how to go from $0 to $200k/month with an app in 6 months with tiny budget: (months 1–3: the foundation) follow the “$10k/month in 3 months” playbook quoted here. even if everything flops, by the end of 3 months you should already have: - a working ios app - an ig account with lots of reels posted - a handful of early users once you have these 3 things, you can start running meta ads. but before you can run ads, you’ll need about a month to get these done: - register a company - open a business bank account - get multiple business credit cards (amex / mercury…) - open a meta ads account the core strategy: use credit lines to run meta ads. if your roas (after apple’s 15% cut) stays >100%, you can scale infinitely. target: spend $75k/month on ads → 2.5x roas → $200k/mo sales. (month 4: first meta ads test, $50k ad spend → $50k/mo sales, breakeven) do these 3 key things before scaling: 1. learn. deep dive into cal ai, rise, quittr’s business models. study every ad they’ve run in meta ad library read $100m offers and $100m leads (alex hormozi) 2. improve product. early users only came because of free trial. after 3 months, remove the trial → force paywall 3. fix onboarding. 20 screens asking questions selling the value (see headway, rise) create 3 subscription plans: - yearly $49.99 - monthly $12.99 - discount yearly $29.99 (the “real” offer) 4. secure ad budget. make sure you have $50k cash/credit options: - savings - business credit card (leverage personal acct/amex business card how to run meta ads: integrate facebook sdk into your ios app launch app promotion campaign, ios14 , optimized for purchase use advantage campaigns target: us, uk, de, ca, nz, au record 10 short reels to sell the app make them look native/ugc (capcut edits, shot on iphone) goal = make people forget it’s an ad until they see “install now” budget setup: dump all 10 reels into one campaign daily budget: $130 usd set cost per result = $20 usd → with 3 plans, avg purchase ≈ $20 usd at first, roas = 0.5–0.75x. track: ctr (most important): should be >0.5% cost per thru-play: are people watching? every week: add 10 new reels, cut underperforming ones. by mid-month, 4 possible outcomes: 🏆 roas 2x : jackpot. scale budget 30% every 2 days until $5k/day 🥈 roas 1–1.9x: decent. raise budget to $1.5k–$1.8k/day 🥉 roas 0.6–1x: normal. hold spend until roas >1, then scale 🙃 roas <0.6 or no spend. 3 possible reasons: 1. app sucks (no demand) → talk to users, read the mom test 2. bad creative (ctr <0.5%) → fix ads 3. market too competitive (cpm >$10) → pivot to organic or focus on retention (month 5: scale $50k ad spend → $150k/mo sales, 2xish ROAS) keep adding 10 new reels every week last month you broke even, but apple pays on 60-day delay → need more credit ask bank to bump credit lines goal: $400k spend this month grow budget slowly: max 30% every 2 days (month 6: endgame $75k ad spend → $200k sales, 2.5xish ROAS) same playbook: nonstop new reels a winning ad can run at 4x roas watch cash flow like a hawk keep pushing credit limits at banks never change your $20 cost per result setting. it’s the backbone of the system disclaimer: this is what worked for me, if you gone bankrupt because you didn't set a CPA target, it's on you

It turns out @desmondhth is right (again). Paid > organic. I got my AI photo generator to $6k/month almost purely via organic, but I wanted to revisit paid before going further down that rabbit hole. It turns out paid ads were a HUGE opportunity for me that I was completely ignoring. Here are the interesting realizations/dumb mistakes I made along the way: (These are very specific to my business - which is web based - and may not apply to yours). Google search ads: 1. Be VERY careful about location target. When I started, I included a bunch of rich, English-speaking countries like Singapore, Canada, Australia, etc. Took me way too long to realize USA was the only highly profitable country for me. It took me even longer to realize you need to change your settings to ensure Google only targets people PHYSICALLY IN the United States, as opposed to anyone who is "interested" in the USA (I was getting so many people from India before). 2. Set up a retargeting campaign, and give it a MUCH smaller budget than your main campaign (it's crazy how efficient this is). My initial logic was: why wouldn't you want to spend MORE money on people who are already warm leads? But the pool of warm leads is so much smaller, that a higher budget wastes a lot of money unnecessarily. 3. For everything else, don't get caught up in the weeds. Set goal max conversions, set a reasonable daily budget, and adjust as needed to meet your CAC goal. Focus on improving your website/product offering, rather than constantly tweaking your settings. Meta ads: 1. Install the Pixel and setup purchase event WAY before you start running Meta ads. I tried starting Meta ads at the same time as Google search, and burned hundreds of dollars with zero purchases. So I stopped. I assumed my creatives were just shit. But I left my pixel there, and the whole time it was learning. Use this information in the next point. 2. Lookalike audiences are insanely good, either standalone or with advantage plus, if your goal is not to burn a shit load of money without any results. When I restarted meta ads with a 1% lookalike campaign, 1-5% lookalike campaign, and 1% lookalike advantage campaign, they were all instantly quite profitable. 3. Setup a retargeting campaign for visitors and registered users (import from your DB). Another no brainer. 4. Website/product is just as important as creatives. When I started up Meta ads again, I used the same shitty creatives I made myself - inspired by @nico_jeannen example for codefast in his course (looks like some ms paint shit). So why are the ads so much more profitable than before? Because my landing page/product offering is 10x better than when I initially launched the ads, and not to mention the audience is a bit more well defined.

Somebody just bought the $199 upsell on my AI photo generator for the first time 🥲 This is also my best customer - he's spent $789.96. Some might say this is proof I should be using a recurring model, but I'm pretty happy with things now.

Just passed $30k revenue. Launched in February. Thank you Reddit 🙏 AMA about organic Reddit marketing

I'm back. I quit X 51 days ago (following @desmondhth advice) to grow my 5k USD/month AI image generator. As I put it in my original tweet, I got to 5k/month revenue by accident. Just a handful of Reddit engagements. That tweet went "viral", and many of you followed to find out what would happen. Well, I have your answer. 1. I grew revenue by 23.7% 📈 in one month. 2. Set up for future growth on autopilot. 3. I proved Reddit can be scaled. How did I actually do it? Simple. I grew revenue by 23.7% using only a single method... I doubled down on Reddit, which was already the source of basically all of my revenue. 99% of people get Reddit completely wrong. In fact, off the top of my head I can't remember seeing a single intelligent tweet about Reddit marketing 😅 I've been building the most insane Reddit marketing tool for over 4 months now and I really got to put it through its paces this month. Not sure exactly what I'll do with it... It's way too good to gatekeep, but it's kind of expensive to run and still requires a bit of knowledge. Anyways, enough about Reddit 👍 I also mentioned I set up my business for *future success*. How did I do that? I focused on "evergreen" marketing strategies. You plant a tree 🌳, and then you wait. One day you will relish in the shade of that tree. Reddit is an evergreen strategy. I went all in on another one: SEO. Guys, my domain rating was ZERO. Literally 0. SEO was completely new for me. A ton of learning, and LOTS of trial and error. But we got there. It's double digits now and rising every day. I went from zero organic search traffic in 4 months to getting my first 49 organic visitors literally days ago. My keywords are blowing up and impressions are skyrocketing. Future profits in the bank 💰 That was the primary focus of the past month. I decided to ignore the current wave of focusing on short form content. Why did I do that? I'll explain, and maybe it will give you some clarity about your own business. ⚠️ KNOWLEDGE NUKE INCOMING ⚠️ Guys, you can market your SAAS however the hell you want to. Business is actually so SIMPLE. Watch: You have a product with a decent website. 5% of people who see your product's landing page will purchase. If 1,000 people see your landing page in a week, that means you earned 50 sales. Congratulations 🥳 So how do you get rich? Get more 👀 on your product. More people visit, more people buy. Period. The beautiful thing is that there are lots of different ways to accomplish the same thing, and you can literally pick which one you want to do: - SEO - Short form content - Long form content - Paid ads - Reddit - X ... and the list goes on on and on. So which one should you pick? Some people will say you should pick based on where your target customers are located WRONG ‼️ If you are a LARGE business that is trying to scale and has hit a wall, then sure. But you AREN'T a large business. You have zero MRR silly 🤪 You can literally pick ANY OF THESE to jump start your business. And you can scale any of these to a very significant degree before you run into issues. So what you should actually do is pick the one you are best at, and that you enjoy the most 👍 If shitposting on X is your thing, you can EASILY turn that into a scalable business. We've seen plenty of examples of that. For me personally, I'm a fully grown adult male in his late 20s. I don't want to make TikToks for a living 😐 So I didn't. I grew out my neckbeard and doubled down on Reddit, and then started implementing SEO. I get dopamine hits from the idea of passive income - investing my time now in a short burst of effort to reap rewards for an extended period of time later. Maybe you are different. Maybe you goon to the idea of one of your TikToks going viral. Then by all means, get @jackfriks post-bridge and have at it! Where will I go from here? 🤔 I'll continue growing the business by double digits each month by making small, dedicated sprints to get more eyeballs on my product. In the mean time, perhaps I will also help some other businesses leverage Reddit with the help of my expertise and in-house tool. Who knows 🤫 Perhaps the most sobering realization from this experiment is that my ability to market a business so successfully on Reddit has to be worth way more than my actual business itself 😂 Gotta give some shout outs here... these are some of the exact resources I used during this process: 1. @dannypostma SEO course (link in his bio) 2. @ahrefs YouTube channel (gave me some ideas) 3. @desmondhth for the idea to try this - I actually didn't think about X at all after the first few days. Any questions? Ask away.

I'm qutting X for a month to follow the @desmondhth playbook. My SAAS is at $6k/month by pure accident. A handful of impactful Reddit comments, word of month, and $20 a day in Google ads got me here. The fact that I can earn $6k by ACCIDENT tells me my product is insanely good, and could easily earn $25k/month with effort in distribution. So I'm going to try. This X account serves no purpose for my business. It's not a distribution channel. I'm leaving it behind. Likewise, I'm uninstalling every repo for every other project I'm building and focusing 100% on marketing. 100% focus. I will report back here on July 27 with the results. Receipts. Before and afters. Everything. Here is the original tweet I referenced: x.com/desmondhth/status/1937…

TBH if you're already a senior dev, Claude Code feels like such a huge downgrade over Cursor. Claude Code may be better for vibe coding, but way worse for granular control over what is happening in your project. So much easier to read changes, revert and retry, etc. with Cursor

I have to hand it to @jackfriks - I was able to get my first view on Tiktok thanks to post bridge. Tried for 40 days to do it myself. Always 0 views. Tried again by warming up account and posting via postbridge fully expecting nothing. Woke up to 91 views. It's working.

Tell me you are restarting your marketing arc without telling me you are restarting your marketing arc

I just sat down with a pen and paper and wrote down 8 simple questions. These questions are the only thing that stand between my $6k/month business turning into a $40k/month business. 1. What should I do with my Google ads? 2. Why is my SEO so shit? 3. How do I get on US TikTok? 4. How do I scale my Reddit marketing? 5. How do I start and scale social posting? 6. How do I convert more customers? 7. How do I recover more customers? 8. How can I gamify marketing so I’m willing to do it more? Each question has 2 blank pages after. Time to figure out the answers.

I did some SEO work 2 months ago. It was crickets for a while, but now I'm starting to get impressions. But I noticed after 100 impressions, I'm still getting zero clicks. What am I doing wrong?

I just opened 14 X bookmarks about marketing that I've been meaning to read. Wish me luck.