Nicolas Cole spent roughly $1 million testing paid ads over a year and lost $100-200k. He argues paid advertising is a completely different skill from organic growth, where you have to spend heavily to learn what works and what doesn't.
This past year, I can confidently say that we lit on fire $1 million learning how to run paid ads. Maybe it ended up being breakeven. Maybe we ended up losing like $100 grand or $200 grand on it, but we spent $1 million on experiments and most of them failed. And when we started running paid ads, I thought, oh, you turn on paid ads and then magically things start working and you realize, first of all, no. Second of all, it's a completely different skill. Third of all, it has a completely different risk profile than organic. And every time you run a different offer with paid, you don't really realize the risks until you're too far in. And that's why whenever people say like, oh, shouldn't I just run ads? Like, no, you should mentally anchor to the fact that you need to light a lot of money on fire before you figure out how to do paid ads well. And so this year we definitely paid down a lot of ignorance debt learning.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
