Why Cold Ads Are the Most Expensive Way to Grow Your Email List
Ads feel like the grown-up move.
You've been grinding on social, growing your list one slow signup at a time, and somewhere along the way you decide it's time to "just run ads." Put money in, get subscribers out. Finally, some speed.
Then the results come back. Your cost per lead is high. The people who do sign up don't open your emails. And the ones who buy? You're not even sure you made your money back.
Here's what nobody tells you before you press go: cold ads are the single most expensive way to grow. Not because the platform is broken. Because of who you're paying to reach.
What "cold" actually costs you
A cold ad puts you in front of someone who has never heard of you. They don't know your name. They don't trust you. They have no reason to care what you're offering.
So before that person will ever buy, you have to do all the warming up yourself. Earn the click. Earn the signup. Earn enough trust through emails that they finally consider buying. Every bit of that costs money, and you're paying for all of it.
"With cold ads, you pay for the whole journey from stranger to buyer. Every step, out of your pocket."
Compare that to how trust normally works. When a friend recommends a restaurant, you go. You skip all the "is this place any good" doubt because someone you trust vouched for it. The recommendation did the warming up for free.
Cold ads have no friend doing the vouching. That's the whole problem, and it's why the cost stays high.
The warmer, cheaper path most creators skip
There's a kind of traffic that comes pre-warmed, and it costs a fraction of what ads do. It's called a borrowed audience.
A borrowed audience is when someone the audience already trusts introduces you to their people. You speak at their summit. You join their bundle. You collaborate on something together. Their audience meets you with trust already attached, because the person they follow brought you in.
That introduction does for free what you'd otherwise pay ads to do. The warming up is already done. So these new people sign up at a higher rate, open your emails more, and buy more readily than a cold stranger ever would.
Cold ad: you pay to warm up a stranger from zero. Borrowed audience: a trusted person warms them up for you, before they ever land on your page. Same goal, wildly different cost.
This is exactly why borrowed audiences are the first layer of the Revenue Stack Method, and paid ads are the last. You start with the cheapest, warmest traffic. You only add ads once you've got something proven to scale.
So when do ads actually make sense?
To be clear, I'm not anti-ads. Ads are a great tool. They're just a terrible starting point.
Ads work beautifully once you already have a funnel that converts. Here's the logic. If you know that warm traffic turns into buyers at a reliable rate, then you've got a machine that works. At that point, ads simply pour more people into a machine you already trust. You're scaling a winner.
But if you run ads before you know your funnel converts, you're doing something much riskier. You're paying premium prices to test whether your offer even works. That's how budgets disappear with nothing to show for it.
Order matters. Prove it warm. Scale it paid. Never the other way around.
Start where the trust already is
If your list is growing slowly and you're tempted to throw money at ads to speed it up, pause.
Ask instead: whose audience could I borrow? Who serves the same people I do, without being a direct competitor? What summit could I speak at, what bundle could I join, what collaboration could I propose?
That's the cheaper road, and it's a warmer one. You're not buying cold strangers. You're being introduced to the right people by someone they already trust. (For the full playbook on this, see how to grow using other people's audiences.)
The fast option isn't always the cheap one. With list growth, the borrowed road usually wins on both.
Want a growth engine that doesn't start with cold ad spend?
Revenue Stack Studio is a 12-month done-with-you engagement where my team and I build your borrowed-audience engine first, then add ads only once it's proven to convert. A small founding group is open now.
See Revenue Stack Studio →Frequently Asked Questions
Paid ads can be worth it, but usually not as your first move. Cold ads target people who've never heard of you, which is the most expensive kind of traffic to convert. Ads work best after you have a funnel proven to convert warmer audiences. Then ads scale what already works.
Borrowed audiences are usually the cheapest way to grow. Through summits, collaborations, and bundles, someone the audience already trusts introduces you to their list. The traffic is warm and the cost is low because you're not paying a platform for cold strangers.
Cold ads are expensive because you're paying to reach people who don't know you, don't trust you, and have no reason to say yes yet. You carry the entire cost of warming them up. Warm traffic from a trusted introduction skips most of that cost.
After. Running ads to an unproven funnel means paying to test something that may not convert. Prove your funnel converts on warm traffic first, then add ads to scale a machine you already know works.
Yes. Many creators grow primarily through borrowed audiences and their own email list, with ads as an optional later layer. Ads can accelerate growth, but they're not required to build a healthy, predictable revenue engine.
