I spent $180,000 of other people's money on ads. What I do with $500

Before Adlift I was a media buyer. Clients with real budgets. Here is what transfers to a founder with $500 and what does not.

Does not transfer: anything that needs the platform to "learn". At $500 a month it never leaves the learning phase.

Does transfer:

• One audience, one offer, three creatives. Not nine.
• Send clicks to a page that matches the ad word for word
• Retarget people who reached your pricing page. It is the only cheap audience you have
• Kill anything that has spent three times your target cost per signup with nothing to show

Most founders I audit are running a test too small to tell them anything, and reading it anyway.

All of this. I would add the boring one: check that the conversion is being recorded at all. A third of the small accounts I looked at in my old job were optimising toward an event that had stopped firing.

Yusuf taught me this job. He also once spent $4,000 in a weekend on an ad with a typo in the headline, since we are saying the real number.

It was $4,300 and the typo outperformed the corrected version. I still do not know what to do with that.

I spent $300 on ads once and got 2 installs!! So $150 each for a $4.99 app!!

Priya, that is the most common story in this section. Retarget the people who visited your store page and nothing else. If that does not work at $50, more money will not fix it.