I was scrolling through yet another set of marketing benchmarks: average conversion rate, average CAC, average ROAS. Clicking through charts… until I put on a video by Alex Hormozi in the background — Acquisition.com, a portfolio doing hundreds of millions per year, and a book that broke a world record for fastest-selling non-fiction over a weekend.
He’s one of those rare people who built the economics first — and only then started explaining them.
And he says it very bluntly: the average business in an industry barely makes money, the average person is in debt and unhappy. So the real question is:
Why on earth did “average” become the standard?
Think about it. What is “average CAC in the market”?
It’s a neatly averaged result across companies — half of which are slowly dying.
“Average CR in the industry” is often just a polite description of how most companies fail to sell properly.
So when you hear: “Our CR is within the market range,” what it often really means is:
“We’re exactly like a lot of businesses that are barely surviving.”
Example
A benchmark says a landing page CR of 1% is “normal.” You have 1.2% — great, you’re “within the range.”
Except with your margin and AOV, at 2.2% your unit economics still don’t work. At all. You’re basically swapping money for money and celebrating that you’re “not worse than the market.”
That’s the core problem with benchmarks: they replace the question “Does our model work?” with “Do we look like the average?”
And the moment you accept “average” as a sign of adequacy, the bar drops fast.
Benchmarks can be useful as a reference for “how things look across the market.” But the moment you start using them as an argument, you’re essentially signing up for mediocrity.
And mediocrity is not what founders or marketing leaders usually aim for.
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