The "symptom points somewhere obvious" trap is real, it's like your brain gets a reward for solving it fast so it stops looking. What got me was building a rule where the condenser check happens before I even touch the meter for ohms, no matter what the last call taught me. Costs two minutes and saves the whole afternoon.

Did you ditch the template for every single ad or just the ones that were getting stale? I'm asking because the ugly photos thing seems to be doing the heavy lifting here, not the fact that they're from your phone. Like, is it the realness that sells or is it that people are just sick of seeing the same polished junk over and over? And what did you do about lighting, since a raw phone pic of your product on a kitchen counter is a totally different animal than a raw phone pic in a dark room. Also wondering if you tested it before the guy ran his mouth or if his comment was the thing that pushed you to finally try it. Six weeks is a real jump, so I want to know if you tracked which specific pics pulled the weight or if the whole batch just worked better together.