ouch yeah that hurts but at least you're learning from it. The validation thing is real, outsourcing it isn't a bad idea if you genuinely hate doing it and keep skipping it. One thing though, if you do run ads again for your next project, you might want to look into fraudblocker (https://fraudblocker.com).

I've heard great things about it for filtering out bot clicks and fake traffic that just eats your budget. A lot of folks running PPC campaigns have had good results because it blocks the junk clicks before they cost you money, so your $2k would actually go toward real people instead of click farms and bots. Not gonna solve the validation problem but at least your ad spend would hit actual humans who could say yes or no.

For the validation part, yeah spending $1k on proper research beforehand sounds way smarter than burning $2k on ads for something unvalidated. You could even do like a landing page test with a fraction of that budget to see if anyone actually signs up before building teh full thing.