Where the Next $300K Goes
You are the growth marketer at Wickfield, the bookkeeping platform from the Practice challenge. Starter $79/month, Pro $249/month, blended ARPA $138/month, 78% gross margin — $107.64 of gross profit per account per month. Here is the last…
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What You'll Be Doing
You are the growth marketer at Wickfield, the bookkeeping platform from the Practice challenge. Starter $79/month, Pro $249/month, blended ARPA $138/month, 78% gross margin — $107.64 of gross profit per account per month.
Here is the last 90 days by channel.
| Channel | Spend | Trials | New paid accounts | CAC | 12-mo retained | Payback |
| Google Search — non-brand | $412,000 | 6,910 | 388 | $1,062 | 61% | 9.9 mo |
| Google Search — brand | $88,000 | 2,140 | 611 | $144 | 74% | 1.3 mo |
| Meta prospecting | $265,000 | 4,020 | 149 | $1,779 | 44% | 16.5 mo |
| $61,000 | 980 | 77 | $792 | 68% | 7.4 mo | |
| Partner / affiliate (bookkeeper referrals) | $103,000 | 1,310 | 246 | $419 | 83% | 3.9 mo |
| Organic + AI answer engines | $190,000 (content team, fully loaded) | 5,470 | 502 | $379 | 79% | 3.5 mo |
Three things the table does not show:
- Dental practices are 9% of trials and 22% of revenue — they buy Pro, they stay, and their ARPA is $312. 71% of dental trials come from Meta.
- The affiliate program has 180 active bookkeeper partners. Partner ops can onboard 12 per month, and onboarding takes six weeks. Budget is not the constraint there; throughput is.
- 11% of trial starts now come from AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude referrers — up from 0.6% a year ago. Those trials convert to paid at 9.4% against 6.2% for the rest of organic.
Your CFO has given you an extra $300,000, usable in Q4 only, from an unspent brand line. Decide where it goes and what you cut to make room for the follow-on cost.
Constraints to consider
- Next quarter’s recurring paid budget is flat at $929,000. The $300,000 is one-time, Q4 only, and cannot be spent on headcount of any kind, including contractors.
- The affiliate channel cannot absorb more money this quarter — 12 partner onboardings a month is a hard ceiling set by partner ops capacity, not by spend.
- Attribution in your stack is last-touch. There is no media mix model and no holdout test running today.
- Your content team is two people. They cannot increase output without an AI-assisted workflow you would have to build yourself, because you cannot hire.
- Your CFO reads one number: blended CAC payback, and wants it under 12 months. Whatever you propose has to survive that conversation.
AI Usage Guidance
We expect you to use AI tools. We evaluate how you use them — not whether you use them. Evidence of iteration, redirection, and critical evaluation scores higher than a polished output with no process documentation.
The single highest-signal indicator: your video answer to the mandatory AI question. If you cannot name a specific moment where you redirected AI output, evaluators will assume you did not.
Mandatory AI question for your video: Walk me through one moment where you disagreed with, pushed back on, or redirected what the AI gave you — and what you did instead. Name the specific moment. Explain what the AI produced that didn’t meet the bar, what you did differently, and why.
Communication clarity matters for this role. We assess structure, stakeholder awareness, and ability to simplify complex ideas — not presentation style or accent.
What You'll Accomplish
Allocate a fixed budget across channels using payback arithmetic rather than channel preference
Identify where a last-touch number is likely to be overstating a channel’s contribution, and say what evidence would settle it
Design an incrementality test with a stated cost in foregone conversions
Specify an AI-assisted workflow that removes a real constraint on a small team
Communicate an allocation decision to a finance audience with the numbers intact
How Your Work Will Be Scored
What to Submit
File 1 — Allocation Memo
Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md
Your Q4 allocation as a table — where the $300,000 goes, what changes in the recurring $929,000, and the one-sentence reason for each move. Lead with the decision.
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File 2 — README Document
Format: .pdf, .doc, .docx, .rtf, .txt, .md
Three required sections:
- Section A — Written analysis: the reasoning behind the allocation, the strongest argument against it, and why you made it anyway. 300–400 words.
- Section B — Evidence and system: (i) the one measurement you would stand up to find out whether you were right — what the test is, how long it runs, and what it costs you in foregone conversions; (ii) the one AI-assisted workflow you would build with your own hands this quarter, what it takes off the team’s plate, and what it would cost to run.
- Section C — AI Usage Log (Mandatory): This is not a trick. We want to see how you work with AI — not whether you used it. In a short section of your README, document your AI collaboration process. For each significant interaction with an AI tool, briefly note: what you asked the AI to help with / what it gave you / what you kept, changed, or rejected — and why. Three interactions documented is sufficient. The log does not need to be exhaustive.
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File 3 — Video Walkthrough
Format: .mp4, .mov, .webm
Record as MP4 or MOV and upload directly on the Provn platform as a separate file. Cover: (1) your allocation and the one-sentence reason, ~45 sec; (2) what you cut and what it costs, ~75 sec; (3) your incrementality test and your AI workflow, ~75 sec; (4) the mandatory AI question, ~60 sec; (5) what you’d do differently with more time, ~30 sec. Speak naturally — we assess the quality of your reasoning, not verbal polish.
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