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Marketing experiments

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

6 experiments match for “$0 budget”

Only experiments where the founder says they spent $0.

SEO
7.3K
google visitors in 30 days
$0
spent
4
months

Slashit went from zero organic traffic to 7,300 Google visitors a month with 12 articles — led by a “Raycast alternatives” page

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.

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SEO
6%
comparison page click rate
$0
spent
4
months

AIToolsRecap: an explainer page got 398,000 impressions and almost no clicks; a comparison page one spot lower got 6%

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%.

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Cold email
Featured
$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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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
Featured
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.

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