when
- A team needs to evaluate whether the business model is working
- CAC, LTV, or payback period are unknown or concerning
- A pricing or growth decision requires unit economics grounding
- An investor or leadership review requires a unit economics view
Do not use this skill when
- The goal is a full financial model (out of scope — requires finance expertise)
- The goal is pricing strategy (use support-pricing-packaging)
Required inputs
- Business model type (subscription, transactional, usage-based, etc.)
- Available unit economics data (even partial)
Optional inputs
- CAC by channel
- Churn rate
- Gross margin
- Expansion revenue data
- Cohort LTV data
Upstream context
Works best when:
- Business model is defined
- Revenue and cost data are available
Downstream handoff
Output can feed:
- build-business-case (unit economics ground investment cases)
- align-revenue-strategy
Instructions
- Calculate or estimate: CAC, LTV, LTV:CAC ratio, payback period, gross margin.
- Assess the health of each metric against benchmarks.
- Identify the biggest unit economics risk or gap.
- Analyze drivers of CAC and LTV (what levers exist to improve them).
- Assess the impact of churn on LTV.
- Recommend improvement priorities.
Output
Provide:
- Unit economics summary: CAC, LTV, LTV:CAC, payback period, gross margin
- Benchmark comparison
- Health assessment per metric
- Key risk or gap identification
- Improvement levers
- Assumptions and confidence level for each metric
Risks / caveats
- Unit economics built on weak data should be labeled as estimates with confidence ranges
- LTV estimates must account for churn — ignoring churn creates inflated projections
- Channel-blended CAC hides unit economics problems — break out by channel where possible