a $100M founder told us his exact meta ads strategy on mic and my CPMs dropped 50% the same week. here's everything we covered: 1. bid caps are the meta ads cheat code nobody talks about. set your budget to something insane like $1M/day and your bid cap to the max CPA you'll accept. it signals to zuck you've got big balls and opens up the entire auction. my CPMs dropped 50% overnight and I went from burning cash at $1K/day to printing at sub 2 ROAS. if you're raw dogging meta with no bid cap you're lighting money on fire. 2. the $500/week creative team hack. post a job on upwork, get 50 replies, filter to 10 decent ones, pay each $50 for a paid test project. 7 will suck, 3 will be great. you just hired a full ad creative team for $150 in test costs. they care about their star rating so if they bomb you just ask for a refund. tom's pumping out 10-15 ads per week with this setup. 3. AI avatars are replacing UGC creators but most people are doing it wrong. don't just tell chatGPT "generate a girl in a park" — it looks AI as hell. screenshot a viral tiktok, feed it to chatGPT image gen, ask it to keep the same background and lighting but change facial features and clothing. the ads that convert are the ones you can't tell are AI. 4. I'm making $50K/mo from one SEO page. ranked for a top keyword in my industry, sold the #1 spot to a competitor for $14K/mo, put myself at #2, and filled slots 3-8 with affiliate offers pulling $5K/mo. plus $30K/mo from my own offer. one page. purely organic. 5. hire from pakistan. not a joke. $100/page shopify devs that are cracked. entire teams doing cashflow management. the philippines got complacent — pakistan and bangladesh are the new alpha. train them with claude, throw them in the deep end, and they'll 10x output because they have zero ego about using AI. 6. the best heuristic for teaching anyone AI: don't think, just ask. outsource your thinking but never outsource your knowledge. your VA doesn't need to be smart — they need to follow instructions and not have ego about asking a machine for answers. that combo beats a $150K/yr employee who "prefers to think with their brain." 7. AI layoffs are just starting. coinbase drama. cloudflare cut 2000 citing AI directly. the dream job kids — CS degree, S&P 500 company, mid six figures with options — they're the ones getting cut first. meanwhile landscapers, barbers, and locksmiths are thriving. tom is bullish on businesses that require hands. ep 4 of NGMI with @itstonyyu and Tom Wang watch/listen ↓
