u/DT_in_the-flesh

TLDR: inherited around $2.5M worth of assets in mostly properties and some cash, not sure what to do.

I’m looking for some perspective on what to do with my real estate and investment portfolio as I relocate to the United States. For context, I will probably be moving around a lot over the next several years, so nothing about my location feels very settled yet. Right now I own two properties in Taiwan, each worth around $1 million USD, plus roughly $300 to $400k in an investment portfolio and almost another $200k in cash. My main question is what to do with the two Taiwan properties. I could hold them and rent them out for income (one of them is already rented out), sell one or both before or after the move, refinance to pull out equity and put that capital to work elsewhere (and where?), or just leave things as they are. Refinancing feels especially worth exploring given that interest rates in Taiwan are lower than in America (I believe around 2%), so borrowing against the Taiwan properties could be a cheaper source of capital than financing anything on the US side. In Taiwan I can finance up to 60% of a property’s value, which on these two would free up a meaningful amount of capital to redeploy. If I do go that route, I’m not sure what the smartest thing to do with the freed up money would be, whether that’s buying property in the US, adding to my investment portfolio, keeping some as a cash cushion while I move around, or something else entirely. I’ve also really wanted to get into real estate development and have heavily considered building something with the refinanced cash.

TLDR: $100k budget. Basically, first time doing this. Need advice and not sure where to start.

I'm launching a DTC beauty brand (hero product at $15.99 with bundle tiers to lift AOV, Shopify store already built). I have some experience building Shopify stores and achieved a pretty good conversion rate even with AI-generated photos (I previously set up the whole store as a learning experience in preparation for this). I have a bit over $100k to deploy over the next 6-12 months. Important context: we're starting from literally zero 0 followers, no email list, no social proof yet. Trying to figure out allocation across three channels:

Meta ads, TikTok Shop affiliate, and Organic.

I won't lie, I'm very nervous. This is my first time starting an actual business and committing to one. I've sourced about 6000 units from China with custom packaging, and they are currently being manufactured.

Meta ads: Plan is ABO creative testing (never done before), then scaling winners into Advantage+. I know beauty CPMs are rough, and I'll need a lot of UGC creative volume to make this work. I'm thinking of moving good-performing UGC videos onto Meta ads to run.

TikTok Shop affiliate: Seeding product to small/mid creators, open affiliate program, commission-based.

Organic: Will be posting in-house-made content along with influencer content daily on TikTok and Instagram. We have a small network of about 20-30 micro to mid-sized influencers. Oh, we also have sorority girls who have also agreed to create some content for us.

Questions for people who've actually done this:

1. Meta structure and budget: How would you structure the account from the start? How many ad sets/creatives per ad set in the ABO testing phase, and what daily budget would you start at, $50/day? $100? $200? And what's a realistic timeline and trigger for scaling (increase by 20% every X days after Y purchases, or wait until you exit the learning phase)? I don't want to throw money away by scaling too fast, but I also don't want to sit at $50/day for months with $100k available.
2. Reliability of each channel: In your experience, how consistent/predictable is each of these? My impression is that Meta is the most predictable once you find a winning creative, but I've also been seeing a lot of complaints on Reddit about inconsistency. TikTok affiliate is high-variance (one viral creator video can make your month, or you send 200 samples and get nothing), and organic is a total lottery. Is that accurate, or am I wrong about any of these?
3. Starting with 0 followers: Does having zero social presence kill conversion on paid traffic (people click the ad, check the IG, see 12 followers, bounce)? Should some of the early budget go toward just building baseline social proof before scaling spend?
4. With a $15.99 hero product, is Meta even viable early on, or should the first $20-30k go almost entirely into TikTok affiliate seeding until I have proven creative and social proof?
5. For those who've run TikTok Shop affiliate programs, what did your cost per sample sent vs. converted creator actually look like? Trying to budget realistically for gifting waste.
6. How much should I hold in reserve for inventory vs. ad spend? I keep hearing stories of brands that finally cracked ads and then immediately sold out.
7. Any ratio you'd recommend (50/30/20), or is that the wrong way to think about it entirely?
8. Finally, I think this is the most important one: What questions should I even be asking?

Not looking for agencies, genuinely want to hear from those who have done this type of thing before. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

TLDR: $100k budget. Basically, first time doing this. Need advice and not sure where to start.

I'm launching a DTC beauty brand (hero product at $15.99 with bundle tiers to lift AOV, Shopify store already built). I have some experience building Shopify stores and achieved a pretty good conversion rate even with AI-generated photos (I previously set up the whole store as a learning experience in preparation for this). I have a bit over $100k to deploy over the next 6-12 months. Important context: we're starting from literally zero 0 followers, no email list, no social proof yet. Trying to figure out allocation across three channels:

Meta ads, TikTok Shop affiliate, and Organic.

I won't lie, I'm very nervous. This is my first time starting an actual business and committing to one. I've sourced about 6000 units from China with custom packaging, and they are currently being manufactured.

Meta ads: Plan is ABO creative testing (never done before), then scaling winners into Advantage+. I know beauty CPMs are rough, and I'll need a lot of UGC creative volume to make this work. I'm thinking of moving good-performing UGC videos onto Meta ads to run.

TikTok Shop affiliate: Seeding product to small/mid creators, open affiliate program, commission-based.

Organic: Will be posting in-house-made content along with influencer content daily on TikTok and Instagram. We have a small network of about 20-30 micro to mid-sized influencers. Oh, we also have sorority girls who have also agreed to create some content for us.

Questions for people who've actually done this:

1. Meta structure and budget: How would you structure the account from the start? How many ad sets/creatives per ad set in the ABO testing phase, and what daily budget would you start at, $50/day? $100? $200? And what's a realistic timeline and trigger for scaling (increase by 20% every X days after Y purchases, or wait until you exit the learning phase)? I don't want to throw money away by scaling too fast, but I also don't want to sit at $50/day for months with $100k available.
2. Reliability of each channel: In your experience, how consistent/predictable is each of these? My impression is that Meta is the most predictable once you find a winning creative, but I've also been seeing a lot of complaints on Reddit about inconsistency. TikTok affiliate is high-variance (one viral creator video can make your month, or you send 200 samples and get nothing), and organic is a total lottery. Is that accurate, or am I wrong about any of these?
3. Starting with 0 followers: Does having zero social presence kill conversion on paid traffic (people click the ad, check the IG, see 12 followers, bounce)? Should some of the early budget go toward just building baseline social proof before scaling spend?
4. With a $15.99 hero product, is Meta even viable early on, or should the first $20-30k go almost entirely into TikTok affiliate seeding until I have proven creative and social proof?
5. For those who've run TikTok Shop affiliate programs, what did your cost per sample sent vs. converted creator actually look like? Trying to budget realistically for gifting waste.
6. How much should I hold in reserve for inventory vs. ad spend? I keep hearing stories of brands that finally cracked ads and then immediately sold out.
7. Any ratio you'd recommend (50/30/20), or is that the wrong way to think about it entirely?
8. Finally, I think this is the most important one: What questions should I even be asking?

Not looking for agencies, genuinely want to hear from those who have done this type of thing before. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Hey all,

I recently launched my first Shopify store, hoping to sell some products that I designed. I decided to stick mainly to Facebook ads because I'm not very sure how to create viral media. Regardless, I am here hoping to get some guidance and fact-checking. Any advice will be appreciated.

First

I first got into this business working on Fiverr. A German person who owned a marketing agency hired me there to help him design products to sell (in Germany). I designed maybe half of the products on his page. Through working for him, I also chatted with him. He told me that he was spending 15 Euros a day on ad spend, getting about 400 sessions on Shopify, and about 18 orders a day. This amounted to around 400 Euros a day in revenue. Since then, I've stepped away from designing to focus on school. But now that I have more free time (senior college), I decided to launch my own store, seeing that my designs were desirable (because he was able to sell my designs). I don't believe him to be a guru or lying to me about his numbers because it doesn't benefit him at all.

So I tried to replicate his strategy as much as I could. I haven't been able to get in contact with him, so I had to stalk the Facebook ads library, Shopify store, etc... The only difference between my products/page and his was that his were more playful, and mine were more aesthetically pleasing. From what I could tell, he had almost no organic growth and relied mostly on ad spend.

I just want to see if you guys thought his spending, conversion rate, and revenue were realistic.

Second

I haven't seen much success with ads. When I first began paying for ads, I used Instagram Boost. I know this may not be the best method, but I wanted to try it out. I spent $200 over 4 days and got 4 sales. I used an image post of a single image. I got about 3108 reaches with 3602 views. 113 link clicks, 112 content views, 13 ATCs, and 6 checkouts initiated. Only 4 purchases. CTR of about 3%. My AOV is relatively low, maybe around $30. After material costs, labor, packaging, and shipping, I lost money. So I decided to go with Facebook Ads or Meta Ads.

Do these numbers look promising?

Third

Currently, I'm on Meta Ads. I decided to set an ad spend budget of around $50 a day, like before on Instagram. My Ad set originally included two ads. One video and one image, the same image as the Instagram post. The video flopped pretty hard and ate up most of the budget. I ran these two ads for about 2 days and stopped. So I disabled it and replaced it with an unboxing video (now it's an image and a video). It's been around 12 hours since I restarted the ads. For the image, I'm getting around 3.66% CTR, $1.20 CPC, and $1.61 Cost per landing page. 17 landing page views. The new video still isn't doing well at all. I also switched from Advantage placement to manual.

I haven't had any sales since I switched over to Meta.

Am I giving it enough time to learn? The Instagram Boost got sales almost right away, so I was thinking there's something wrong with my Meta ads.

What else can I do? Or should I just let it learn?

Thank you for reading, and any advice would be appreciated.

First off, I want to say, I used to absolutely love Waymo. I enjoyed the privacy we got in Waymos and the fact that we could play any music we wanted.

Last night changed my perspective on the company. My girlfriend and I took a Waymo in LA last night, and she forgot her purse in the car. Obviously, this part was our fault, and we don't blame Waymo for it. But we thought Waymo would be more helpful. They weren't at all.

After we realized we had left the purse in the car about 10 minutes after getting out of the car, we contacted them. We told them that we had left a purse in the car and that there was important medicine that she had to take within 2 hours (I don't want to get into the details of the medicine, but if you have taken it before, you know what it is). We couldn't just go home and get another pill because that was her last set of pills, and CVS was closed by then (I know she should probably keep a backup, but she didn't).

Anyways, they told us they would get back to us in 4 hours. We asked them why it would take this long, and they said that they had to bring the car back to the depot before they could give the items back to us. So we asked them if they could at least check some sort of recording or check the camera in the car to see if it was actually there. They said no, they don't keep recordings, and no, they can't check the camera in real time. Which I found very weird because they checked in on us a couple of times when we had our seatbelts on to ask if we were 18. Sure this may be understandable due to customer privacy but they never seemed to care about privacy when it came to us.

Well, they didn't get back to us in 4 hours. We woke up this morning, and no emails or any attempt at contact from them. So we called them. They said they don't have any information about the car or our items. I asked if they've even checked it and they said they didn't have information on that either. Very terrible experience all around. I looked at Google Maps reviews of their depot and others posts and people had terrible experiences. They handled this worse than any other company I’ve ever dealt with.

We aren’t getting our items back are we.

Needless to say, I'm never taking Waymo again.