You can have the right product, the right audience, and a landing page you’re proud of. Then you turn on ads, and money starts leaving your account every single day, whether any of it is working or not.

Most first ad budgets don’t fail because the creative was bad. They fail because nobody decided upfront what success would look like, which number would prove it, or at what point to switch it off.

Speaker

Sandesh Gupta, Growth at Oolka

Sandesh has spent over a decade scaling businesses online, across MPL, Wakefit, Bounce and Emergent, and before that running growth at a digital marketing agency. He’s also co-founded and run a business of his own, so he knows what spending your own money on ads actually feels like.

Connect with Sandesh on LinkedIn

What will you do?

You’ll work through a simple planning framework to create:

  • Your channel picks - which two channels deserve your first budget, and why not the other six

  • Budget split and duration - how much, for how long, and what a meaningful test actually costs

  • Creative angles - the three or four messages you’ll test against each other

  • Success metrics - the one number per channel that tells you it’s working

  • Kill criteria - what you’ll see that makes you stop, written down before you spend

Who should join?

Founders, early-stage builders, D2C and B2B marketers, GTM & growth folks, and anyone about to spend their first serious ad budget.

Especially if you’re wondering:

“How much do I actually need to spend to know if this works?”

“Meta, Google, LinkedIn - where do I even start?”

“How long do I run this before I decide anything?”

“Is my cost per lead good or terrible?”

“How do I know when to stop instead of spending more?”

About The GTM School

This season, The GTM School is hosting a 15–20 event series running from the last weekend of August through the first week of October 2026.

A joint community initiative by AI Learn Circle × Women in Product Marketing, bringing builders and experienced GTM operators together to learn, experiment and figure out what actually works.

Community Partner - BHIVE Workspace

We’re excited to have BHIVE Workspace as the community partner for this session.

BHIVE is one of Bengaluru’s largest coworking and managed-office communities, bringing startups, founders and businesses together under one roof.

The perfect place to bring a bunch of builders, GTM folks and marketers into one room and talk about why people should choose you.