#164 · Self-hosting n8n sucks (true story)
No, for the same reasons I've mentioned before — ads don't really make sense at small budgets. It typically takes something like 10x that budget just to begin to tell whether a campaign is actually working or total garbage.
Definitely go with cold email marketing. With $150 you can run a cold‑email campaign for about 2–3 months (roughly 60–75 days) sending around 300 emails per day, which gives you many shots at landing a paying client. Facebook ads at that budget are ineffective—you’d need roughly 10× the spend just to begin to understand whether the campaign is working, making it a poor choice for lead generation when funds are limited.
I’ve run paid Facebook ads for AI offers and seen a very high cost per acquisition—around $1,500 per lead—so the campaign isn’t profitable right now. I’m going to keep testing and optimizing the ads to bring the CAC down, but for now it’s not a recommended primary channel unless you can significantly improve targeting or offer.
If you’re selling a speed‑to‑lead offer that saves clients money on ads or improves their ad ROI, it’s crucial to target businesses that are already running ads. The whole premise relies on them having ad spend you can optimize. If they don’t run ads, the offer doesn’t apply. I recommend filtering for ad‑running businesses, using Facebook Ad Library, Google’s ad transparency library, enriching the data via their websites, finding email addresses, and doing LinkedIn lookups to identify decision‑makers before pitching how you can increase their revenue.
First, identify prospects who are already running ads by scraping Facebook or Google ad libraries and enriching them with contact info. Use browser automation to opt into each of their offers, recording the time and outcomes to demonstrate you've experienced their lead flow. Then, use AI to create a detailed, personalized icebreaker email that shows you've gone through their process and highlights how much money they're losing due to slow lead response—often $20,000–$30,000 per month. Offer a solution that patches these leaks, promising an additional $15,000–$20,000 in revenue. Reach out warmly, referencing specific details from their LinkedIn or ads to build rapport. Because these are high-intent, high-value leads spending money on growth, your reply rate can be 5–10%, allowing you to contact about 300 prospects per day. This approach is essentially a highly customized audience selection similar to Facebook Ads but executed via automated outreach.