Making physical Japanese cards: The full walkthrough from zero to launch

The burnout section resonated. The pattern of "I will learn everything myself" followed by "I cannot do this alone" is so common among technical founders, myself included.

Two things stood out:

1. Your Meta Ads experience matches mine exactly - atrociously buggy, AI shoved everywhere, money draining with questionable results. And yet it still outperforms the alternatives. I have tried Google, Reddit, TikTok ads for B2B and they all performed worse per dollar.

2. Getting family involved (sister for video/social) was the right call. There is a weird pride thing where founders feel they "should" be able to do marketing too. But creative work requires different skills and energy. Delegating it freed you to focus on what you actually enjoy (the product).

Curious about the $55k goal - did you run any pre-launch surveys or just estimate based on manufacturing minimums? That seems high for a niche language learning product (though I could be wrong about market size).