I had already been saving. As is, I had the down payment for small, inexpensive property. But the good stuff did not work with "down payments." I needed more.
This was october of 2012.
I had a few half-hearted advertisers on my rather massive site at coderanch.com. And zero at permies.com.
All of my past efforts were pretty much time wasted.
I needed to think of something. Something more effective than normal ads. Something new. Something that nobody else was doing. And something that would put a huge amount of coin in my pocket really fast, so I could buy
land.
What I came up with was a type of ad I called DX1. I gave $1000 of DX1 to my best customer and the results were profound. About 40 times better results than any other type of ad. We did some improvements and tried different strategies named DX2, DX3, DX4 ...
And now we have DX5. You might call it "the tiny ads". And, in time, we modified the software so you could self serve your own DX5 whenever you like:
https://permies.com/dx5
Have fun!