If that title sounds familiar, yeah, I cribbed it from the recent TAM piece. Today, we’ll explore how CAC (cost of acquiring customers) is misused. Traditionally, the cost of acquiring a customer for an insurance company was pretty easy to measure. You paid a commission to the producing agent at Continue Reading
The Future of Personal Lines Distribution: An Update
Last year, I wrote about how the distribution of personal lines needed to evolve. It ended up being one of my post popular posts ever, largely due to a group of Allstate agents finding it and making it viral (to the extent something can go viral in insurance). The agents Continue Reading
Metromile: The Palm Pilot of Insuretech
Metromile, the pay by the mile auto insurance carrier, has been in the news of late with its announcement to go public through a SPAC. Metromile is one of the original insuretech carrier models having launched in 2011 and going full stack in 2016. Missed Opportunity However, being the first Continue Reading
How to Evaluate TAM: An Alternate Framework
In the startup world, the best way to become a Hare and get a high valuation is to talk up the giant total addressable market (TAM) of your product. Nothing gets a tech investor more excited than a company with bold plans to take over the world! Rational people often Continue Reading
Ian’s Brief #8: Vaccine Edition
Obviously, the big story of the week is the great news around the Pfizer vaccine. I have a number of thoughts about what this means which means it’s time to combine them all into a Brief. Revisiting Sell the News A few months back I predicted that a vaccine announcement Continue Reading
Why the Polls Were Wrong and What We Can Learn From Them
As of the moment I write this, we don’t know who will be the next President and probably won’t for a few days. What we do know is the projection sites and the state polling were off base again and the election was much closer than anticipated. For example, using Continue Reading
Providing Life Support to AIG
To make an (perhaps poor) analogy, AIG is like a patient with a lot of pre-existing conditions. It’s overweight (expenses are too high), has high blood pressure (too much operational leverage), and eats too much processed sugar (in too many underperforming businesses). With AIG’s recent decision to separate the P&C Continue Reading
AEL’s Corporate Governance Failure
Normally, when a company receives an acquisition offer they don’t want, they do one of two things: sell to someone else or stubbornly refuse to sell, usually due to a belief that they are being undervalued by the acquirer. When faced with these two choices, American Equity (AEL) opted for Continue Reading
Burn, Baby, Burn
No, this isn’t about the California wildfires. It’s about the Root IPO. Confused? Don’t worry, keep reading. I explain it all. So I was going to write a detailed page by page guide to the Root S-1 like I did for Lemonade, but two things got in the way. First, Continue Reading
Ian’s Brief #7: AI, AEL, and ESG
Back with another Brief since too many things to talk about and not enough time to write them all up separately… That Didn’t Take Long! It was only a few weeks ago I outlined a new business model for life insurers. I suggested established insurers should focus their energy on Continue Reading