The Next-Gen Brand Lab
Budgets and unit economics
How long before leads start coming in?
Last updated 2026-09-09
You are live in market at roughly week six, and the funnel is stable by month three. The sequence: about two weeks of questionnaire and business learning, about two weeks of market research running in parallel tracks, ten days to two weeks of architecture and creative direction, then launch. First leads arrive within days of going live; a trustworthy cost per qualified lead takes a full test window of about a month after that.
Why the first six weeks have no leads in them
They are the only weeks in the engagement where changing your mind is free. Everything decided in that window — the buyer, the offer, the catchment, the budget floor — costs nothing to revise. Every one of those decisions revised after launch costs the media already spent against the old answer.
This is also the honest reason to be sceptical of anyone promising leads in week one. They exist; they are just leads against an untested proposition, which is the expensive way to discover the proposition was wrong.
What "stable by month three" means
By month three the cost per qualified lead has held across a full test window, the scaling rules are written down, the CRM routing works, and the weekly report contains decisions rather than descriptions. Before that point, any scaling is a guess dressed as a strategy.
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