Spent $2,800 on ads and hated every second, then the math surprised me

I kept hearing everyone in this sub say you need a big ad budget or you're wasting time. So I finally pulled the trigger on Meta ads for my print on demand shop, $2,800 over 8 weeks in Austin. I tracked everything in a spreadsheet, expecting to prove the gurus wrong. Instead, my return on ad spend came in at 3.4x, which beat my organic posts by a mile. The surprising part was that my worst performing ad, a grainy phone video I almost deleted, drove 40% of the sales. I found this split by accident when I broke down the data by creative after week 3. So now I'm wondering, has anyone else seen ugly, low effort content outperform their polished stuff? Or did I just get lucky with one weird niche audience?

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rowanjenkins19h ago

My buddy runs a little candle shop and poured like $500 into these super slick product shots with moody lighting and all that. The one that actually moved product was a 10 second clip of him dropping a candle on the floor by accident, captioned "oops, still smells good". It got triple the sales of the fancy stuff, and he was honestly mad about it until he just started filming everything on his phone.