I had a call with a founder last week where cash was genuinely tight, and the re
By Ted Gibson · September 2, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I had a call with a founder last week where cash was genuinely tight, and the real question was whether to stay on Amazon at all or pull the ads until things loosened up.
We kept them on, but the more useful part of the conversation was about what number actually goes into the account. Their absolute ceiling was a thousand pounds a month, and the instinct when money is tight is to type a thousand in, because that is what you can afford. What I would do instead is put seven fifty in, because Amazon does not spend evenly, and if you cap at your ceiling then one good week tips you over and the whole thing pauses, which means the days you were selling best are the days you go dark.
The account wants consistency more than it wants size. A steady seven fifty a month for three months will do more for you than a thousand a month that stops in week six, because every time the ads go off your rate of sale drops and your rank goes with it, and then you are paying again to climb back to where you already were.
The other half of it is what you point the money at. On a budget like that you are not competing for the big category term, you are picking three or four long tail versions of it that are cheap enough to actually win, and yes that is a super narrow starting point, but it is the only version of this that works on the money available and you widen out later when there is more cash in the business.