#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.
I think you could use Meta ads to get clients, but I'll be honest — I've never been very good or successful with ads myself, which is part of why I pushed toward outbound instead; outbound just makes more sense to me. That said, plenty of people are crushing it with inbound in our niche, so it's absolutely doable — it just comes down to your specific technical implementation.