Marketing in Public
Sponsorships & paid placementsBuying the #1 slot on a viral bid-for-placement site

Tibo paid $12,000 for one homepage slot. It brought 50+ extra trials in two days

By Tibo · Outrank· Sep 27, 2026
50
Extra trials above baseline
100
Trials over the two days
$12,000
Budget
2 days
Duration

Tibo bought the #1 spot on outbid.lol — a viral site where the highest bidder gets the homepage — for Outrank, then measured new trials against the same days over the previous 8 weeks: 50+ trials above baseline in two days.

01The problem

A viral meme site was sending huge traffic to whoever paid for its top slot. Was a $12,000 placement worth it for a B2B SEO tool?

02The hypothesis

Outbid's audience are the kind of people who buy Outrank. With an LTV of $1,000–$2,000, only 6–12 new customers would pay back $12,000.

03The experiment

He paid $12,000 for the #1 placement on outbid.lol, linking to Outrank.

To measure it, he compared new free trials on the Friday and Saturday of the placement with every Friday and Saturday over the previous 8 weeks, using Stripe data.

04Results

MetricResult
Extra trials above baselinestated as “50+” over two days; his chart shows 100 trials vs a 49.1 baseline50
Trials over the two daysfrom his Stripe analysis chart100
Paid subscriptionshe projects “roughly 25” from his usual conversion rateNot disclosed
Spend$12,000

“Not disclosed” means the source doesn't say. We never estimate or fill in missing numbers.

05What worked — and what didn't

What worked

  • Choosing a placement whose audience matches the buyer
  • Deciding the break-even (6–12 customers) before spending
  • Measuring against an 8-week same-weekday baseline instead of eyeballing a spike

06Lessons

He estimates about 25 paid subscriptions at his usual trial-to-paid rate — his projection, not a count — and calls the placement worth it even at the low end of his LTV range.

“a win in my books”
— Tibo

07Source & evidence

  • Originally shared on Blog · Aug 27, 2026

    I spent $12,000 on a meme

    View original
  • Also on X · Aug 26, 2026

    Outrank at #1 on outbid.lol

    View original

Public source. Extracted from publicly available content by the founder.

Want to try this?

Run this experiment for your own product

Channel
Sponsorships & paid placements
Estimated effort
—
Original duration
2 days
Original budget
$12,000

Get an experiment like this in your inbox every week.

Was this experiment useful?

Want the full playbook behind this?

Tibo hasn't published a step-by-step playbook. If enough readers ask, we'll ask Tibo for one.

Share this experiment

Sponsorships & paid placements
2
sales from the public demo
$1K
revenue
27
days

$2 on a stranger's wall: PressDrop made $1,093 in 27 days from 0 followers

Jack · PressDrop

Jack launched PressDrop.io with no followers by listing it on small .lol launch sites — the one that mattered was a $2 slot on bigbubble.lol, which brought a $59 sale within minutes. After a silent week where Product Hunt and Reddit did nothing, publicly doing the job for people restarted sales: $1,093 in 27 days.

Read experiment Public source
Product Hunt
$300
MRR before relaunch
$10K
MRR two months after
$60K
MRR, June 2025

Same product, new name: a Product Hunt relaunch took Outrank from $300 to $10,000+ MRR

Tibo · Outrank

Tibo's SEO tool launched on Product Hunt as ContentPie, placed #8 and stalled at $300 MRR. Renamed Outrank and repositioned as an autonomous SEO machine, it relaunched to #1 Product of the Day and passed $10,000 MRR within two months.

Read experiment Public source
RedditDidn't work
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.

Read experiment Public source