I was on a call recently with a founder who'd just lived through every ecommerce operator's nightmare.
They'd been running Meta ads at $3K–$5K/day for months. Stable CAC. Predictable results. Nothing fancy, but it worked.
So they decided to scale.
They pushed spend to $15K/day ... and everything fell apart.
CAC spiked 40%. Creative that had been running strong for weeks suddenly died. The team panicked and started changing everything … new hooks, new offers, new targeting, new landing pages.
More changes. Worse results.
When I asked what they thought the problem was, they said: "Meta is cooked. The platform just doesn't work at scale."
Here's the thing.
Meta wasn't the problem.
Scaling didn't break their ads. It exposed what was already broken upstream.
See, at $3K/day, you can get away with a lot:
Your message can be a little fuzzy
Your segment can be a little broad
Your offer can be "good enough"
Targeting can do the heavy lifting
But when you scale, all those crutches disappear.
The platform forces you into broader exposure. Higher frequency. More audience diversity. And suddenly, whatever was unclear in your message, your segment, or your offer gets loud.
Most founders think acquisition is a tactics problem.
"We need better ads."
"We need more creative."
"We need a new agency."
But acquisition isn't a tactics game. It's a truth amplifier.
Platforms don't create demand. They don't fix fuzzy positioning. They don't make weak offers feel safe.
They just scale whatever is already true about your business.
And when the truth upstream is messy … when your segment is blurry, your message is generic, or your offer creates hesitation … the platform amplifies that mess right back at you.
The moral: Platforms amplify truth, not tactics.
So if scaling feels hard, the answer isn't to push harder downstream. It's to look upstream and ask:
"What truth isn't holding anymore?"
Tomorrow I'll show you the most common place this breaks first (and it's not where most founders look).
See you tomorrow,
Jeremiah
P.S. If you've ever had a "winning" ad suddenly stop working when you tried to scale it, you've felt this. The ad didn't change. The truth it was carrying just couldn't hold at higher volume.
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