Don’t be scared to run paid ads. TikTok ads brought me the quickest first $500 out of all my side projects

I think there is an unjustified stigma against paid ads in the bootstrappers community for some reason. If your pricing makes sense, spending 10-20 bucks on testing out a couple of creatives does not hurt. Who knows maybe It could be the channel that works for you. You will be spending that money to pay some crappy directory to list your app anyway.

When I was building ImageAnimageAI.com, my target distribution channel was going to be SEO and short form only, thus the domain name. It has the main keyword. While I was making TikToks and Reels using the tool, on a random Saturday (7 days after site went live), I decided to promote one of the tiktoks I posted. My daily budget was set to 8 usd which was minimum for TikTok.

It brought in 219 users 8 of them purchased a credit pack made $304 that 24 hours.
Here is the ad: https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSSCrSuus

Tried again on a different format targeting a different segment. Flopped, wasted my precious 8 bucks.

3rd time, similar audience, different creative. It worked again, made another $200.

This time, I made an ad targeting SmBs and Ecom but on IG. Brought in the most sign ups and revenue out of all 3 attempts. Ad here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DLn1_FwuGVg

There comes a time any product is gonna outgrow its organic channels. Ultimately, you will run ads. That’s how most companies scale to millions of ARR most of the time. Ads are not bad.

Experiment with about 50 usd. Worst case you will find out it’s not the channel for you or your landing page sucks.

Working on adding a subscription right now to increase the LTV so I can blast paid ads.

You might ask for process and stuff. Nothing special there. I made the images on gemini and animated it with ImageAnimateAI.com and used it as the hook. For the ones with dialog, I used VEO 3, again through my own tool (that's the whole point of being a builder I guess).

So long story short, try running some ads, maybe it will change your life.

Comment "AD" and I will dm you some prompts and stuff I used. I still have it around.

Good luck!