Then Stripe banned him and held the money for three months. He lost about $1K, which was all of his living money.

Got on a call with a guy who still lives at his family's house in Turkey. The month before we talked, he did over $3.4M. That July, his best month ever had been $400K. He had a very high GPA at the best university in Turkey and stopped going to class to do this. He started in April 2019 with about $2K and a $150 course, and tutored high-school kids in maths and English on the side. The story that got me: he was on exchange in Switzerland, living on a scholarship. He put $100 into ads and made $1.5K in sales and $400 in profit. Then Stripe banned him and held the money for three months. He lost about $1K, which was all of his living money. For years after that he did everything himself and cleared $10–30K profit a month. He told me straight up that being a one-man business was the main thing limiting his growth. So he made one full-time hire. An assistant to publish his ads. With that one person, profit went to $100K a month. That assistant now runs his people. Then he went after unit cost. He cut $6–8 off every unit, then went back to his old supplier and got them to match the new price. And when he scales, 90–95% of the time it's on Advantage+. Most guys stuck at $400K a month go looking for a better ad. He hired a person and fixed his margin. Why this works: When you're the only person in the business, every hour you spend uploading ads is an hour you're not spending on product, suppliers or the next offer. That's why he sat at $10–30K profit for years. The ads were fine. He was the bottleneck. The first hire doesn't need to be a genius. His was an assistant whose job was publishing ads. That freed him to fix the things only he could fix, like his unit cost. And $6–8 a unit is not small. On a product that sells every day, it lands on every single order before you touch your ads. How to steal it this week: 1. Write down every task you did last week and how many hours each one took. 2. Circle the ones someone else could do with a 2-page SOP: publishing ads, uploading creatives, customer emails. 3. Hire one full-time person for those. Not a freelancer you have to chase. 4. Spend the hours you get back on unit cost. Get a quote from a second supplier, then take it to your current one. If you still publish your own ads, you've found your ceiling.