The library
What founders tried, what it cost, and what happened. Every number shown was disclosed by the founder.
38 experiments
Manjiri · KathaDaily
Manjiri is posting every day as she tries to take KathaDaily, a paid daily-stories site, from 26 to 100 paying readers in 21 days. By day 12: two Instagram ad campaigns and an X post sent hundreds of visitors but no buyers. 28 paying users, $48.37 in, $113.50 spent.
Manjiri · KathaDaily
To find her first readers, Manjiri collaborated with three Instagram creators for KathaDaily, a paid daily-stories site: one creator posted a story, two made dedicated reels. The story brought 5 paying users. The reels brought none.
Tony Dinh · TypingMind Custom
Tony Dinh tested LinkedIn Ads for TypingMind Custom in three rounds: broad targeting, Lead Gen forms, then a Lead Gen form turned into an AI quiz. $2,052.03 bought 183,663 impressions and a handful of leads, none of whom had come back when he posted. He stopped the channel.
Tibo · SuperX
Tibo turned on Outrank — his own AI SEO tool — for SuperX in November 2025. It did the keyword research, wrote the articles, got contextual backlinks and built some free tools. By September 2026 daily Google impressions had gone from about 2K to 23K. Signups and revenue weren't shared.
Pratham Naik · BearConnect
Instead of building an X audience or launching on Product Hunt, Pratham Naik DMed 80 agency owners from LinkedIn groups in one week, offering free access for honest feedback. 12 replied, 8 used BearConnect, and 3 paid within two weeks: his first $201 MRR.
Noah Greenberg · Stacker
Stacker's founder Noah Greenberg posted on LinkedIn almost daily to reach buyers. His most viral post, read by 700,000 people, didn't produce a single sales call. A post the week before, seen by only 4,000, set up three.
Nick Wolny
In 2020 Nick Wolny wrote paywalled articles on Medium with a freebie offer at the end of each one. Medium paid him $7,685.98 for member reading time, the freebie grew his email list by more than 3,600 net subscribers, and a discount offer sent to new subscribers sold $10,714 of his mini-courses.
Nevo David · Postiz
Before Postiz went open source, Nevo David focused on SEO: an UpWork freelancer pitched news sites, bought backlinks and wrote many articles. After four months at around $3K a month he called it useless — with very low domain authority, even easy keywords wouldn't rank — and switched to open source.
Nevo David · Postiz
Nevo David built Postiz's search presence through open source — GitHub awesome-lists, open-source and SaaS directories, a daily AI blog post and free tools — reaching 70 domain authority. By August 2026 he wrote that traffic went “up and up and up” but revenue didn't follow, and he's moving effort to getting cited by AI assistants.
Mahmudul Hasan · Slashit
In April, Mahmudul Hasan's Slashit had zero organic traffic. By July it pulled 7.3K visitors in 30 days, all from Google, from 12 articles — with no ads, backlinks or outreach. The biggest page targeted a competitor's name plus the exact use case where Slashit wins.
Pat · AIToolsRecap
Four months after launch, with $0 spent on ads or backlinks, AIToolsRecap had 4.95M Google impressions but only 4,540 clicks. July alone brought 71% of all clicks, as comparison pages took over from explainer pages that Google answers in the results. One explainer: 398,000 impressions and a click rate that rounds to zero. One comparison page: 6%.
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.