r/juststart

Quick build-in-public update on my iOS app. A few months ago I started spending real money on ads to grow it. Here's what I learned, with actual numbers, in case it saves someone else the cash.

Over about three months I spent $5,674 total:

Apple Search Ads: $2,498

TikTok ads: $1,881

Reddit ads: $1,295

For a couple weeks the dashboards looked amazing. Downloads spiked, trials climbed, impressions went up several times over. Then I built better tracking and actually calculated my unit economics:

Cost to acquire a paying customer: ~$114

Lifetime value of that customer: ~$18

There's no creative test or targeting tweak that fixes a 6x gap. It got worse the closer I looked: the users I got from ads were the most likely to cancel. They came for the cheap install and left before building any habit.

The part that surprised me most (relevant if you do ASO): the ads were hiding how the rest of my funnel was doing. While they ran, my App Store conversion rate looked like ~1.6%. Within a week of turning them off it jumped to ~7.5%. The ads had been dumping a flood of low-intent impressions into the top of the funnel, dragging the whole number down and making my real organic traffic look way worse than it was. If you're optimizing a listing while running broad paid, your conversion benchmark is probably lying to you.

So I shut all the paid off in mid-May and put everything back into the two free channels I already had: a blog and TikTok.

The timing was brutal. Right after I went all-in on organic, I think I got shadow banned on TikTok and a Google algo update hit my blog the same week. Churn spiked to ~9%/week (normally 3-4%) and MRR flatlined around $650 for a few weeks.

I regrouped and got more deliberate. Stopped throwing random clips at TikTok and leaned into the formats that actually got watched. Went back through every blog post and rewrote them to answer the questions people actually search, not the ones I assumed they were asking. Both recovered and are doing better than ever now. Organic search clicks hit record highs (~50-68/day, up from ~6/day a few months back), ChatGPT quietly became one of my biggest referral sources, churn is back to ~3.5%, and MRR went from stuck at $650 to $787 with zero paid behind it.

Not a huge business, but it's growing again on channels I own and it's not bleeding money to do it.

The thing I keep coming back to: paid gave me a spike I had to keep paying for, and the second I stopped it vanished. The blog posts I wrote two months ago are still pulling readers today. Slower, but it compounds, and it's mine.

Happy to answer anything about the channels, the tracking setup, or the numbers.

Full writeup with all the charts (spend, CAC vs LTV, the Search Console recovery, MRR): https://gainframe.app/blog/spent-5k-on-app-ads/

Been chewing on this for months and I keep going in circles, so I'm throwing it at you guys.

I run a content site in the healthcare space under a pen name. The thing is I actually hold a real credential in the field, relevant enough that if I put my real name and license on the site it'd carry actual weight. Right now there's a "reviewed by [pen name], [credential]" on everything but it's not me in any way you could trace.

Where I'm at: I've got over 150 articles published, so this isn't a week-old project, I've put real months into it. Bing is actually starting to come around, I'm getting about 1,000 sessions a month from it. But Google is still basically ignoring me, which makes me think I'm sitting in the sandbox. Monetization is set up but it's done basically nothing so far. The plan was always to go public at some revenue milestone, attach my name, do the whole LinkedIn/expert thing. But that milestone isn't anywhere close.

And here's my actual problem. The de-anonymizing part is the thing I keep stalling on. It's the biggest mental block I've got with this whole project and I've talked myself in and out of it about fifty times. So I want some outside voices instead of just rerunning the same argument in my own head.

Stuff I'm trying to work out:

If you went from anonymous to using your real name plus a real credential, did it actually do anything? Like did E-E-A-T / trust / reach noticeably move, or was it kind of a nothingburger?

Anyone do it and wish they hadn't? What actually went wrong, employer drama, privacy, board/licensing stuff, or did it just turn out not to matter?

I've got Bing traffic, but Google's still ignoring me, and I'm pre-revenue. Is that a reason to wait (why attach my name before there's an audience) or a reason to do it now (maybe the name plus credential is the trust signal that helps me earn Google's trust and climb out)? Which way did it go for you?

Anyone deliberately stay anonymous and have it work out totally fine?

Not looking for someone to give me permission. I want the verdict and the war stories. Tell me what you actually watched happen, good or bad.

Last year I had a site doing decent numbers then the March spam update hit and it got wiped my rankings gone, traffic gone, no real path back. It was a rough lesson in how fragile this can be when you don’t fully understand what you’re optimizing for.

I took a few months then started over. New site, calculator tools, built on Blogger this time since I didn’t want to spend too much money for website builders. It wasn’t really a bother to me since I’m a coder I got around in creating my cta codes and even my own link system that automatically turns some domains in nofollow.

This time I changed a few things on purpose:

•	No backlink schemes, no PBNs, nothing that looks remotely manipulative  
•	Went all in on low competition long tail keywords instead of chasing anything competitive  
•	Used Reddit as basically my only distribution channel early on and found a couple niche subs where a genuinely useful tool gets a real response instead of getting nuked as spam. Here’s some examples for proof: https://www.reddit.com/r/Vivarium/comments/1tgrcx2/the\_actual\_math\_behind\_isopod\_colony\_sizing\_with/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/resinprinting/comments/1t503hb/why\_cutting\_layer\_height\_proportionally\_tanks/  
•	Wrote everything myself instead of mass producing thin content

It’s been slow. We’re talking low to mid thousands of monthly visitors not some huge number but some of the pages actually hit #1 for its keyword within days of publishing for example my “Candle Making Statistics 2026” post you can verify yourself if you want any more proof.

Mainly sharing this because the spam update wrecked a lot of people last year and I don’t see many “what actually happened and what I did differently after” posts most are either pure complaints or vague “I recovered!” claims with zero specifics.

Happy to get into specifics on any of it like keyword research, the Blogger setup, the Reddit angle, whatever’s useful.