Your campaigns used to be predictable. You'd find a winning ad, scale it, and let it run until creative fatigue set in. When performance dropped, you'd refresh creative or adjust targeting. It worked.

Now? Winners decay faster. Targeting changes don't stick. You've tried "more creative" and it didn't help. You've tried going broad and trusting the algorithm—the results are volatile.

You're not worse at this. The game changed.

In late 2024, Meta rolled out something called Andromeda—a complete rebuild of how ads get matched to people. Not a tweak. A new architecture.

If you've felt like the rules stopped making sense, that's why. And once you understand what Andromeda actually rewards, you can stop fighting the algorithm and start feeding it what it wants.

The old system rewarded targeting precision. You'd define an audience, Meta would deliver to it. The skill was in segmentation—stack the right interests, find underpriced audiences, out-target your competitors.

Andromeda inverted this.

Now Meta's AI decides who sees your ads based on signals it reads from your creative. Your targeting inputs are suggestions. The algorithm overrides them when it thinks it knows better—and increasingly, it does.

This is why "go broad" became the advice. But here's what that advice leaves out:

If you're feeding it three ads with the same underlying message, you're asking it to solve an equation with missing variables. You get volatility—because the system is guessing.

What Andromeda actually rewards is signal diversity—different messages, angles, and contexts that let the AI match the right ad to the right person.

Not more ads. Different signals.

That's a structure problem, not a volume problem.

Here's what most marketers miss:

The signal Andromeda rewards isn't creative cleverness. It's customer knowledge.

Who are your customers? What situation triggers their need? What objections do they have? What would make them act now vs. later?

That's knowledge you have. You understand your customers' problems, motivations, and hesitations better than any agency ever could. You live in your market. You talk to customers. You know what they're thinking.

You just don't have a way to translate that knowledge into something the algorithm can use.

That's the structure problem S3 solves.

You're not competing on creative talent. You're competing on customer insight—structured into signal diversity.

I spent most of my career as a CTO, not a marketer. Sold a software company to a Fortune 500. Later shifted to CMO and took a company to a Nasdaq IPO.

When I moved into marketing, I brought systems thinking. $75 million in first-party Meta spend—my money, my P&L. More than $220 million in Meta-attributed revenue. Six 8-figure brands. Two Inc. 500 awards.

All from treating marketing as an engineering problem, not a creative one.

But that was on the old system.

When Andromeda broke everything, I went to the source—Meta's engineering and architecture resources, not their advertising documentation. I could read it because it's written for engineers. That's what I am.

S3 is what I rebuilt for how Meta actually works now.

I'm a technical founder who figured out marketing through systems thinking and lots of experimentation with my own campaigns. Was never a natural marketer, but got good enough to make it a consistent growth lever instead of a bottleneck.

When Andromeda changed the rules, I had a choice: figure out the new system, or keep running the old playbook and watch it decay. I figured it out.

S3 is the framework I built—for founders who think in systems, not slogans. Builders, not marketers. Founders who want to understand the logic, not just follow tactics. Who'd rather solve marketing once than manage it forever.

What I Specifically Didn't Build