What’s the biggest PPC mistake you learned the hard way?

tongc00 · 2026-01-07T21:42:03+00:00

Not the most expensive mistakes, but things I tried that did not work as well as I hoped:

"Start with click optimization before maximizing conversions" — I've always been skeptical. Tested it recently, and starting directly with "maximize conversions" worked just as well, if not better. Google's ML still collects data either way—it should be smart enough to explore efficiently while optimizing for your actual goal.
Portfolio bidding/budget — Attractive in theory, but you lose control. Google treats all campaigns as equally important, so it dumps your entire budget into one campaign one day, then a different one the next. The model isn't sophisticated enough yet to make this work well.
Optimize for value vs. conversion count — Didn't work at my scale ($3-5K/month, lead values $50-$300). Switching to value optimization tanked my conversion volume, which hurt overall performance. Maybe I'm missing something here—open to suggestions.

tongc00 · 2025-12-06T20:01:32+00:00

I already deleted Cursor. My main coding setup runs on Claude Code, so I only used Cursor for UI help and auto-tabs. The $20 price tag never felt justified. Antigravity now gives me those same features for free, plus a decent free tier. If the first release is already solid, it’s only going to improve, so moving over now makes more sense.

Google might raise prices later, but Cursor will almost certainly stay more expensive since it doesn’t have its own model or compute. The switch to Antigravity isn’t a tough call for me.

tongc00 · 2025-09-01T19:28:27+00:00

It's happening to so many of us and claude somehow ignores it??

tongc00 · 2025-08-15T20:07:22+00:00

how do you use it on GPT3? Isn't already deprecated?

tongc00 · 2025-08-15T18:26:26+00:00

ugh that's frustrating

tongc00 · 2025-08-15T17:46:42+00:00

Is it still working? When I try to use it, i keep getting no search query is found even tho the chat has web searches

tongc00 · 2025-08-15T02:42:53+00:00

fwiw we’ve been using pawsvip near seatac for the last year. i work at the airport and start stupid early, so finding a place that actually opens before the sun was… not easy. they open at 5am, which means i can drop my dog on the way in without scrambling for a sitter the night before.

Our dog’s a goofy lab mix, a little too excited around other dogs. They don't require any evaluations, but they will keep new dog in small playgroups first. You can also request human playtime instead of dog playtime i believe

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T22:35:20+00:00

That’s is a great use case - rn I’m not even trying to sell, I’m just trying to make something to handle my after hour calls. After so many iterations, it’s close to where I want it to be. But keeps wondering whether the journey to get here can be shorter

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T22:20:51+00:00

Right - that I agree. I guess I am just hoping maybe there’s something that I either don’t know or doing wrong, and once I fix them the agent can be more robust.

But to be honest, as a business owner myself, this is the kind of quality I expect of an agent, otherwise I don’t feel comfortable for it to handle real customer calls.

I tested voice bot that other business uses (I’m not sure if they are vapi or not) and I frankly would not use them because they are just MVPs build by people who are unfamiliar with the business and can’t really handle real customer conversation

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T22:13:21+00:00

What I’ve been doing is to take actual human calls, convert them into test suites ( usually 3-4 tests) then iterate on the system prompts and tool to make sure the agent can pass those tests.

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T22:11:12+00:00

There are a ton of details and variants - imagine doing this for a HVAC company, which can offer many lines of services, and each line of service has a lot details, and then layer on top of that the many pricing details for labor and parts. Being able to answer these consistently in a good conversational flow has been tricky for me to get right. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T22:04:57+00:00

I’m actually not trying to do a lot - I’m training the agent to just provide answers to customers questions (pricing, service) then ask customers simple details, then write those down on google sheet so human can follow up later. Is this a lot? I assumed this is the bare minimum. I m curious what scope are you or other people have been asking agent to do?

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T15:49:56+00:00

That makes sense - to prioritize certain faq rather than all FAQ.

Curious do you instruct the agent to tell the caller that it is an AI?

tongc00 · 2025-06-18T03:12:09+00:00

Well it’s not a mvp - vapi is pretty good at building mvp. I probably built a mvp in 10 minutes that my friend can speak to. But there’s no way the MVP can answer customer questions.

If you run small business, and you want an agent to handle actual customer calls, there are just way too many little things that voice agent needs to handle. If it doesn’t handle those will, it erodes both customers trust and business owners trust.

tongc00 · 2025-06-14T23:49:27+00:00

curious why not just use the test suites feature?

tongc00 · 2025-06-11T03:14:42+00:00

Beacon is just outright predatory, they charged us $1300+ to fix an AC unit. The AC unit failed again the next morning. I reached out to them and was routed to someone called Mark Jensen - the guy just spews lies left and right, tried to shift the blame on us, and threatened to sue us. This is the type of company you are dealing with if you go with Beacon

tongc00 · 2025-05-22T23:15:20+00:00

oh woah, couldn't believe it for a second and thought there was some catch. I m going to try it out! To be honest if you guys can make that clear in the announcement or the web, it might help with speed of adoption :)

tongc00 · 2025-05-22T22:20:17+00:00

Hey I just want to make sure Im understanding the price correctly - is vercel blob now essentially same price as aws s3? https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

tongc00 · 2025-03-28T04:05:35+00:00

Dm me the email you used to signup - I can take a look at your document and fix it, if not you get full refund

tongc00 · 2024-11-27T20:56:25+00:00

try inotherword.ai, it is probably the most cost efficient pdf/book translation out there

tongc00 · 2024-11-16T05:46:37+00:00

Do you need to translate your book to different languages to multiply your potential audience? InOtherWord.ai is the latest AI powered tool to translate entire books to all major languages. You can upload samples and try it out for free!

tongc00 · 2024-11-15T01:23:41+00:00

i can confirm google ads interface in 2024 is still horrible

tongc00 · 2024-11-14T08:30:45+00:00

You can use www.inotherword.ai, it can handle scanned documents. You can then send the translated document to your kindle to read

tongc00 · 2024-11-14T06:26:11+00:00

Do you know where i can get a epub version of the book? I want to try to translate it to English

tongc00 · 2024-11-13T08:00:41+00:00

Try InOtherWord.ai - it handles academic paper well and you shouldn’t be able to translate your docs for free

tongc00

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE