The $1k/Day Experiment
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DebriefApril 13, 2026 · 27 min read

Ads 2026: the experiments and the February–April update

2026 Experiments

Ad Strategy Update: Tweaks and Tests for Better Performance 📈 - Watch Video

What I’m Testing Right Now (and How It’s Going)

Over the last few months, my ads that were working beautifully started to fall apart, and I’ve been in the weeds testing, breaking, and rebuilding. Here’s what I’ve been doing, why, and what I’m seeing so far.

1. When My “Evergreen Winner” Broke

For months, I had a core campaign that reliably brought in tripwire purchases at around $20–$30 per purchase. Over the last 30 days or so, that same funnel started producing:

  • Cost per purchase at $60+ and then disappearing altogether
  • Cost per lead jumping way up
  • ROAS declining
  • Purchases dropping off

Looking back, there were three big culprits:

  1. I cloned my winning campaign and had two campaigns optimizing for the exact same thing.**
    ** At one point I had both budgets up around $200/day, competing against each other in the auction. Not smart.

  2. I expanded targeting to “cheap” countries.**
    ** I normally only target US/UK/Canada. In January I added countries like South Africa, the Philippines, and UAE. On paper, costs were cheaper. In reality, I got:

    • Tons of spammy comments
    • Weird, low‑quality leads
    • Super erratic performance

  3. I changed my tripwire price at the same time.**
    ** I’d been running a $17 tripwire for a long time. Then I raised it to $37 and changed other variables (creative, targeting) at the same time. So when the funnel tanked, I had no clean read on what broke.

2. How I Simplified the Core Campaign

To clean this up, I went back to basics:

  • One campaign, one ad set, many creatives.**
    ** I turned off the clone and consolidated everything into my original, long‑running campaign.

  • 15–20 creatives, same copy.**
    ** I create one ad with my primary text and 2–3 headline options, then duplicate it and just swap out the image or video. All ads have:

    • Identical copy (3 variations to test)
    • Different creative (static images, simple graphics, reels)

  • Tightened geographic targeting again.**
    ** I removed all the “cheap” countries and went back to:

    • United States
    • Canada
    • United Kingdom

  • Slow, deliberate scaling.**
    ** I dropped the budget, let the campaign re‑enter the learning phase, and now I’m:

    • Starting around $25/day

    • Increasing ~10% every few days if performance looks stable

  • Tripwire pricing test.**
    ** I’m keeping the tripwire at $37 for now to see if I can make that price work. My plan:

    • If I can’t get $37 profitable, I’ll test $27**

      **

    • If $27 doesn’t work either, I’ll assume $17 is my true ceiling and go back there

Right now, cost per lead has been higher than I’d like but is starting to trend back down as the campaign re‑stabilizes.

3. The New Lead Magnet Campaign (Algorithms Anonymous)

I also launched a brand new lead magnet campaign (“Algorithms Anonymous”) with its own structure:

  • One campaign, one ad set, 20 creatives**

    **

  • Targeting:**

    **

    • US, UK, Canada only

    • Age 25+

    • English speakers

    • Wide open, Advantage+ style—no interests

  • Objective: Purchases (not just leads)
    I’m still optimizing for purchase even though it’s a free lead magnet because I want higher‑intent traffic.

  • Creative mix:**

    **

    • Simple static graphics
    • Photo‑style images
    • NotebookLM‑designed visuals (busier, more experimental)
    • Reel‑sized videos I made in Canva with their templates
    • A couple of “not my style at all” creatives just to see what happens

This campaign has only been running a short time, so early data looks like:

  • Higher CPL than I want

  • No purchases yet

  • Not enough volume to make decisions

I’m forcing myself not to touch it for at least 3 days so Andromeda/Facebook can properly learn.

4. Video Ads to Build My “Invisible List”

I’m also running a low‑budget video view campaign designed purely to build a warm audience:

  • Goal: 500 new people per week watching at least 25% of the video

  • Structure:**

    **

    • 1 campaign
    • 1 ad set
    • 4 different videos
    • Objective: Video views (25% view)

Originally, when I opened up countries, I was getting sub‑penny video views—but again, obviously the wrong people. So I reverted targeting here too:

  • Back to US/UK/Canada/Ireland
  • Costs went up slightly (still under a penny), but the audience is much higher quality

When I look at the last 30 days, I’ve had around 1,300 people hit 25% view, which averages to ~325/week. Since I really want 500/week, I’m:

  • Letting the new, tighter targeting run a bit longer
  • Watching 25% view counts rather than obsessing over the cost per result
  • Planning to adjust once I see more stable data

This is a long‑game “invisible list” asset that I retarget later with sales ads.

5. Retargeting Campaigns: What Flopped

I also tested retargeting funnels for my higher ticket offers—MBA and The Room.

MBA Retargeting (High Ticket, $2,000)

  • Campaign objective: Purchases
  • Audience: Warm only (past buyers, site visitors, video viewers, email list, ad engagers)
  • Creative: 7 different ads (including a 10‑minute reel style video from a webinar)

What happened:

  • I spent ~$540

  • Got:

    • 145 link clicks
    • 121 landing page views

  • Zero tracked sales from this campaign

Facebook claimed I got a few purchases, but when I cross‑checked with Kartra, those sales were not actually from this campaign. So I’m trusting my cart data.

My takeaways:

  • The click‑through rate was solid**

    **

  • The ads themselves “worked” in terms of engagement

  • The sales page likely needs work (which I’m currently updating)

  • Based on feedback from my ads mentor, I:

    • Turned this retargeting campaign off

    • Am considering re‑launching it later with a traffic objective first, rather than purchases, to rebuild more data and test the page

The Room Retargeting ($97 Offer)

  • Objective: Purchases**

    **

  • Audience: All warm segments (similar structure to MBA)

  • Creative: 6 square image ads

Performance:

  • Spent ~$369**

    **

  • No sales from this campaign

  • High CPMs

  • High click‑through rates on certain ads (e.g., “Entrepreneurship is lonely, but you don’t have to do it alone” and a “room where it happens” playbill‑style ad)

  • ~100 landing page views, zero purchases**

    **

What this tells me:

  • Again, ads are “working” (people are clicking)

  • The offer/sales page, not the ad, is likely the friction point

  • High CPMs suggest I may need to adjust:

    • Creative

    • Copy

    • Targeting structure (including Advantage+ audience expansion)

I’ve paused this and am planning to:

  • Revisit the strategy (possibly test traffic objective vs purchase objective)

  • Ask more nuanced questions inside my ads group (this retargeting structure came from Laurel, so I’ll likely circle back there)

6. Pricing Experiments on the Front End

Behind all of this, I’m also running a pricing experiment on my funnel:

  • Tripwire went from $17 → $37**

    **

  • Bump went from $37 → $77**

    **

  • Some early results:

    • When I switched to $37, sales volume dropped

    • I also made multiple changes at once (targeting, creative), so I’m now holding at $37 to see if I can optimize around that price

My personal rules for this test:

  1. Give each price long enough to re‑stabilize in the algorithm

  2. Don’t stack too many changes at once

  3. If $37 can’t be made profitable, test $27

  4. If $27 also fails, accept that $17 is the “sweet spot” for this particular offer and let it be

7. Big Picture: What I’m Actually Doing With My Ads

Summing all of this up, my current ads strategy is about:

  • Simplifying the structure**

    **

    • One winning campaign for my core tripwire funnel

    • One campaign/ad set for the new lead magnet

    • One video view campaign for my invisible list

    • Retargeting that I’m willing to pause and rethink

  • Tightening targeting**

    **

    • Back to US/UK/Canada (and sometimes Ireland)

    • Removing “cheap” but low‑quality countries even when CPL looks sexy

  • Letting Andromeda/Facebook learn**

    **

    • Avoiding the urge to tweak daily

    • Giving each test several days before judging performance

  • Separating variables in my experiments**

    **

    • Not changing price, creative, and audience all at once (anymore)

    • Treating tripwire price as its own experiment, separate from ad structure

  • Trusting my cart data over Ads Manager**

    **

    • Always cross‑checking Facebook’s “purchases” against Kartra

    • Making decisions on real revenue, not just in‑platform reports

8. What This Means for You

I’m sharing all of this in the mess, not just the tidy debrief, because:

  • Good ads do break—especially when we tweak too many things at once

  • “Cheaper leads” can quietly tank your funnel if they’re the wrong people

  • Often, the ad is not the problem; the offer and page are

  • Scaling is almost always about:

    • Fewer campaigns

    • Clearer objectives

    • Cleaner targeting

    • Better back‑end (offers, pages, nurture)

Over the next few weeks, I’ll keep testing:

  • Whether I can make $37 tripwires and $77 bumps profitable

  • How my new Algorithms Anonymous funnel performs at scale

  • Which retargeting structures actually move the needle for MBA and The Room

And as always, I’ll report back with the real data—what worked, what flopped, and what I’d do differently so you can apply it to your own ecosystem without burning through your budget (or your nervous system) in the process.

Quick changes I’m making right now:

  1. Turned off retargeting ads to core 3 offers.
  2. Upped my video budget to $20/day to get to 500 new 25% viewers
  3. Changed the tripwire price back to $17 for now until stable, but kept the bump at $77
  4. Working on updating the MBA sales page because If CPM high + CTR high + no sales → friction at offer. Not ad.
  5. Once my CPL is back under $5, I’m getting high-quality 500 people a week viewing 25% of the videos, I may turn on the retargeting ads again and continue scaling up the lead magnet ads. Until then, I observe.

The results

MONTHLY AD RESULTS: JANUARY 2026

  • Total New Leads: 1,258

    • Lead-to-Customer Rate ≈14.7%

  • Average CPL: $4.71

  • Total Purchases: 185

  • Amount Spent: $6,591.77

    • This comes out to an average of $212.64/day in ad spend

  • Front-End Amount Earned (via Kartra): $6,236 in cash collected

    • $1,904 from the tripwire

      • = 121 sales/1,258 leads = 9.6% conversion rate

    • $2,220 from the bump

      • = 60/121 = 49.6% conversion rate

    • $2,112 from the upsell

      • = 4/121 = 3.3% conversion rate

    • Revenue per Lead ≈ $6.64

    • Revenue per Purchase ≈ $45.12

  • ROAS: 0.95

  • Average CPM: $39.66

  • Average CTR: 1.67%

I think the main reason for this is because I’ve spent $234.89 on retargeting ads to MBA sales page and The Room sales page and have gotten 0 sales so far.

I also spent $47.46 on video ads to build my “invisible list”, which in theory should lower ad costs, but it might take a bit to fully kick in.

I’m also not looking at LTV like I did above, just what the ad generated on the front-end. So I’m happy to see that’s at least breaking even, because that means anything else I earn now from these leads, I’m getting paid a small profit to build my list and fill my ecosystem.

My higher CPM also tells me that my creatives might need some work, especially since I’m in a competitive audience where impressions are more expensive. Then again, Q1 is proving to be a hard sales quarter (holiday spending fatigue?) and I struggled to scale my ads without breaking them, and often had to scale back down again and then try scaling back up.

Overall, I’m not too worried. I’m going to make some changes to retargeting and budget for February and then see where I’m at.

February – April Ads 2026 Update

A catch-up dispatch for members who've been wondering what the hell I've been doing

Ummmm…. So, I haven't written one of these ads diaries in a few months. And instead of pretending that's because I was too busy doing impressive things, I'll just say what's true: I fell off the documentation habit at the exact moment things got the most interesting.

Which, if you've been in this experiment for any length of time, you'll recognize as peak Kate behavior — I go heads-down when the real experimentation is happening and come back up for air after I've processed it.

So here's what's been going on, in real time, in the order it actually happened.

February 2026: The Month My Cat Died and the Business Kept Running

The headline financial number for February was $31,341 in revenue with a 45.7% profit margin.

That felt both impressive and insufficient at the same time, which is its own interesting data point. No campaigns. No active launches. Broken ads (more on that in a minute). A grief week in the back half of the month when my cat Boo died. And the business still ran at over $1,100/day in revenue.

That's the "resting heart rate" concept from January playing out in real time. I introduced that term a couple months ago to describe what a business generates with no active effort — when you're not pushing, not launching, just letting the evergreen systems do what they were built to do. February was the second consecutive proof-of-concept month. The floor is real.

But the floor is not the goal. The goal is $1k/day in profit, and February landed at about $511/day in profit. Exactly half. The infrastructure exists. The gap is an optimization problem.

What else happened in February:

  • Attended the New Media Summit (a podcast guesting conference in Denver) — all relationship-building, no immediate revenue, planting seeds for the newsletter sponsorship and PR strategy
  • Announced The Room price increase from $97/month to $197/month, effective March 20
  • Rebuilt ad infrastructure after a messy end to Q4 (also more on this shortly)
  • Spent a lot of time in backend work: updating the $1k/Day portal, tightening team systems, building AI tools
  • Lost Boo on February 20th. If you read the income report, you know. I'm not going to try to make that into a business lesson.

12-month rolling numbers as of end of February:

  • Revenue: $387,885
  • Profit margin: 60.3%

We're sitting exactly on the 60% profit margin target on a rolling basis. That's the goal I set under the Profit First framework, and hitting it without consciously engineering it in any given month is the point of running a margin-first business.

The Ads Honest Post-Mortem

In late March, I did a full audit of every Meta campaign I've run since February 2025. Fourteen months of data, every campaign, every dollar.

Here's what I learned, and I'm sharing this because it's genuinely instructive and also a little embarrassing.

The Golden Window

From roughly July through October 2025, the ads were working. Not "working" as in "fine, probably." Actually working.

July alone: 489 purchases at $30.93 CPP, 1.65x ROAS. CPMs were running $20–33. Opt-in CVRs were 48–54%. The machine was: BTS/SAC challenge funnel, purchase-optimized objective, broad targeting, rotating creative.

That was the proof of concept. The question I didn't ask at the time: what exactly is making this work, and how do I protect it?

The Fracture

Starting in November 2025, a set of decisions compounded in a direction I didn't see clearly until I laid the full data out.

Cost per purchase went from $31 in October to $121 by March. That's not a market problem. That's a self-inflicted wound with distinct causes.

The ads didn't stop working. I stopped running the ads that worked, and replaced them with experiments that hadn't earned scale yet.

There are three distinct failure modes here, and I want to name them because they're all very easy to fall into:

1. Creative fatigue I didn't address properly. My CPMs roughly doubled between the golden window and Q1 2026 — that's the signal that the algorithm is running out of new people to serve my ads to efficiently. The solution is genuinely new creative — meaning new psychological angles, new emotional entry points, not just new images over the same hook. I kept "refreshing" creative without actually changing the core message. Though I'll be honest: I'm not 100% sure creative fatigue was the whole story. There are millions of people who'd never seen my ads. I also think I was messing with targeting and funnel pricing and other levers simultaneously, and it was all just too much at once.

2. Strategic drift. I knew the challenge funnel worked. Instead of doubling down and iterating on it, I got curious about new frameworks. Curiosity is generally a business asset. In this case it cost me a few months of acquisition efficiency. The shiny object pull is real even when you know it's happening.

3. Underinvesting in retargeting. My retargeting campaigns consistently produced 3–12x ROAS. I was putting only 6% of total spend there. That's money I was leaving on the table every month because I kept prioritizing cold traffic acquisition. I'll be honest — I still haven't fully figured out how to do evergreen retargeting well, but I'm working on it.

There's a fourth failure mode worth naming that I didn't include in my original diagnosis: too many tweaks too early. The fragmentation created its own evidence that campaigns weren't working — at $300–400 per campaign with a purchase objective, nothing had enough budget to exit the learning phase, which made everything look like it was failing, which made me want to change things, which reset the learning phase again. Anxiety-tinkering made the data worse, which justified more anxiety-tinkering. Fun cycle.

What this means going forward: Get back to the challenge funnel, purchase-optimized, broad targeting, with genuinely psychologically diverse creative. Build retargeting to 15–20% of budget. Stop fragmenting spend. Let campaigns run long enough to actually tell you something.

The Honest Accounting

Total spend from November 2025 through March 2026: approximately $12,700. Total cost per purchase during that period: peaked at $121.76.

Compare that to July 2025: $15,497 in spend at $30.93 CPP, 489 purchases.

If I had run the July model — even at half the budget — through Q1 2026 instead of pivoting to awareness campaigns and untested frameworks, the difference in output would have been significant.

I'm not flagellating over it. I'm documenting it, which is different. The experiments had logic at the time. The logic turned out to be wrong. What I want to carry forward isn't guilt — it's a sharper filter for when "I want to try something new" is creative iteration versus strategic drift.

The Live Webinar Experiment: I Tried It Once and Stopped

On March 24th, I ran my first cold-traffic live webinar for MBA. I've been testing webinars with warm audiences before, but this was the first time I paid for cold traffic to come in, attempted to close them live, and tracked everything.

The numbers:

  • 489 registrants (paid cold traffic, CPL around $1.69)
  • ~40 showed up live (8% attendance rate — industry average for cold traffic is 15–25%, so this is below average but not catastrophic)
  • Conversion: disappointing (as in 0 sales)

The decision to stop:

Here's the honest question I had to sit with after: if this webinar had gotten 10 sales, would I be saying something different right now?

Probably yes. I'd probably be saying "okay that was actually not that hard, let's do it every month."

Which means my decision to stop running live webinars isn't purely strategic. It's partly that it didn't work, and discomfort amplified when there was no immediate payoff. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. The experiment didn't convert, and I found reasons to stop.

But the operational reality is also genuinely bad for how I work:

Every live webinar required cloning email sequences, rewriting copy, setting up and tearing down ad campaigns, running the live event, then archiving the whole thing until next time. None of it was ever running in the background. Every month was a manual rebuild. That's the exact opposite of what I sell.

I sell evergreen. I teach people to stop trading time for money and build systems that work while they sleep. Running a live webinar from scratch every 30 days was a structural contradiction that I couldn't unsee once I saw it.

The pivot to evergreen:

My biggest revenue year came from an evergreen webinar funnel. My audience historically buys in follow-up sequences, not live. I'm a better writer than I am a live closer — which was not actually something I thought about myself until I looked at the data.

I briefly ran an evergreen webinar for MBA a couple years ago. It didn't convert, and I killed it after a few weeks. But I used a two-year-old recording, never iterated, and gave it almost no time. That wasn't a test. That was a glance.

This time, I'm building it properly. Two changes from the previous attempt: registrants will pick a time to watch (not just land on a replay page — that one shift meaningfully increases show-up rates), and the entire email sequence will be written specifically for cold traffic from scratch, not adapted from warm launch copy.

Will it convert immediately? Almost certainly not. An evergreen funnel typically takes 60–90 days of data and iteration before you know if the core mechanism is working. I'm prepared for that.

April: Back to the Machine

In late March, I made the decision to stop fragmenting and return to what actually worked: BTS challenge, purchase-optimized objective, broad targeting, with genuinely new creative.

The first 48 hours of the rebuild campaign were instructive in a different way.

CTR of 2.91% is not a fluke. That's nearly double the 1.5% threshold, which means the creative is stopping the scroll. The ad itself was working.

The $82 CPM and 2.11 frequency after 48 hours on a reach of 2,239 people were telling me something specific. The cause: I had a "25K+ video viewers" custom audience included as a targeting suggestion. I thought it would function as a nudge — go to these people first, then expand. Instead, it was acting as a hard constraint, boxing the "broad" campaign into a pool of 2,500–2,900 people. The algorithm wasn't finding fresh eyeballs — it was cycling back on the same tiny pool, hence the CPM and the frequency.

I removed it. One edit, nothing else changed. Genuinely broad now.

Fourteen days in, the rebuild is materially better than the Q1 campaigns and still not where it needs to be — which is exactly where a 14-day purchase campaign should be.

The blended CPP of $67.78 looked alarming until we broke it week-over-week: week two came in around $47, a 60% improvement, with ROAS hitting 1.95x. The campaign is maturing in the right direction. The problem is it's still stuck in Meta's learning phase — exiting requires 50+ purchases/week and the campaign is generating roughly 18.5. That gap won't close from budget alone.

The more useful data came from the copy breakdown. Five variations, dramatically different results:

One variation is already hitting below the $30 CPP benchmark. The bottom two were deleted. I also published five individual ads — one creative each — inside the same ad set to finally get per-creative performance data, since Meta's image/video breakdown for offsite conversions is a known platform glitch that doesn't actually work.

Current status as of April 14: holding at $178/day, waiting on the creative test data before making any further moves.

The April Ads Data Rabbit Hole

Okay, so I did not plan for today to turn into a four-hour deep dive into my Meta ads data. I had a normal Wednesday. I had emails I was going to write. But then a marketing mentor I follow sent an email I couldn't stop thinking about.

His name is Zach. The gist: cold traffic is harder than it used to be, costs are up, attention spans are down, and the people winning with ads right now aren't running campaigns — they're running a strategy. His argument was that list-building ads, run consistently even when there's no launch happening, create an "invisible lift" — every new subscriber eventually warms up, reads your emails, buys something. His data showed warm traffic converting at less than half the cost of cold traffic ($40 per sale vs. $104 per sale for cold). The punchline: the list-building ads you ran three months ago are what made the warm traffic warm.

Here's the thing: I already run my lead magnet ads with a sales objective, not a leads objective. I'm optimizing for buyers, not just opt-ins. My cost per lead is higher because of it. But I'm getting actual buyers on my list from day one, and my tripwire sequence is generating positive ROAS immediately.

Reading his email, I started wondering: am I already doing a version of what he's describing? And should I also be running cheaper leads campaigns alongside it to just grow the list faster — even if those leads are lower quality?

The question underneath the question was: of the people who come in through my ads and don't buy the tripwire on day one, do any of them ever actually buy anything?

I had the data. I just had never looked at it this way.

What I Did

I pulled a CSV from Airtable of all my Meta ad leads since February 2025 — 7,844 people. The data included their lead date, which form they came from, their total lifetime value, their purchase dates, and what they bought. Then I sat down with Claude and asked it to help me answer the question I'd been circling: what do people who don't buy on day one actually do? Do they ever buy? When? And what does that mean for my CPL targets?

Here's what I found.

Finding #1: 91% of my leads never buy anything — which is actually fine

Out of 7,844 leads, 694 (8.8%) ever made a purchase. That sounds alarming until you compare it to industry benchmarks for course creators, which hover around 1–2% lifetime list-to-buyer conversion. My 8.8% is 4–8x that benchmark — from cold traffic.

This is my sales-objective ad setup doing its job. The people hitting my list have already demonstrated purchase intent just by clicking. The 91% who never buy are not a failure of my funnel. They're just cold traffic. The question is whether the people who are ready to buy are finding me, and the answer is yes.

Finding #2: 79% of my buyers purchase on day zero or one

Of my 694 buyers, 548 bought within the first 24 hours of opting in. That's my tripwire sequence working exactly as designed. Their average lifetime value is $80 — maps to the tripwire plus upsells.

Here's the thing about those $80 buyers though: 72 of them (13.1%) came back later and made additional purchases. Those 72 people have an average lifetime value of $423. The other 476 who bought the tripwire once and disappeared? $28 average LTV. That's a 15x difference, and it is the most interesting number in this entire dataset.

The tripwire isn't the destination. It's the audition. Whether someone passes isn't determined by whether they buy it — it's determined by whether they ever buy again.

Finding #3: The late buyers are worth significantly more, and they're buying The Room and MBA

146 people (2% of non-day-0 leads) eventually bought something after the first 24 hours. They average 3 transactions versus 2 for day-zero buyers, and 24.7% of them become recurring customers (purchases spanning more than 60 days) versus only 8.8% of day-zero buyers.

The high-value late buyers — the ones with $500, $1,000, $2,000+ LTV — are almost entirely Room members or MBA buyers. Not one-course buyers. People who got on my list, read my emails for a few weeks, hit a Get It Done Week or a promo, and committed at a higher price point.

Every single one of my $500+ late buyers came from the Beyond the Scroll Challenge ads. Not the webinar. Not the masterclass. BTS Challenge. One exception out of 17.

Finding #4: The timing curve tells me when to expect which kind of buyer.

The data broke down into two interesting spikes:

Days 2–14: 43 buyers, $272–289 average LTV. These are people who needed a few more email touches after opting in but were already close. The welcome sequence converted them.

Days 31–60: 17 buyers, $478 average LTV — the highest average LTV of any window. These are almost certainly GIDW converters. They came in cold, went through the welcome sequence, got a Get It Done Week invitation about a month later, and that event was the thing that tipped them. The 31–60 day buyer is my most valuable cold traffic archetype: patient, considered, and when they commit, they commit at a higher price point.

After day 90, the curve flattens significantly. The persuadable buyers have mostly converted by then. After day 180, you're looking at people who might occasionally buy something when a promo reaches them, but the active conversion window has passed.

Finding #5: My CPL and CPP targets were based on old assumptions

This one stung a little.

My day-zero revenue per lead is $5.60. That's what my tripwire funnel alone generates per opt-in — before email does any work. My CPL ceiling to be profitable on day zero is $5.60.

By day 30, revenue per lead climbs to $8.10. By day 60, $9.39. By day 90, $10.32. By day 180, $11.52. The curve essentially plateaus there — that's approximately my full customer lifetime value from ads.

Which means my actual CPL ceiling is $10.13 (my lifetime RPL), and my honest break-even window is somewhere between 30 and 60 days. If I'm evaluating whether a campaign "worked" at day seven, I'm looking at it too early. A campaign that looks marginal at day zero might be solidly profitable at day 60 — I just have to wait for the GIDW cycle to run.

As for CPP: at my actual 7% day-zero conversion rate, a CPL of $7 implies a CPP of $100. My day-zero average buyer LTV is $80, so to be profitable on day zero I need CPP under $80, which means CPL under $5.60. The $30 CPP target I'd been using was optimistic for cold traffic. Retired.

What I'm Going to Do With This

1. I'm not adding leads campaigns right now.

Zach's framework is solid for a launch model. My model is different. I'm already doing what he describes — I just do it with a sales objective, which means Meta does more filtering work before someone hits my list. Adding leads campaigns would grow the list faster but increase the percentage of leads who never buy. Given that my non-day-zero conversion rate is already only 2%, I'd rather have a smaller list of higher-intent people than a bigger list that dilutes that number further.

The only scenario where leads campaigns make sense for me: if I can get CPL cheap enough that even at a lower conversion rate, the eventual LTV math works out. I don't have enough data to know if that's true yet.

2. I need a real post-tripwire sequence.

The 476 day-zero buyers who bought once and disappeared are sitting there with $28 average LTV. If I could move even 20% of them to return-buyer status, that's roughly $19,000 in additional lifetime value from people already in my ecosystem — no additional ad spend required. I don't currently have a dedicated post-tripwire flow designed to get that second purchase. I have broadcast emails. That's not the same thing.

I used to have a buyer nurture sequence for low-ticket offers but it got turned off a while ago and needs to be updated and turned back on. Especially for challenge ad leads. I do have a special challenge sequence that funnels folks into MBA, but based on this data, it could be revamped to increase conversions and repeat purchases.

3. GIDW is doing more conversion work than I realized.

The 31–60 day buyer cluster at $478 average LTV almost certainly represents leads who converted through GIDW. This is the most efficient lever I have. It means the effort I put into making GIDW excellent is directly reflected in late-buyer LTV. More importantly, it means my welcome sequence should be explicitly setting up GIDW — not just nurturing people, but building anticipation for the event so when the invitation arrives, it lands on soil that's already been prepared.

4. Live launches activate the back half of the pipeline — and I need to plan for that.

The ads seed the list. The launch harvests it. Running ads without a promo calendar to match them against means I'm leaving the day 31–60 conversion window largely underactivated. This is part of why my "always on" strategy works, but why the months with live launches are so dramatically better.

I'm still working out whether that means quarterly live launches for MBA, or an evergreen MBA funnel with one annual anniversary sale launch plus our Q3/Q4 promos (birthday sale in September, Black Friday in November). I'll be thinking about this as we start the MBA revamp in May.

What's Actually Next

The evergreen webinar funnel isn't live yet. The decision was made in late March; the build is underway. I'm not soft-launching it until the email sequence is genuinely written for cold traffic, the webinar has been re-recorded, and the sales page is fully revamped. May is when we go MBA-focused.

Monthly "light launches" are the new cadence. Instead of big quarterly launches with full campaigns, we're running a softer promo every month for The Room and $1k/Day — a few emails, a call to action, nothing that requires a full funnel rebuild. GIDW and Watch Me Build give us the timely push to make this easy every month.

The newsletter is a growing priority. The Whole Soul List is being positioned as a media property, not just a list. Newsletter sponsorships are a 2026 revenue target. The foundation is subscribers and open rates — which means the ad strategy that grows the list is also the sponsorship strategy.

The $1k/day profit goal is still the goal. I was at $511/day in February. The math isn't complicated: it requires either more revenue at current margins, or lower expenses at current revenue. I don't want to cut costs. So the lever is revenue, which means ads working, the evergreen funnel converting, and The Room continuing to grow.

This is what it looks like to make a calm, considered business decision. No panic about the 91% who never buy. No impulsive budget increases. No chasing Zach's framework without asking whether it applies to my specific model. Just: here's the data, here's what it means, here are the things I'm going to do about it.

I'll report back when the post-tripwire sequence is built. Promise it'll be interesting.

— Kate

P.S. If you have questions about any of this — the ads data, the webinar decision, the MBA AI tools, any of it — post them in the Skool community or on Telegram for Office Hours. I'll answer everything. That's literally what this offer is for.

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