u/Agencyseller

Built a VAT filing app for UAE small businesses, looking for 10-15 owners to try it before we open it up.

Quick context I'm a founder based in the region. The app scans your invoices with AI, sorts them by emirate, and gives you a Form 201 export you can hand to your accountant or file yourself. Android is live, iOS is close.

What I need: people actually doing their own VAT (or fighting with it quarterly) who'll use it on one real cycle and tell me what's broken. Free Pro access for a year in exchange.

If you're in, drop a comment or DM. Happy to share the Play Store link there so I'm not spamming it in the post.

Just got rejected from Reddit for accessing Reddit Api after one month of wait!

Amazing

Recently Meta rolled out it's MCP connector with Claude and other AI Agents curious if anybody test it out? what it can do or can't do?

Building a B2B SaaS in the Meta ads space. Two weeks ago Meta shipped their own MCP server, which lets anyone with Claude or ChatGPT query their ad accounts in natural language for free. Roughly 40% of my product just got commoditized.

Curious how others have handled this. Adjacent examples I keep thinking about: SEO tools when Google launched AI overviews. Email warmup when Gmail tightened deliverability. GPT wrappers when OpenAI shipped the equivalent feature directly.

Three instincts so far. First was compete on quality, which most founders I've talked to in similar situations regretted. The free version doesn't have to be good, just bundled. Second was abandon the threatened modules and double down on what's still defensible. This is where I'm leaning but the math is uncomfortable. Third is build on top of the platform's new thing instead of around it. Sounds smart in the abstract, can't tell if it's real strategy or a story I'm telling myself to feel okay about a forced pivot.

For anyone who's lived through some version of this what actually worked? Did you reposition, narrow, or pivot?

Open to "stop overthinking it and keep building" being the answer. Sometimes it is.

Run a small agency. 7 years in.

The ads themselves aren't what's killing me. It's all the stuff around them. Specifically:

Building the same Monday report 6 different ways for 6 different clients. One wants Looker, one wants a Loom, one wants Slack at end of day, one wants a 3-line email by 9am, one says "monthly" then asks every 9 days.

Manually checking pixel health on 12 accounts every Monday. Half the time nothing's wrong. Other half something drifted and I should've caught it Thursday.

Backup BMs that are technically "set up" but haven't been touched since onboarding. Everyone has them on a to-do list. Nobody actually maintains them. We all know the day one of them dies it's going to be bad.

Margin data not being in reporting so ROAS targets are kind of made up. Client asks "is 2.8x good or bad" and the honest answer depends on a contribution margin number nobody has loaded anywhere.

Onboarding a client who was on 28-day click attribution and explaining why our numbers are going to look smaller for two months even though revenue didn't change.

I'm building something in this space and trying to figure out which of these is actually the worst across other people's agencies vs just the one I personally hate the most. The two aren't always the same.

What's on your version of this list that I missed? Genuinely more useful than ranking.

I run a small agency. 7 years in, mostly DTC and lead gen. Trying to figure out if what I'm seeing is a real Meta shift or just my 4 client accounts being weird in sync.

Across all 4 (different verticals, different spend tiers, $8k–$60k monthly each), prospecting Reels placement CPMs jumped 30-45% in the second week of May. Retargeting placements held flat. Advantage+ placements held flat. Only thing moving is manual placement with Reels-only ad sets.

The weird part: CTR on those same ad sets actually ticked up slightly. So cost rising, engagement fine, which usually means it's a delivery-side change, not creative.

What I've already ruled out, since this is going to be my third client call this week explaining mystery CPM jumps:

• Not seasonal. Same week last year showed nothing close.
• Not bid strategy. Mix of cost cap, bid cap, lowest cost all showing the same pattern.
• Not creative fatigue. New creative launched into these ad sets is hitting the same elevated CPM from day one.
• Not audience saturation. Frequency at the ad set level still under 2.0 on most.

Working theory: Meta quietly tightened the supply pool for prospecting Reels, or started shifting inventory allocation toward Advantage+ Shopping. Both would create exactly this pattern, and both would be in character with how Meta usually rolls out delivery changes (no announcement, hope nobody notices for a month).

Anyone else running enough prospecting through manual Reels placements to confirm or deny? Especially curious if other agency folks are seeing this across multiple client accounts at the same time, which is the part that doesn't feel like coincidence.

When you pool budget across creative + audiences + placements, Meta has more freedom to find conversions. That’s the whole trick. You can recreate 80% of it with a properly structured CBO.

"I'm letting it learn" is the most expensive sentence in this app.

Learning phase is real but it's also become an excuse to not kill obvious losers. If it hasn't shown signal in the first 3x your target CPA in spend, learning isn't the problem.

Just curious!!! What are your backup plans?

Quick context. Past 6 months I went through 50 Meta ad accounts. Some solo founders at 2k/mo, some agencies at 200k/mo, a bunch of ecom in between.

Accounts looked nothing alike from the outside. But the same stuff kept showing up. None of it exciting. All of it expensive.

Writing this because every other thread blames iOS 14 and honestly that's not what's killing most of these accounts.

1. They trust Meta's reported ROAS

The number is inflated. Always. Attribution windows, view-through credit, click-stealing from organic, all of it. I've seen 4.2x in Ads Manager turn into 1.8x once you actually reconcile against Shopify and subtract whatever organic was already doing on its own.

Pull three numbers into one sheet every week: Meta's reported revenue, your platform's actual revenue, your organic baseline. The gap is your real ROAS. Stop looking at anything else.

2. They catch creative fatigue too late

People wait for CPM spikes or CTR to crater. That's a week late. Frequency at the ad-set level is lagging by the time it's 4+, you've burned days.

Better tell: CTR-to-CPC ratio at the ad level, tracked daily. Drop 15% three days running, the creative is dying. Pull it before Meta does it for you with a CPM hike.

3. They keep optimizing campaigns they should kill

Agencies are the worst at this. Campaign hits 30 CPA, target is 25, team spends two weeks "optimizing." New audiences, new bids, new placements. None of it works because the thing was broken on day one and they won't admit it.

Rule I use: if a campaign hasn't hit target CPA within 3x its target conversion volume in spend, it's not an optimization issue. Kill it. Rebuild. Sunk cost will mess up your numbers for months.

4. They have no plan for when something breaks

I've watched accounts get restricted, get the "we limit ad delivery" warning, lose pixel data. The operator just panics, opens a support ticket, waits.

You need a written stability doc. Backup ad accounts already warmed up. BM admin on more than one human. Pixel events written down somewhere. Creative library exported every month. Audiences exported every quarter. If your main account dies today, are you running again in 48 hours? Most people I audited could not answer yes.

5. They look at ROAS, not contribution margin

ROAS is vanity when you actually sell something. 3x ROAS on a 40 dollar product with 18 COGS, 6 shipping, 4 processing is 2 bucks an order. 2.2x ROAS on a 120 dollar product with 35 COGS is 30 bucks an order.

The 2.2x is 15x more profitable. Most accounts I audit don't have margin in their reporting at all. So they scale the 3x, starve the 2.2x, and then wonder why the bank account isn't growing.

6. They read prospecting and retargeting as one blended number

Blended account-level ROAS is like the average temperature of your house. Tells you nothing about whether the AC in the bedroom is broken. Prospecting and retargeting are different objectives, different math, different benchmarks. Has to be tracked separately or the structure is hiding problems from you.

If you can't pull "prospecting only" in 30 seconds, that's the first thing to fix.

7. They test creative without a control

Everyone says they test. Almost nobody runs a clean test. Four new ads against an existing ad set, budget redistributing dynamically, call a winner after 2 days and 200 bucks. That's not a test, that's a vibe check.

Real test: same audience, same budget per ad, 50 conversions minimum or 7 days, and your existing winner in the rotation as control. No control, no answer.