[cletus]

Here's my take: the company needed to raise $X to deliver their $700 scooters. They had raised $Y where $Y < $X.

Since the only way for Unicorn to raise money is by preselling scooters They had to sell more scooters. Word of mouth wasn't doing it so they tried advertising for customer acquisition. Nothing unusual here.

So when they say the as we expensive what they realty mean is customer acquisition was really expensive. To put it another way conversions were really low.

So they likely completely understood these costs. They may have been unrealistic. They may have been sold a bill of goods (as agencies are notorious for unrealistically optimistic CPA costs). They may have simply not budgeted enough or expected more organic sales.

So they may want to blame this on expensive ads butt what they realty mean is they screwed up and underestimated customer acquisition costs.

[thenickevans]

This is accurate.