---
name: paid-basics
description: Plan a performance-marketing push — structure, angles, targeting, daily loop — against a CAC ceiling. Use once paid has cleared the gate.
---

Set up paid so the first dollar teaches you something.

**Preconditions, checked first.** Analytics firing and verified (`/analytics-wire`), and a CAC ceiling from `/unit-economics`. If either is missing, say plainly that paid will accelerate a broken funnel rather than fix it, and fix that first. This is the single most expensive mistake available at this stage.

1. **Account structure.** One campaign per goal, one ad set per audience hypothesis. Resist the urge to build twelve variants before a single one has data.
2. **Creative: angles, not variations.** Three different reasons someone would care beats three colours of the same headline. The angle is the variable that actually moves cost per acquisition.
3. **Targeting narrow first.** Broad targeting on a small budget teaches you nothing — it just spends. Widen only after something works.
4. **Budget.** Enough impressions to read a result, capped at what can be lost entirely. State both numbers.
5. **The daily loop.** What to check each day, the threshold that triggers a cut, the one that triggers a raise, and the point at which you stop. Write the stop condition before spending, not after.
6. **Check every plan against the CAC ceiling.** If projected acquisition cost exceeds it, say so and stop — do not soften it. A channel that can't clear the ceiling isn't a channel, however good the creative is.

Write to `06-growth/paid-basics.md`.