Are paid ads worth it for a small product?

spent $1000 on apple ads exploration so you don't have to

even though this was fuck-around money i'm disappointed with the numbers. this was to market @BDYCTRL

> 100 users
> the drop-off between installs vs accounts is too high
> generic keywords lead to 3x the amount of accounts per 1000 impressions then competitor keywords

at the same time i gained 26 organic users with the same amount of trials. is organic maybe the way? slow & steady forward?

i probably have a lot to learn & optimize but i truly felt i did a lot of research ahead of starting

appreciate any help & tips from those that have spent more time on this than me

i don't want to hear "hard paywall it", we're not building a strava for gym workouts by hard paywalling the app

next up is tiktok exploration

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Google campaign with targeted only 4-5 keywords brings more clicks and conversion.

Moved all my keywords to negatives which brings huge returns on investment.. look for next batch ads now.

Claude working hard for me to setup google ads campaign & optimizing it.

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ads experiment, week 2. €2/day.
Last 7 days: €16.34, 20 clicks, 15 events created by people who came from an ad. €1.09 per event (week before: €2.95).
Better, but my bar is €0.50. Still 2x off.

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Get your first 10 customers for a self-serve product with a small budget ad campaign:

1. find 5-10 pain points that your product solves, create one image with clear message for each pain point using ai or canva (no need to go too fancy).

2. Set up a campaign with separate budget for each asset (if you have 10 images, thats 10 ad sets each with standalone budget), and set 5-10 dollars for each image.

3. Do not start the campaign on weekends or after business hours, or you're wasting budget running ads when people are not paying attention.

4. Run for 48 hours and see if any converts, shut down ones that don't and add budget to the one that is converting.

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Marketing is just attention arbitrage.
figured this out perfectly:

→ Pay to rank on a leaderboard
→ 576 people online at any moment see your product

→ @Crowdreply_io paid $12,700 → got 6,550 clicks, 1,800 signups, $50k pipeline

That's a better ROI than most paid ads.
The internet keeps reinventing itself 👀
cc @jonathan_wilke

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My kids AI app went from $3.3k to ~$5.9k MRR. Here's what actually worked (and what not - burning $1k a day on ads with 0.02 ROAS).

Three months ago I posted at $3,361 MRR asking what you'd do to scale my kids AI app. A lot of you gave real, specific advice, so I owe the sub

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A few days ago I had ads on OpenAI, not a single registration.
I have updated the home page, premium feeling, all CTAs go to register, ran the ads again: 10 accounts within first 30 min 🤯

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