The discovery call lasted four minutes and forty-one seconds, and the prospect never turned his camera on. He was working outside, he said. Fine. I’ve taken calls from a Publix parking lot.
He runs a custom cabinet and remodeling company, and he wanted Meta ads for kitchens specifically, because kitchens are where the money is. An average kitchen job, he told me, lands somewhere between $30,000 and $60,000. That’s higher than what I’ve heard from other companies in this space, but sure, let’s go with it.
I’d done my homework before we got on. No Meta Pixel on the site. And the site itself had that unmistakable look of something built over a weekend by describing a vibe to an AI and hitting enter. (I teach vibecoding seminars, so I recognize the handiwork. I’m aware I may be part of the problem.)
This is the world we’re in now. You can look like a real company by Friday. The website takes an afternoon, the logo takes a prompt, and a Meta ad account takes less time than ordering lunch on DoorDash. There’s also a whole cottage industry of agencies in your DMs and on Upwork offering to run your ads for free, which should tell you plenty about how that industry makes its money.
What nobody has figured out how to generate is the ad budget. Or the patience to let one work.
The free trial
Here’s where the call got interesting. He was already running a 10-day free trial with another agency. They set up the account for free and managed it for free, and he covered the ad spend. I asked how it was going.
“Pretty well,” he said.
Which is why he was on a call with me, shopping for someone who could get him “better results.”
Ten days of free management is that agency’s lead generation, and he is the lead. The retainer kicks in on day eleven, and by his own description it’s pretty high. Ten days on a brand-new ad account with a brand-new pixel is barely enough time for Meta to figure out who it’s supposed to show the ads to. The agency knows nobody can be judged fairly in that window.
What they’re selling is the feeling of momentum, right up until the contract shows up.
And he could smell it, which is why he was already looking around. Credit where it’s due. He told me he’d run ads for a previous business and came from a marketing background. He knew enough to be suspicious of the free trial.
He did not know enough to be suspicious of his own numbers.
The math
His targets were simple. No more than $250 per qualified booked appointment. $4,000 in ad spend for the first month. And he wasn’t going to put more than $1,000 into any single agency before seeing results.
Start with the algorithm. $4,000 a month is about $1,000 a week. At $250 per booked appointment, that buys four appointments a week and 16 for the whole month, and that’s the best case, assuming he somehow hits his cost target on a brand-new account with no pixel data. Sixteen conversions in a month is nowhere near enough for Meta to figure out what a real kitchen buyer looks like. The algorithm learns about as much from that as I learned from the back row of Statistics 101.
Now flip it around and look at what he’s actually trying to buy. At the midpoint of his own range, one kitchen is worth about $45,000. One signed job pays for his entire first month of ad spend eleven times over. The prize is enormous and the downside is small.
And yet the number he was guarding was the $1,000.
This is the part I said out loud on the call, more or less word for word. You’re selling $50,000 and $60,000 projects, and you won’t spend more than a few thousand dollars finding out whether ads can sell them. The math just isn’t there. I know that from working in this exact space, with companies selling this exact product.
He was being very careful with the $1,000 and pretty casual with the $45,000.
How it ended
I told him it wasn’t a fit. I typically work with people spending $30,000 to $50,000 a month, and I wasn’t going to pretend a startup budget and a 10-day audition were going to change that. I told him I’d be happy to revisit when he’s ready to come back with a real budget and a real commitment.
He said okay, and that was the end of the call. I don’t expect to hear from him again. It’s hard to revisit a budget that doesn’t exist.