Last year I opened my Meta Ads dashboard, did the math, and just stared at the screen for a second. I had spent more on running ads that week than the store had made. Not close. Actually more. So yeah. That's where this series starts. A bit of context I run Code Culture on the side. It's a developer apparel brand, shirts with terminal jokes on them, hoodies for the kind of person who has opinions about tab width. I work a full-time job in data during the day and do this in whatever's left over. Running it solo means every subscription you're paying for is money that could've been product, or ads, or just staying in your pocket. And for a while I was paying for a SaaS tool that bulk uploads ad creatives to Meta. It was fine. It did the job. But it was also a monthly cost on top of an ad budget that clearly wasn't working yet. At some point I just stopped and thought about what the tool was actually doing.…