Laura Schaffer on Why Cameo Was a Growth Loop, Not a Business

When Your Supply Side Goes Vertical by Accident

Cameo hit $100 million in revenue during the pandemic. Not because they cracked retention or figured out demand-side economics, but because celebrities had nothing else to do and fans ran out of things to buy after their Pelotons.

Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude, calls it what it was: misattribution at scale. The company had a temporary pressure cooker fueling both sides of their marketplace—supply stuck at home needing money, demand stuck at home needing virtual entertainment. Neither was sustainable.

I think that folks who were investing in them and working with them kind of have a false impression where it's going, which is obviously challenged. But also then folks aren't focusing on building the right things.

— Laura Schaffer

The pattern repeats across pandemic darlings. Shopify, DoorDash, Instacart—all assumed step changes would hold. Most were wrong. Cameo just had the misfortune of being a growth loop masquerading as a marketplace when the music stopped.

SaaS-Like Networks Aren't Marketplaces

Casey Winters, former CPO at Eventbrite, spotted the structural problem in 2019: Cameo had zero demand-side retention. You might buy a James Van Der Beek video for your friend's birthday once. You're not doing it every month.

Most low-frequency marketplaces survive with high average order values—think cars or real estate. Cameo had neither high AOV nor the long-tail SEO to capture point-of-need demand. Their growth came from word of mouth and a killer acquisition hack: sliding into celebrity DMs on Instagram before spam filters existed.

The business model looked more like seller-distributed SaaS than a true marketplace. The value prop to supply wasn't more demand—it was fulfillment tools and efficiency. That's a different business with different unit economics.

A growth loop does not a business make. The low demand side frequency has not been addressed and that always will kill you unless you have incredibly high AOV.

— Laura Schaffer

When your only lever is adding more celebrities to attract their audiences, you eventually scrape the bottom of the barrel. Hence the Fyre Festival guy and the Tinder Swindler showing up on the platform.

Hopium Is Hard to Resist When Everyone's On It

Brian Balfour, CEO of Reforge, admits his company also went on a pandemic growth tear. They couldn't fully attribute where all the growth came from. Voices everywhere told him to lean in, invest, scale.

Looking back, his lesson is stark: if you don't understand why you're growing, be unbelievably hesitant to increase investment. The problem is you'll never understand all the reasons. Attribution is always incomplete. But when it's mostly a mystery, adding fuel can be dangerous.

You almost have to attribute what you can and kind of focus on that and think about the stuff that you can't attribute like it's not even happening because it clouds your view and it clouds your judgment of what's in control and what's not in control.

— Laura Schaffer

The rationalists got pegged as pessimists in 2020 and 2021. Being the one person not on hopium when everyone else is riding the rocket? That takes guts. Especially when you can't definitively prove the growth is temporary.

What Could Save Cameo Now

Schaffer's prescription: go back to first principles. What problems does Cameo actually solve? Accessibility—you have no other way to reach James Van Der Beek. Transaction efficiency—celebrities don't want to negotiate pricing for every birthday message.

Starting there might unlock a path forward, but it requires killing sacred cows. Infrastructure built for a $100 million GMV run doesn't map to solving core problems for a sustainable business. That's brutally hard when you have existing customers, engineers on-call, and investor expectations.

Pivots are 10 times harder with an accrued history. You fight hiring friction, customer perception, and the ghost of what you thought you were building. But the CEO is still grinding at 33 employees down from 400. That's worth something.

The question isn't whether there's a business in there—there probably is. The question is whether it's venture-scale or a profitable SaaS-like network supporting celebrity fulfillment. Those are very different futures, and the investors from the Series A through C are likely wiped out either way.

Know When You've Got Lightning in a Bottle

Schaffer's framework for recognizing real traction versus temporary spikes: look for echo chambers. When you have true product-market fit, multiple signals reinforce each other. Not just one growth lever, but several.

Cameo had word of mouth and DM-based acquisition working. But they never cracked SEO, demand retention, or high AOV. The supply side boost was external—pandemic-driven, not product-driven. When the accelerants disappeared, so did the growth.

Companies that navigated the pandemic well treated the spike as brand awareness and customer acquisition, then pivoted deliberately before the wave crashed. DoorDash and Instacart retained some sticky habits. Cameo didn't.

The lesson isn't to ignore growth or refuse to invest. It's to separate what you control from what you don't. Attribute what you can. Build for retention. And when everyone around you is high on hopium, ask yourself: is this a growth loop or an actual business?