A first-person YouTube narrative by Nate Tilley describing how he convinced a car dealership and a martial arts gym to let him run $100 Facebook ad tests, wrote his first lead-generation ads late at night, published them, and felt that this moment marked the start of a transformative business journey.
Chapters
I approached the car dealership that I was working at and I said, hey, I'm learning a lot about marketing. I would love the opportunity to just spend $100 on Facebook ad. I'll generate prospective car buyers. I'll follow up with them myself. I'll get them in here. And if you make some money, I would love to use this as a case study to start my business. They said, of course. Here's a hundred dollars. Here's my card. Try it out. I also went to the martial arts gym that I was training at and I said the same thing. Hey, I'd love to help you get more students. I know you just started this kids program. Let me try running some ads for you. He said, sure. How much do you want to spend? I said, let's do $100. He said, okay. And I remember that that hundred dollar commitment felt was like so much money, which really it was nothing to them. They didn't think it was going to work. They were just supporting me. And so I remember that night so vividly. House was dark, my roommates were all sleeping. I stayed up past midnight and I started just writing up the ads. And I created my first lead generation campaigns. And when I did that, I had this feeling like late at night I pressed the green button, I published the ad and I had this feeling and I knew in that moment that that was the start of something new, that that was going to be big, that that was going to transcend and transform my life.