Nico Jeannen grew Talknotes to $7,500 MRR with Meta ads fed by onboarding answers
- $1,500
- MRR after Product Hunt
- $7,500
- MRR after 11 months
- Not disclosed
- Budget
- Not disclosed
- Duration
After directories, Twitter and a Product Hunt Product of the Day took Talknotes to $1,500 MRR, Nico Jeannen made Facebook/Meta ads his main channel — writing new ads from what users said in the onboarding form. He took it from $0 to $7,500 MRR in 11 months and sold it for $200,000.
01The problem
Launch channels gave Talknotes an early bump, but not steady growth.
02The hypothesis
Users' own words about why they signed up make better ad creative than guesses.
03The experiment
Early traction came from directories and Twitter, then a Product Hunt launch that won Product of the Day and took the app to $1,500 MRR.
He then leaned into Facebook/Meta ads. Every new user filled in an onboarding form; he used their answers to learn who they were and why they signed up, and turned that into new ads — a loop of users → insight → ads → more users.
He says good creatives are 80% of the work on Facebook ads.
04Results
| Metric | Result |
|---|---|
| MRR after Product HuntProduct of the Day | $1,500 |
| MRR after 11 monthsfrom $0 | $7,500 |
| Exit pricesold on Acquire.com | $200,000 |
| Ad spendnot disclosed | Not disclosed |
| MRR growth from the ads loopstated as “MRR doubled in ~2 months” | Not disclosed |
| Spend | Not disclosed |
“Not disclosed” means the source doesn't say. We never estimate or fill in missing numbers.
05What worked — and what didn't
What worked
- Using onboarding-form answers to write new ad creatives
- Treating creative as most of the work on Meta ads
What didn't work
- SEO: in his blog he reports only 3 sales from non-branded keywords
- He burned out in May; bugs slipped in and revenue dropped sharply
06Source & evidence
- View original
Originally shared on X · Jul 2, 2024
I just sold my startup Talknotes for $200,000
- View original
Also on Blog · Aug 30, 2023
TalkNotes — From $0 to $200,000 in 1 year
Public source. Extracted from publicly available content by the founder.
Want to try this?
Run this experiment for your own product
- Channel
- Meta Ads
- Estimated effort
- —
- Original duration
- Not disclosed
- Original budget
- Not disclosed
Get an experiment like this in your inbox every week.
Was this experiment useful?
Want the full playbook behind this?
Nico Jeannen hasn't published a step-by-step playbook. If enough readers ask, we'll ask Nico Jeannen for one.
Related experiments
- $75K
- revenue
ShipFast: about $25K on Meta ads made $75K — run by someone else
Marc Lou · ShipFast
Marc Lou says he spent about $25K on Meta ads for ShipFast in 2024 and made $75K from it — and credits Nico Jeannen, who ran the campaign because Marc says he's bad at ads.
- 54
- sales
- $10K
- revenue
- 4:1
- ROAS
Marc Lou copied a Chinese restaurant's Instagram ad. It made $10,000+
Marc Lou
Marc Lou remade the structure of a French Instagram ad for a Chinese restaurant, swapped in his own product, and ran it. It took 30 minutes to make, and he reports 54 sales, $10,000+ in revenue and a 4:1 return on ad spend.
- 0
- paying users
- 2
- posts auto-removed
- 10
- days
Reddit was his main channel. Ten days in: shadow-removed, then banned — and 0 paying users
Koran Thorne · Helios
Koran Thorne set out to get 50 users in 25 days with Reddit as the main channel. He built karma for two weeks, then his first posts were removed by Reddit's spam filter, his comments became invisible to everyone but him for nearly a week, and the account was banned sitewide. Day 10: 0 paying users.