I saw a post about IM8 last week that stopped me.

The numbers sounded almost absurd.

More than $20m of revenue in July. A run rate above $240m less than two years after launch. CAC apparently holding around $300 while marketing spend doubled. 14.2% of its launch customers still transacting at month 20. And a $1bn customer acquisition facility from General Catalyst.

There is also David Beckham, international DTC across dozens of markets, premium pricing and a subscription proposition moving aggressively towards quarterly prepay.

You could look at all of that and conclude that IM8 has built one of the most optimised DTC growth engines in consumer health.

You would not necessarily be wrong.

But whenever a growth story looks this clean, I want to understand what is sitting underneath it.

So I went through the Q2 shareholder letter, the earnings presentation, earlier filings and the General Catalyst agreement.

What I found was more useful than either a bullish growth story or a takedown.

IM8 has built a genuinely sophisticated operating system around customer acquisition, subscription commitment, cash collection and capital.

Some of it I would steal tomorrow.

Some of it I would leave exactly where it is.

And the most important lesson has little to do with Beckham.

The real story is the customer economics.

Most brands still treat retention as a department.

Email owns part of it. SMS owns another part. Customer service handles cancellations. Someone watches churn. Someone else builds winbacks.

Then the customer leaves and everybody asks what message might have saved them.

IM8 is interesting because some of its most consequential retention decisions happen before the first retention message gets sent.

The clearest example is quarterly prepay.

IM8 introduced quarterly subscriptions in December 2025.

Seven months later, quarterly customers had grown from 2,907 to 34,531 and represented roughly 55% of July revenue. Over roughly the same period, first-order AOV moved from around $133 to $208.

That changes far more than AOV.

Think about a supplement customer on a monthly subscription.

They buy month one. Thirty days later, you ask them to make another financial decision.

Have I noticed anything?

Do I still want this?

Is £70 leaving my account again?

Should I pause?

Should I cancel?

For products where the customer needs consistent usage over 60 or 90 days, the commercial model has inserted a decision point before the product has had a fair chance to establish itself.

A quarterly plan changes that sequence.

The customer makes a 90-day commitment at the beginning. The brand collects more cash immediately. The customer gets a longer uninterrupted window in which to establish the routine, use the product correctly and experience the outcome.

That is a retention decision.

It happens at checkout.

This is where I think the IM8 lesson becomes useful beyond IM8.

If your product needs 60 to 90 days of consistent use, why is your commercial model built around a 30-day decision cycle?

We accept monthly subscriptions because that became the default architecture for DTC.

That does not mean the default is right for your product.

A skincare routine might need several weeks.

Creatine, adaptogens, gut-health products and many other supplements depend on adherence.

Some functional products become valuable because they replace an existing daily habit.

Your subscription structure should reflect that reality.

This connects directly with the argument I made recently about WhatsApp and retention.

The point of WhatsApp was never “send more messages”.

The opportunity is helping the customer reach the next successful usage event.

Take the product.

Understand how to use it.

Notice an outcome.

Build the routine.

Solve friction quickly.

Continue.

Quarterly prepay and post-purchase education attack the same problem from different sides.

One gives you the commitment window.

The other helps the customer use that window well.

For a replenishment brand, that combination is much more interesting than another clever cancellation flow.

There is an important catch.

Quarterly prepay makes early cohort economics look better before we know whether lifetime retention has improved.

Suppose a monthly subscriber pays $128 today, another $128 next month and another $128 in month three.

Move that customer onto a quarterly structure and a much larger portion of those collections arrives on day one.

First-order AOV rises.

Cash payback accelerates.

Month-one cohort revenue improves.

The company gets more cash earlier.

Those are all useful outcomes.

They do not tell us whether the customer ultimately stays longer.

Part of what looks like improved customer economics is simply revenue arriving sooner.

There is nothing wrong with that. Cash timing matters enormously in DTC.

But an operator needs to separate two questions.

How quickly did this cohort return the cash we spent acquiring it?

How much value did this cohort ultimately produce?

We will understand the full effect of IM8’s quarterly strategy only when those customers have reached several renewal cycles.

That distinction matters for your own reporting too.

If you launch a 90-day plan and your day-30 LTV suddenly jumps, do not declare victory.

You changed the collection schedule.

Now measure whether you changed the customer relationship.

This is the part of the IM8 story I suspect most operators will overlook.

General Catalyst committed up to $1bn through its Customer Value Fund to finance eligible customer acquisition.

That makes a great headline.

But think about what had to exist before a sophisticated outside party was willing to finance customer acquisition at that scale.

General Catalyst needed to understand the cohorts.

How much did IM8 spend?

How many customers arrived?

What did each customer cost?

How much cash came back?

How quickly?

How much gross profit followed?

How predictable was the curve?

IM8’s Q2 earnings presentation gives us a window into that discipline.

The CAC column gets your attention.

I think the more important fact is that management knows the economics by vintage.

That should be normal.

For many brands, it isn't.

Ask a brand about customer economics and you often hear something like:

“Our LTV:CAC is 3.4x.”

Fine.

Which customers?

Acquired when?

At what CAC?

Through which channel?

At what point in their lifecycle?

A blended number mixes customers acquired yesterday with customers acquired eighteen months ago.

Inside a fast-growing business, that gets dangerous quickly.

Look at IM8.

Its Q1 2025 customer cost roughly $104 to acquire.

By Q2 2026, CAC was roughly $301.

Almost three times as much.

Yet the mature customers have had 12, 16 or 19 months to produce repeat collections. The newest customers have had a fraction of that time.

Blend them together and historical winners start underwriting your confidence in customers whose economics have barely begun to reveal themselves.

This is why one of the most repeated claims around IM8 needs context.

Yes, CAC was roughly stable from Q1 to Q2 2026 despite acquisition spend almost doubling.

That is impressive at that scale.

Zoom out and CAC has still moved dramatically from the early cohorts.

The commercial question is therefore not:

“Is $301 CAC high?”

The question is:

“What does a $301 customer eventually return?”

That is the number that decides whether the growth works.

The operator rule is simple.

Underwrite the marginal cohort, not the blended average.

The General Catalyst structure gets especially interesting here.

Its Customer Value Fund finances up to 70% of eligible acquisition expenditure, with repayment coming from the collections generated by those customers.

That changes the role of customer acquisition inside the business.

Meta spend is no longer merely a marketing expense.

CAC starts behaving like invested capital.

You put $1 into acquiring a cohort.

That cohort generates a stream of future collections.

You measure the return.

You measure the time required to receive the capital back.

Once those returns become sufficiently predictable, somebody else becomes willing to finance the initial investment.

That is a different level of DTC thinking.

Instead of asking:

“How much should we spend on Meta next month?”

The conversation becomes:

“What return do we expect from the next £1m of customer acquisition, when does the cash come back, and what is the cheapest source of capital available to finance that period?”

This is where acquisition, retention and finance stop operating as separate functions.

They become one economic system.

Prove the cohort first.

Then finance it.

Do not use financing to find out whether the cohort works.

IM8 has a growing body of transaction history for an outside underwriter to interrogate.

A smaller supplement brand with unstable churn, volatile CAC and six months of customer history is dealing with a different asset.

External capital multiplies whatever economics already exist.

If your marginal cohort returns acquisition spend quickly and predictably, financing opens interesting possibilities.

If your payback keeps deteriorating, adding capital simply lets you acquire more of the problem.

This is one reason retention deserves more attention from finance teams.

Better retention does not merely make Klaviyo reports look healthier.

It changes the amount of capital the company needs to grow.

Prenetics reported that IM8 reached positive “adjusted free cash flow” in July.

The phrase sounds like the growth engine crossed into self-sufficiency.

Read the definition more closely.

Prenetics’ measure includes net funding received through the General Catalyst facility.

Using the figures disclosed in its Q2 shareholder materials, July generated around $10.8m of contribution profit.

From there, the business still had approximately:

$11.3m of acquisition marketing.

Roughly $0.7m of Beckham royalty.

Around $0.9m of ambassador-related costs.

My reconstruction puts adjusted EBITDA for the month at roughly negative $2.2m.

Then approximately $7.9m of customer acquisition financing comes in.

That gets you close to the reported positive $5.7m adjusted free cash flow figure.

This does not make the financing structure bad.

Quite the opposite. I think the structure is one of the most sophisticated things about IM8.

But if you are trying to understand whether the underlying operation independently produced cash after funding growth, financing inflows answer a different question.

Your bank balance increases when you borrow money.

Your business has not earned the borrowed amount.

Metrics need jobs.

The trouble starts when one metric gets asked to perform another metric's job.

This is the tension underneath the growth story.

IM8 spent $35.7m acquiring customers during Q2 2026, according to its Q2 materials.

CAC landed around $301.

Using the current gross margin, operating expense burden, royalties and estimated financing costs, my modelling suggests a customer acquired at that level needs somewhere around $721 to $859 in lifetime collections to reach EBITDA breakeven, depending on how much operating leverage Prenetics eventually achieves.

The oldest reported IM8 cohorts have generated collections in the low $600s per customer.

That does not tell us the newer cohorts will fail.

The commercial model has changed.

Quarterly prepay helps.

Higher AOV helps.

International DTC might help.

Premium pricing helps.

Clinical evidence supporting that premium helps.

A stronger post-purchase system might help.

But the newer customers still need to become more valuable than the customers that established the historical curve.

That outcome has not been demonstrated yet.

That is the bet management is making.

And I think that gives operators a much better lesson than “scale when CAC is stable.”

Earn the right to scale by understanding what the next customer returns.

One of IM8’s most impressive published numbers is the claim that 14.2% of customers are still transacting at month 20.

Its earnings presentation compares that with 11.4% for Thorne, 10.8% for AG1 and 2.4% for Grüns using third-party card panel data.

The ranking is interesting.

I would still hesitate before using 14.2% as the retention truth of the current IM8 business.

The month-20 population comes from the December 2024 launch cohort.

That cohort contained 3,794 customers.

Q2 2026 alone added 118,493.

The early customer bought into a Beckham launch, novelty and a completely different acquisition environment.

Today’s customer is increasingly arriving through scaled paid acquisition at a much higher CAC.

I want to know how that person behaves.

Then I want to know how the next month's customer behaves.

And the next.

This is why retention should be measured by acquisition vintage too.

Never let your oldest cohort become the story you tell yourself about your newest cohort.

Retention is not the output of your retention team.

It is the output of your whole customer system.

Look at how these decisions connect.

Pricing determines how much economic room exists after acquisition.

Pack size affects the commitment window.

Billing cadence determines when cash arrives and when the customer gets asked to reconsider.

Product efficacy determines whether continued use produces an outcome worth paying for.

Education influences whether the customer uses the product properly.

Acquisition source influences which customer enters the system in the first place.

Retention determines how much value comes back.

That value determines what CAC the company supports.

CAC payback determines how much capital growth consumes.

Capital availability determines how aggressively the company scales.

You cannot optimise those pieces independently forever.

IM8 is interesting because the business increasingly treats them as connected.

That is the part I would steal.

If I were running a replenishment brand tomorrow, I would start with the subscription architecture.

Does your billing cadence match the period required for your product to deliver its intended outcome?

If the customer needs 90 days, model what a 90-day commitment looks like.

Then I would get serious about cohort reporting.

Not blended LTV.

Not blended churn.

Not a pretty subscription dashboard.

For every acquisition vintage I want:

Acquisition spend.

Customers acquired.

CAC.

30-day collections.

90-day collections.

Gross profit.

Subscription survival.

Payback.

Then repeat the exercise for the next cohort.

Once you have enough mature cohorts, customer acquisition starts becoming something you underwrite rather than something you hope works.

That changes the quality of every growth decision downstream.

I would not call financing inflows free cash flow when evaluating the underlying operating engine.

I would not treat contribution margin as profit while acquisition marketing sits outside the calculation.

I would not assume a customer bought for $301 behaves like one acquired for $104.

I would not use my oldest and smallest cohort as proof that today's retention economics work.

I would not finance paid acquisition until marginal cohort payback has become sufficiently predictable.

And I would be extremely cautious about putting permanent celebrity royalties on gross revenue.

Beckham reportedly receives a percentage of revenue rather than profit.

For IM8, the distribution and credibility attached to Beckham might justify the economics.

For another brand, that structure deserves serious modelling.

A royalty comes out before the shareholder finds out whether there was any profit left.

A quarterly subscription is not automatically better than a monthly one.

If customers frequently decide within two weeks that they dislike the product, locking them into 90 days risks creating refund pressure, chargebacks and resentment.

Acquisition financing is not interesting if your cohorts are unpredictable.

International DTC is not attractive simply because CPMs are cheaper. Duties, fulfilment, returns, payment costs and customer service still need to work.

Premium pricing does not survive because the founder wants premium margins. IM8 is backing its positioning with clinical work, including multiple studies.

And none of this matters much if acquisition itself has not started working.

If your main problem is that customers do not want the product at an economically viable CAC, sophisticated retention architecture does not fix that first problem.

This playbook becomes interesting once demand exists and your next constraint is getting more value, cash and longevity from the customers you are already good at acquiring.

First, pull your last six acquisition cohorts separately.

For each one, look at CAC, 30-day collections, 90-day collections, gross profit and subscription survival.

Do not blend them.

Look for what is changing.

Second, compare your subscription cadence with your product’s usage window.

If the customer needs 60 or 90 days to experience the intended outcome, question the assumption that they should make a new purchase decision every 30 days.

Third, start treating retention as customer economics rather than messaging.

Ask what has to happen from first purchase to second, third and fourth purchase for that customer to become economically valuable.

That will lead you into onboarding, adherence, education, pack size, subscription structure and product experience long before you reach the cancellation flow.

IM8 has built something worth studying.

The celebrity partnership gets attention.

The $1bn facility gets headlines.

The $240m-plus run rate gets LinkedIn posts.

The more useful story sits underneath all three.

Quarterly commitment improves cash collection.

Cash collection improves cohort payback.

Predictable cohort payback makes acquisition financeable.

Financing increases the amount of acquisition the company funds.

Retention determines whether the whole thing ultimately works.

That is the machine.

And over the next few quarters we will get to see whether the customers IM8 is now acquiring for roughly $300 become valuable enough to support it.

That is far more interesting than the headline.

I increasingly speak to replenishment brands where acquisition is already working, but the economics underneath growth still feel opaque.

CAC sits with growth. Subscription sits with retention. Email sits somewhere else. Finance sees the P&L after everybody has made their decisions.

The bigger opportunity is connecting those decisions into one customer economics system.

If you are acquiring customers at scale and want to understand where subscription architecture, retention and LTV are either supporting or constraining growth, reply to this email.

That is the conversation I am interested in having.

Kunle Campbell
Conscious Commerce

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