I tried every possible paid advertising method for a business
Hi Makers 👋🏻,
Some backstory:
So, a friend of mine wanted me to help her out with inorganic advertising (Of which I'm not a great fan of) of all sorts. So instead of just trying one or two platforms, we decided to do it on every possible place.
About the product:
A micro SaaS made for developers with mid-budget pricing.
Audience:
The target audience was generally people aged between 24-45 years located in the USA and EU.
Some important thing, we were using Google Analytics and as audience where devs many had content blockers installed, so we weren't able to track some data. Also, the landing page is optimized enough to get good sign-ups.
We decided to set a budget of $100 per channel.
Here are the channels and results we were able to achieve.
Google Ads (aka Vanilla): This got us 174 clicks, which got us around 28 sign-ups.
Bing Ads: Something weird happened here IDK why it's been 7 days now, and we were able to only spend ~75 USD which got us 96 clicks and weirdly high 21 sign-ups.
Reddit Ads: This got us with 208 clicks and 39 sign-ups, but most of them were from low CPC countries like Belarus and Serbia.
Facebook OOPS, Meta Ads: Got 240 clicks and 44 sign-ups.
Quora Ads: Got 149 clicks and 23 sign-ups.
All of them are still on a 30-day trial, so will have to see how they are converting.
The Bing results are the real "glitch in the matrix" here. A 22% conversion rate on dev-focused SaaS is practically unheard of.
A few "gut checks" for your 30-day follow-up:
The Bing "Corporate" Theory: If those 21 sign-ups turn into paid users, you’ve hit a goldmine. Usually, developers on Bing use locked-down corporate machines (Edge defaults). These are the folks with company credit cards and actual budgets, not just side-project hobbyists.
The Reddit "Ghost" Trap: Watch those Eastern Europe sign-ups like a hawk. Reddit is notorious for high-intent-looking clicks that turn out to be "bot-adjacent" or low-LTV noise. If they don't actually push code or hit an API, they’re just inflating your ego, not your ARR.
The Content Blocker Gap: Since you’re targeting devs, your GA data is definitely lying to you. You probably have 20-30% more data than you think. Check your server-side logs for the "true" sign-up count—you likely did even better than the dashboard says.
The Meta Paradox: 44 sign-ups are huge, but Meta devs are often "procrastination clicking." They sign up on their phones while scrolling, then completely forget the tool exists by the time they’re actually sitting at their IDE.
Have you tried TikTok ads? I've been seeing more and more dev-oriented channels there.
I really wanted to, but TikTok is blocked in my country
I'm curious to see the results at the end of the trial.
As a general rule, indie hacking and paid advertising really don't seem to mix. You can see this when going back through interviews with them. I feel like fewer than 1 in 10 indie hackers cite paid advertising as a meaningful marketing initiative.
I, too, think that it's not the most viable solution, and it's better to stay organic. BTW, we did inorganic stuff here only because we needed some feedbacks coming in.
Will surely update on the results.
🙏
Thank you for sharing. Do you feel comfortable to share the visual and the copywriting?
Will post an update soon
Thank you, I'll be waiting then.
Thank you for sharing this list. Will you publish the information on how many stayed after the free trial?
Yup, let the trial period end