Paid ads are not the silver bullet that almost every marketer spruiks to business owners, though there is definitely a place for them in your marketing stack. Over the past 10 years I have invested well over $500,000 on ads and before that I spent thousands a week before digital really kicked off. I say most agencies because people like @Aaron Parkinson has one of the best agencies on the planet, we have worked together for a while. He is one of the few that will tell you how it is, I have complete trust in his team and him. If you are in any of Cole Gordon's programs, you will know Aaron from running his ads calls. The main lesson is that if you want to grow a highly engaged, loyal audience who know like and trust you - there is really only one way. Produce organic content and build your audience. When that works then you use ads to amplify your message and drive conversions faster, at much less cost to a warm audience. That may take 1-2 years and for many people that is too far in the future so they don't invest. Yes there are methods of getting there faster, they require a complete commitment to a platform, you have to be a weapon at creating content and responding to it. It also depends on your aim - ie how quick do you want a business to support you financially, what are your short, medium and long terms goals. Everyone is different. Yes. There are plenty of insta famous marketers who say their account got up up very quickly, maybe in the old days though it is harder now, possibly with the exception of Tik Tok, or they had serious assets behind them. Ie large podcasts, books etc. They will not tell you this unless you do some digging. Why? Because otherwise they have nothing to sell. One thing I can pretty much guarantee is that they put in a huge amount of time to get there. If you want to take a deep dive listen to how Mr Beast built his platform, spending thousands of hours with his friends pouring over thumbnails and videos trying to identify virality. You can learn from him.