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Yeah I’ve seen this work but it’s way harder than most PPC people think… the successful transitions I’ve watched weren’t people copying their clients’ models, they were finding arbitrage opportunities where strong products had garbage acquisition.
What separates the ones who scale from the ones who burn out is understanding that media buying is table stakes not a moat… your edge comes from speed of testing and capital efficiency.
Like there’s a reason why businesses with working products still can’t crack paid acquisition profitably even when they hire decent freelancers, it’s usually because they’re optimizing for the wrong metrics or don’t have enough budget to properly test into profitability.
The people I know who’ve done this successfully picked industries where average competitors are spending $200k+ monthly but still getting mediocre ROAS because they’re running campaigns like it’s 2019… so if you actually understand modern attribution and creative velocity you can just outspend everyone while staying profitable. But you need like $20-30k to properly test before you know if the model works, and most PPC folks don’t have that sitting around to burn through learning.
Honestly the risk-reward usually favors just taking on higher-paying clients where you keep all the upside without the operational headaches… but if you find the right vertical with broken acquisition it’s definitely a path.
