I was reading Alex Hormozi’s $100M Leads and came across a line that stayed with me: “Once you set up tracking, you can lose money like a pro.” I thought of it again after a recent call with the founder of an iGaming business—an online casino. Until recently, he was spending money to acquire players without really knowing which spending brought in paying customers.
The business is seven years old. The team cost about $30,000 a month, and they bought plenty of traffic across different channels. At one point, the head of sales proposed a plan for new channels and asked for another $50,000. The founder approved it. It produced no result. They kept trying things, and a lot of the money went nowhere.
The problem was that almost no purchase could be reliably tied to its source: an ad, a partner, or a platform. After each round of spending, they could not tell which channel had failed and which one merely needed more time.
It looked like the business was headed for an early death. Instead, it got an unlikely happy ending.
Three years ago, the founder let the team go and kept two support employees. Then, for reasons he still cannot explain, affiliate partners began bringing in players on their own. The product was integrated into a popular bot, and one of its six games reached 3,000 bets per second. The business became strongly profitable.
“We burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nothing worked. As soon as we stopped, the affiliates came to us,” he told me. He still does not know why users started arriving at that particular moment. It was the same measurement problem as before, except this time the outcome was a surge rather than a failure.
His only hypothesis is that the brand had finally reached some critical mass of awareness: the affiliates got to know the platform and its offers and decided to promote it. But that is a hypothesis, not an explanation the data can confirm.
I asked what he would do differently if he found himself in the same position again. After a rueful smile, he said: “I’d find someone like you to look at the numbers and tell me what to keep doing—and what to stop immediately.”
Tracking by itself will not prevent losses. That is the joke in Hormozi’s line. But if you cannot even roughly tell where your paying customers came from, you are not investing in growth. You are throwing money away. The difference is subtle—and expensive.
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