Can confirm. We were a corporate account spending large 6 digit sums every month on Facebook Business Manager and Facebook randomly stopped campaigns due to intransparent and inaccessible credit line configurations, hurting not just our bottom line but theirs as well, with nobody to turn to in general FBM support.
After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).
Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.
But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.
Jumping in as a CTO and hiring manager currently spending 50% time on recruiting: We're definitely to blame as well.
In the beginning, I really made an effort to be courteous and polite to every single candidate and give them their optimal chance at learning something from the interview process, but I realized that recruiting is a process that really does suck for everyone. Especially now that we're scrambling to grow, I need to constantly prioritize in order to just stay sane and get forward.
If I've interviewed 10 candidates in a week and there was one or two which were really interesting, that's what I'll be focusing on first. Whether I get to write 8 rejections in detail, it doesn't matter for the company. At least in the short term.
And chances are >50% that candidates don't perceive detailed and honest feedback in a good way (even with the best intentions), so I might get stuck in a discussion about details going forward when nothing changes that "no". Nothing good came from that for either me or the candidate ever. Rejections always feel like failure and honestly I hate writing them as well, as I know I'm always hurting someone.
It's not a part of my job that I'm proud about (hence the throwaway too), but this is frankly my thought process around the whole thing.
I've been on the other side of the table multiple times, so I know how much the candidate experience sucks, but that's how it goes.
If you're searching for a job, just do yourself a favor and go broad while not taking anything too personal. It's very much in your best interest to get the bidding war for your person on, so never fall in love with any single job offer.
This may be a very specific example, but it all goes back to the number one rule in raising: If you‘re a hot startup, you make the terms. If you‘re in need of money, they make the terms.
If anything, focus on growth, revenue and timing so that you‘ve got both good curves in the reports and more than two investor options lined up when it‘s time to raise. Nothing else matters.
We lost our biggest client around Series A stage and were strong-armed into a seed stage contract with bad valuation and lots of other unfavorable terms. We signed it because we had to.
Two years later, we had managed to get our act back together and had a basically infinite runway through our own revenue. And that power to say no completely turned the dynamics around.
The same main investor basically begged us to take more money, so when we wanted to accelerate a bit, we told him we had a last offer for him to invest and left the room with it on the table.
He didn‘t even insist on participating LP, as he was so glad to get a small additional piece of that rocket ship.
There‘s a million ways to screw founders and just a single way to avoid it: Show traction and the money will find you.
After lots of escalation through some personal contacts we fortunately had, they switched to a system where they're apparently now using "AI" to determine the credit line every client has dynamically, which doesn't work for us as our campaigns are very big and very short (products that are only relevant for a couple of weeks, but benign, nonpolitical content if you want to ask).
Still nobody can tell us how big the AI thinks our credit limit will be at any given point in time. Finding out who is responsible for anything is a hot mess, and by now we're spending seven digits per month.
But to me, the cream of the crop is how many times we had to escalate to FB to literally beg them to be able to spend our money with them. It's ridiculous.