We lit $1M on fire learning paid ads.

This past year, I can confidently say that we lit on fire a million dollars learning how to run paid ads, and most of them failed. Our business is primarily organic based, and when we started running paid ads, I was so ignorant. I just thought, oh, you turn on paid ads and then magically things start working. 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. Organic is easy mode. You just post content and people show up and go through your funnel and then buy something and, oh, that's incredible. The problem is you don't have full control over that lever. You're relying on the algorithm. You're relying on posts going viral. Paid ads are much more predictable, but they're also riskier in the sense that you might spend five grand only to realize that your funnel doesn't work. You might spend ten grand only to realize that this offer isn't the thing that people are interested in. And I have felt our risk profile go up and up and up. Like two months ago, we did our first paid challenge. So people signed up for a paid challenge and paid a fee to come live. And we spent $150,000 promoting this thing. And it wasn't until after the fact that me and my co founder, Dickie were like, all right, so what was the risk there? I mean, maybe we wouldn't have made our money back on the back end. But imagine if all those people bought tickets and then my Internet went out. Well, then what do you do? And every time you run a different offer with paid, you don't really realize the risks until you're. You're too far in. And that's why whenever people say, like, oh, shouldn't I just run ads? 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, I don't even know if I can. We figured out paid ads this year, but we definitely paid down a lot of ignorance, debt, learning.