Same thing happened to me with running. I spent $120 on this fancy smart watch with GPS and heart rate zones and coached workouts. Used it maybe 8 times and felt overwhelmed by all the data every time the screen lit up. Then I just started leaving my phone at home and running down the street until I hit a certain lamppost and back again, timing it on a $15 stopwatch from Target. That was 3 months ago and I'm still running 4 times a week. The cheap stuff just doesn't come with all that built in guilt and those complicated instructions that make you feel like you're doing it wrong before you even start.

Are you talking about the baking soda and vinegar trick or the hydrogen peroxide method? All the old brick around here has that white fuzzy salt stuff that won't budge.

Yeah, seeing it yourself really hits different!

Gotta push back a little here - I mean, is it really that much of a revelation that someone who does something for a living knows more than the average gym goer? Like yeah, a powerlifter spotting bad form is gonna be more helpful than internet videos. But you can also just learn proper bracing from a quick YouTube search without needing some stranger to interrupt your set.

Comps showing dry traffic by week 2 or 3 is a red flag you can't ignore. If you had that data and still stuck with the buy-plus-10k formula, that's where the real issue was. Your buddy's advice probably worked fine in a hot market where everything moves fast, but Austin flipped hard lately and those simple formulas just don't hold up. Pricing based on what you paid ignores what buyers are actually willing to spend right now, which is the only number that matters. After three months on market, you probably had to drop below what a smart comp-based price would have been from the start. Learning the hard way is still learning though, just costs a lot more.