I burned €3,000 learning this the hard way. Zero sales, and I'm genuinely fine with that (kinda)
Wanted to share an actual result instead of another "how I made it" post. Hopefully that is okay!
The last product in a long line of tests to fuel my entrepreneurial dream. Spent over €3,000 on all sorts of ads, products and projects. I know that might not seem like a whole lot compared to the millions some businesses spend. But for a solo founder it was quite a lot of money to "burn"..
Anywho I built a digital product (a sleep guide) and spent some money on testing it out with no clear plan.
After that I rebuilt the whole approach: got feedback on the page from strangers before spending anything extra, fixed what was wrong based on that, then ran one test, €150, decided in advance, no more.
Result: 25K reached, 1,132 full video views, 244 page visits.
Zero sales.
Zero sales hurt me emotionally but it isn't automatic proof nobody wants it, though. If a true 1-in-100 buy rate existed, you'd still see zero sales after 244 visits about 9% of the time, purely by chance right?
So I ran the numbers instead of guessing. At my cost per visit, I needed roughly 1 in 26 people to buy just to break even. Zero sales from 244 visits meant the actual rate was very unlikely to be above 1 in 80. That's what made stopping an easy call, data instead of a gut feeling or stubbornness pushing me to keep going.
Genuinely curious: for anyone who's killed a project, was it a clear data-driven call like this, or more of a gut decision? Trying to figure out if what I did is a repeatable process or if I got lucky with how clean the numbers came out.