There is a Nike advert from 1997 where Michael Jordan walks through a tunnel and says this:
"I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I have been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."
People usually quote the other one at you, the one about missing 100 percent of the shots you do not take. That line is Wayne Gretzky, not Jordan, and both men are saying the same thing from opposite ends. Gretzky is talking about the shot you never attempt. Jordan is talking about the nine thousand you attempt and miss on the way to being the best who ever played.
Neither of them is describing a man waiting for the perfect shot.
The quietest way to waste money
I pulled our own numbers this week and they stopped me.
Right now 484 members are holding 73,181 ad credits that have never been spent on a single campaign. Not a banner, not a text ad, not one solo email. Those credits were earned or bought and then they just sat there.
Credits are not money. You cannot withdraw them. They do exactly one thing, which is put your offer in front of other people, and they do nothing at all sitting in a balance. A credit you never spend is not saved. It is a shot you did not take.
And I understand how it happens, because I have done it myself on other platforms. You buy the advertising because the deal was good. Then you open the campaign form and it asks you for a headline and a link and suddenly you are not sure. What if the wording is wrong. What if nobody clicks. What if you waste it.
So you close the tab and tell yourself you will do it properly at the weekend. And the credits sit there for a month.
The thing nobody tells you about your first ad
Your first ad is going to be mediocre. So was mine. So was everyone's.
That is not a reason to skip it. That is the reason to run it. You cannot think your way to a good ad from a standing start, because you do not yet have the one thing that makes ads better, which is a real number telling you what happened when strangers saw it.
A mediocre ad that runs teaches you something. A perfect ad in your head teaches you nothing. Jordan did not get to be Jordan by taking nine thousand shots in his imagination.
What to do in the next ten minutes
Open Campaigns and start one. Here is the whole checklist:
- Pick the cheapest format you have credits for. A text ad costs less per view than a banner. Start there and stop optimising a decision that small.
- Do not write from a blank page. Promo tools has ready-made copy you can lift, and at Surge the AI Copy Engine will write the thing for you. Use it. Nobody gives you extra points for suffering.
- Send it to one page, not five. One link, one offer, one thing you want the person to do.
- Give it a real budget. A hundred credits tells you nothing. Put enough behind it that the number at the end means something.
- Set it live and walk away. Do not sit and watch it. Come back in two days.
Then read what happened. Impressions, clicks, and whether anyone did the thing you wanted. That is your first real number. Every ad after it is an edit rather than a guess.
If it flops, archive it and go again
We added something for exactly this. Pause a campaign you are done with and archive it. The performance stays where you can read it, and any credits it did not spend go straight back to your balance. Nothing is lost and nothing is stranded.
Which means the downside of running a bad ad is smaller than the downside of running none. A bad ad costs you some credits and hands you a lesson. An unrun ad costs you the credits anyway, because they are doing nothing, and hands you nothing back.
The part that actually matters
Most people here came for the payouts. That is fine, and the payouts are real, and they are all on the public ledger where you can read every one of them.
But the payouts come from people buying packages, and people buy packages when they see something that makes them want to. Which means the advertising is not a side feature of this platform. It is the engine. Every ad you run puts your offer in front of people who are already paying attention to offers, and some of them will follow you back.
The members who are quietly doing well here are not the ones with the cleverest ads. They are the ones with ads that are actually running.
You have the credits. Go take the shot.
Marty Bostick
