You never have a CAC of zero. I mean, you could pretend that all of your costs are R&D or Development, but is that actually true? What about the time you spend posting to the company blog or building the website, or AB testing or any of the other things hat end up getting you customers?
Say you are putting an app in Apple's App Store. Your CAC at the very least is $100 + any time spent to integrate with Apple's store, get approval, etc. because if you aren't in the store, you don't get those customers. You might classify them as development costs or somehow marketing/sales costs but the bottom line is if you're talking generically about what it takes to acquire a customer, plenty of things you do in development are to acquire more customers. How you classify those costs is sort of up to you, but don't be under the assumption that just because you are doing SEO or App Stores or Craigslist that you have $0 CAC.
Your time has a cost. Development time or content creation time has a cost.
It might not be easy to track in the traditional accounting sense, especially in the early days of a company, but never believe your CAC is $0.
Say you are putting an app in Apple's App Store. Your CAC at the very least is $100 + any time spent to integrate with Apple's store, get approval, etc. because if you aren't in the store, you don't get those customers. You might classify them as development costs or somehow marketing/sales costs but the bottom line is if you're talking generically about what it takes to acquire a customer, plenty of things you do in development are to acquire more customers. How you classify those costs is sort of up to you, but don't be under the assumption that just because you are doing SEO or App Stores or Craigslist that you have $0 CAC.
Your time has a cost. Development time or content creation time has a cost.
It might not be easy to track in the traditional accounting sense, especially in the early days of a company, but never believe your CAC is $0.