This is a really crisp explanation of why “just turn up the budget” is basically a controlled way to discover the edges of your current system.
The key idea I took away is that CAC blow-ups at scale are rarely a “platform problem”, but they’re a signal that you’ve hit one (or more) bottlenecks: audience saturation/quality drift, creative fatigue, insufficient conversion volume for learning, weak measurement, or a funnel that only worked for early adopters. Your Meta example makes that intuitive: scaling forces the algorithm out of the ready-to-buy pond and into colder water, so everything you’ve been getting away with gets exposed. 
I also liked the implicit “pre-flight checklist” framing: before increasing spend, ensure you have (1) reliable measurement, (2) a creative system (not a single winner), and (3) an experimentation cadence that can absorb higher volume without overfitting. That’s the difference between scaling spend and scaling performance.
Looking forward to your measurement essay. I work with a tool that quantifies value through propensity (likelihood to buy) and delta (change in propensity) as metrics. Keen to hear your approach. Staying tuned for the next one!
Thanks - this is super helpful. Looking forward to the part 2.
Glad you liked it Jen!
Loved sitting down with you on this, and what a great resource and primer on all things paid social.
This is a really crisp explanation of why “just turn up the budget” is basically a controlled way to discover the edges of your current system.
The key idea I took away is that CAC blow-ups at scale are rarely a “platform problem”, but they’re a signal that you’ve hit one (or more) bottlenecks: audience saturation/quality drift, creative fatigue, insufficient conversion volume for learning, weak measurement, or a funnel that only worked for early adopters. Your Meta example makes that intuitive: scaling forces the algorithm out of the ready-to-buy pond and into colder water, so everything you’ve been getting away with gets exposed. 
I also liked the implicit “pre-flight checklist” framing: before increasing spend, ensure you have (1) reliable measurement, (2) a creative system (not a single winner), and (3) an experimentation cadence that can absorb higher volume without overfitting. That’s the difference between scaling spend and scaling performance.
Looking forward to your measurement essay. I work with a tool that quantifies value through propensity (likelihood to buy) and delta (change in propensity) as metrics. Keen to hear your approach. Staying tuned for the next one!
Great read, learned a lot about ad spend and quantity of ads.