I lost a whole month's ad budget on a 'growth guru' course that was just recycled blog posts

I mean, I was desperate to get our first 100 customers and saw this online course promising a 'foolproof system' for $1,200. The sales page made it sound like you just follow these steps and boom, instant growth. So I paid up, which was basically our whole ad spend for that month. The course was just a bunch of videos where the guy basically read old articles you could find for free, and his 'secret templates' were things I'd already seen on other sites. The worst part was the 'community' was just a dead Facebook group where the guru would post his own links. It set us back so much, and I had to explain to my partner why we had no money for actual ads. Has anyone else fallen for one of these and found a real, helpful resource instead?