Spending $350 on TikTok ads to make $0

Have you ever seen people online making loads of money on mobile apps by running TikTok ads?

I’ve considered making mobile apps in the past but never did because I thought you had to do all the account warming up and stuff which I didn’t like the sound of, so the thought of just running paid ads sounded so much better.

I did what the guide said, I just semi-cloned a popular AI app that targets a human desire and got it listed on the app store, and proceeded to run TikTok ads. I used the before/after format in the guide and patiently waited for the RevenueCat subscription notifications to roll in as I ran my $50/day campaign budget.

But as per the title, there was 0 conversions.

What did I try, and what failed?

The first day used up $50 which I didn’t mind because it’s the learning phase, I was like whatever. My goal was to cut off creatives that spent ~$50 but had <1% CTR.

By day 2-3 I already cut off 1 creative, so at the same time I was also replacing it with 1 or 2 more creatives to try and find a winning ad.

If you’ve done TikTok ads before, you just burn money until you find 1 winning ad, and at that point you start scaling and creating many variants of that winning format. Then you gain all your losses back and more.

Alongside the ad statistics, I was also looking at Posthog for analytics. Each day, I would look at the metrics and try and figure out the main bottleneck, and try and fix it. For example the CTRs were bad, so I tried better hooks and I tried shilling the app more towards the end of the video.

Or another example is that I had about 70 people reach the paywall, 20 people hit purchase, but 0 conversions. My initial test was to reduce prices by ~30% from $10 weekly $50 annual, to $7 weekly $40 annual. This still didn’t work. I even tried adding a checkout abandon offer, but that didn’t work either.

What did I learn? What can you take away from this?

The first lesson is related to the last paragraph above - if you have a hard paywall, the user HAS to be convinced by the time they get there. After reducing the price and adding an abandon offer, I realised the problem was that users weren’t actually convinced by the time they got to the paywall.

Why else would 20+ people hit purchase but second guess it and cancel? To fix this, I studied other popular apps and I’ve submitted a new version that has a multi-step paywall to convince the user of the app’s value so that they’re not hesitant by the time they arrive, so hopefully that works.

The second lesson that has helped me MASSIVELY is to have analytics for your app/product. I personally used Posthog since I’ve got experience with it, but use whatever you want. Without analytics, you’re literally blind and won’t know what to improve in your product.

For example, I’ve got a chart that shows me where users drop off in the onboarding so that I can see if there’s any pages that are causing large dropoffs.

Finally, the last lesson is that making money isn’t as easy as it seems online, there’s survivorship bias. The people who make money will post about it and vice versa. However, as long as you don’t give up, and you keep learning from failures, you’ll get there guaranteed. As they say, you gotta spend money to make money.

I’m hoping that in a couple of months, I’ll be sending out an article about how I went from $0 to $10k MRR, so stay tuned 👀