Marketing in Public

The library

Marketing experiments

What founders tried, what it cost, and what happened. Every number shown was disclosed by the founder.

27 experiments

Meta 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.

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Cold email
$80K
revenue
$0
spent

Marc Lou grew a SaaS to $80,000+ using only cold email, for $0

Marc Lou

Marc Lou says he grew a B2B SaaS from zero to $80,000+ with cold email as the only channel and $0 spend: directory-sourced leads, a CRM, a template email, a sales call, and a short drip sequence.

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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.

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Short-form video
50K
views, with spike
200K
views, no spike
$0
spent

A 200k-view TikTok sold nothing. A 50k-view one spiked downloads

Jack Friks · Lovelee

A year after his short-form playbook, Jack Friks tested a new format for his app Lovelee: a 200k-view video produced no download spike, while a different format showed a very noticeable spike after just 50k views.

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Short-form video
30K
downloads
300
videos to find a winner
$0
spent

1 hour a day of short-form video: 30,000 app downloads in a month, no ads

Jack Friks

Jack Friks spends about an hour a day making and posting 6 short videos across warmed-up TikTok and Instagram accounts. He reports 30,000 downloads for his B2C app in a month, with no paid ads.

Read experiment Public source
X (Twitter)
9%
install → trial
250
installs
1
day

Day 1 on the App Store: 250 installs and 24 free trials

Jack Friks

On his new mobile app's first day on the App Store, promoted only on X, Jack Friks got 250 installs and 24 free-trial starts — a 9% install-to-trial rate — before doing any other marketing.

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Short-form video
8M
views
1.8K
posts published

1,800 recycled posts, 8 million views

Jack Friks · Postbridge

Jack Friks scheduled 1,800 of his own posts through Postbridge — most repurposed from content he made two years earlier — and they reached 8 million views, with Facebook Reels almost a third of them.

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SEO
2
meta Ads purchases
1
google Ads trial signups
$1.5K
spent

$500 on Google Ads, $500 on Meta, $500 on SEO: what GenPPT got from each

Ilias Ism · GenPPT

Ilias Ism split $1,500 three ways for GenPPT, an AI presentation tool. $500 of Google Ads produced 1 trial signup; $500 of Meta ads, 2 purchases; $500 of content and backlinks, 5,000+ visitors a month — most of it from one $100 blog post.

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Directories & launch sitesDidn't work
0
paying customers
8
signups
23
days

22 directories, 10 channels, 23 days: 8 signups and zero paying customers

Muhammad Haris Zafar · ColdCraft

Muhammad Haris Zafar pushed ColdCraft across 22 AI directories, about 15 listing sites and daily posts on nine social channels. In 23 days: 8 signups, 0 paying. Directories and social posts produced no traceable signups; community posts and one-on-one conversations produced all of them.

Read experiment Public source