Every paid ads strategy that worked for SaaS founders

Puff Count (Steven): Steven grew Puff Count on organic TikTok first, with no ad spend: 120,000 followers and over 50 million views. He then uploaded the best organic videos as TikTok and Meta ads, which were profitable from day one because the content was already validated. Paid ads took the app from $3K to $44K MRR on about $82K of total spend before he exited. [source]

Snag: Any creator video that passes 50,000 organic views becomes a Meta ad. Benji says every 100,000 views brought roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in subscription profit. [source]

Simple app (Max): Max films five or ten videos at a time, tracks retention and skip rates, and moves the best performers into Meta ads on a low budget, scaling as product-market fit is confirmed. He now spends about $250 a day. [source]

First app (Kian): Kian started 100% organic, posting three times a day. Once a format converted, he remade it 50 times with small variations, hired UGC creators to copy it, and put money behind it on Meta and TikTok ads. [source]

Simple app: One repeatable TikTok format, posted across several accounts and by low-cost UGC creators, took the app to $30K a month. Putting ad spend behind the proven formats pushed it past $100K a month. [source]

AI SEO writing SaaS (Vasco): After reaching $70K MRR organically on YouTube, Vasco runs YouTube in-feed ads on videos that made sales and then stalled in views, so YouTube shows them on the homepage and sidebar. He warns you never know for sure whether a promoted video is bringing in sales. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): Mal found a 15-year-old creator whose videos got about 10,000 organic views each and ran TikTok Spark Ads on them, at about $3 per trial. He recommends putting spend on organic videos with over 10,000 views, with Spark Ads over Meta or any other platform. [source]

Stoppr: After building on organic influencer partnerships, the founder started boosting videos that were already going viral with Meta ads and TikTok Spark Ads. Spark Ads cost him about $100 a month. [source]

Creator-led app (Flo): Flo's app grew on three videos a month from one creator partner. A few weeks before the interview he started running that creator's videos as Meta ads, saw strong early results, and says his one regret is not starting sooner. [source]

Weight-cut app: After organic videos and partnerships with small creators, he put the influencer videos into paid ads, which added revenue and helped him scale faster. [source]

Vibe-coded app (Connor): Connor builds a library of UGC videos from influencer campaigns, uses each video's organic performance to predict how it will do as an ad, and scales the winners with Facebook ads. [source]

Niche mobile app (Lino): After cutting every UGC deal except his equity partner, Lino put that creator's videos behind Meta ads at about 2 to 2.5x return on ad spend. [source]

Tor Notes (Nico): Nico got Tor Notes to $1,500 MRR organically before he bought any ads. His rules: validate the idea organically first, and don't spend money on ads if you don't have savings. [source]

28-app portfolio: He launches each app on App Store search alone. If it sinks he moves on; if it holds or grows, he goes back and scales that winner with paid ads. [source]

Creator-partner apps: They partner with creators, sometimes as equity co-founders, and start running paid ads once an app reaches about $10K MRR. Long YouTube videos from creators can be cut into shorts and ads. [source]

Four-SaaS portfolio: Tibo uses organic channels to reach $1K to $10K MRR and shifts to ads, SEO and affiliates once past $20K MRR. He says those channels can grow from a $1K to a $100K ad budget, and points to Outrank going from $20K to $200K after adding them. [source]

Gravl: Gravl got its first users free on Reddit, and Julian says to validate that people will pay, not just that the product works, before spending on ads. Ads went on right after the subscription launched, and the first subscription came within 10 minutes. [source]

iOS apps (Will): Will's TikTok ads use native formats like memes and talking to camera, leave the app out of the first three or four seconds, and weave it into a story that shows the core feature in action. [source]

Tor Notes (Nico): His best Tor Notes ad was a non-professional video of a person reading a script in his office, about the problem, with the app only at the end. It beat polished studio ads. His static image ads took off once he made separate ads and landing pages for each audience. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): Timo's ads simply show the app's interface in use. One of them generated over $15,000 in revenue and close to 5 million views. [source]

Vibe-coded app (Connor): Connor says Facebook's algorithm makes entertaining videos cheaper to show, so his ads balance entertainment with a clear push to the product. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Steven says the best ads have a subtle call to action that feels organic, because TikTok viewers want to be entertained, not sold to. On paid placements he adds the platform's call-to-action button to lift the view-to-install rate. [source]

Late (Mickey): Mickey spends about $8,000 a month on Google search ads with automated bidding at a $120 target CPA, ad groups built on the same keywords he targets organically, and three to five copy variations. He gets about $2.50 back per dollar, around $15K MRR from paid search. [source]

StealthGPT (Joseph): After UGC on TikTok and Instagram educated the market, Joseph shifted heavily to Google Ads, which converted at $10 to $20 per conversion in the early days. He calls it gasoline on a fire. [source]

Notion Forms: Julian spends about $3,000 a month on Google Ads alongside the product's viral loop, because it is the only ad platform he knows how to use. [source]

Stagetimer: Paid Google Ads, managed by Lukas's wife, cost about $1,400 a month, and the business still runs at an 80 to 90% profit margin. [source]

Tor Notes (Nico): Nico separates the two kinds of platform: search ads give people what they want at the right moment, while Facebook and Instagram are interruption platforms where the ad has to catch attention. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): CAC was $20 to $24 against a lifetime value of $55 to $70. Steven's target is lifetime value at least three times CAC, which he calls a money printing machine. [source]

Late (Mickey): Mickey tracks CAC, ROAS, revenue and traffic per channel in a dashboard. He treats a good CAC as 20 to 40% of lifetime value and aims to keep it under 30% of first-year revenue. [source]

iOS apps (Will): A subscription campaign costs him about $16 per subscription against a lifetime value of $30 to $35, which he calls very good. [source]

iPhone app: He uses RevenueCat's lifetime-value data to decide how much he can afford to spend on paid ads or influencers, and AppsFlyer to connect the app to Facebook and TikTok ads. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): In April the app made $43,700 on about $20,000 of TikTok ad spend, leaving roughly $11,500 profit after Apple's fees. Once ads pay back like that, Timo says the goal is to spend as much as possible. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Before running ads, set up a mobile measurement partner such as Adjust or AppsFlyer to send in-app events to the platforms. Don't start with a purchase campaign: optimize step by step from views to clicks, installs, trials and finally subscriptions. [source]

Journable (Steve): Steve tracks installs, paywall views and purchases and sends them to Google Ads. He starts with install campaigns on low budgets and stock images, improves the Play Store assets, then launches a target CPA campaign with a budget of about ten times the cost of a trial, for example $150 a day for a $15 trial. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): Timo optimizes for subscriptions, not installs, and uses a hard paywall with no free trial so ad spend comes back immediately. He checks ROAS weekly: if it is profitable he raises the budget, if not he makes new videos. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): Mal's first paid ads flopped because he optimized for downloads instead of trials. He uses Singular to measure, and says to reach at least a 10% download-to-trial rate before scaling paid ads. [source]

AI ebooks (Joe): Joe starts Pinterest ads as consideration campaigns to test niches, then installs the Pinterest tag and moves to conversion campaigns. Most of his money comes from Pinterest ads, and ads are his main expense on a 70 to 80% margin. [source]

Letterly: Paid advertising is Letterly's main channel, at about $200,000 a month in ad spend, alongside word of mouth from users. [source]

Coding game: Blogging and an influencer collaboration took it from $10K to $30K a month. To reach $1M a month the team moved heavily into paid ads and YouTube creator marketing, spending almost $2 million on ads in the past year. [source]

Gravl: Gravl now spends about a third of its revenue on Meta and TikTok ads, plus some Google and Apple search ads, not counting the cost of making the ads. [source]

Late (Mickey): Mickey reinvests all revenue into scaling what works across SEO and Google Ads. [source]

Snag: Benji scales a profitable ad day by day but stops when the numbers turn: one ad spent $3,000 in total before its return went negative. [source]

Snag: Benji says ad fatigue means constantly testing new creatives, and the number of creatives matters because each one is another ticket in the lottery. [source]

iOS apps (Will): Will uses AI to make 10 to 20 video variants per idea at almost no cost and scales the best. A few winners can run passively for four to five months. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): Every first campaign gets at least six videos so the algorithm has options to test. He warns that creative fatigue kills an ad when too much money goes through one video. [source]

Gravl: Julian says UGC makes most working ads, creator videos can cost as little as $50, and AI-generated videos are cheap to test. He uses the public Meta Ads Library to see which competitor ads are working and copies the approach. [source]

Copied fitness app (Israel): For his creatives, he studied the most viral content from similar apps in the US and viral fitness and nutrition content in his local market. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): Timo starts TikTok Smart+ campaigns at $50 a day with broad targeting. He warns that changing settings during TikTok's 7-day learning phase, or raising the budget more than 20% every three days, sends ads back into learning and often makes them unprofitable. [source]

iOS apps (Will): Once a creative wins, Will raises its spend 20% every three days until it caps out. [source]

Snag: Each new ad starts in a $50-a-day test. If return on ad spend is above 1 and the click-through rate is high, Benji raises spend day by day, and warns that Meta has diminishing returns: doubling a profitable budget does not double the profit. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): Mal started at $20 a day. About $4,000 of ads took him to $10K in October, another $6K to $15K in November, and roughly $9K in December to $20K. He now spends $360 a day at $1.88 per trial. [source]

Gravl: Julian and his co-founder translated the app into Spanish and ran ads in South America for under $50 a day, which worked better than competing in the expensive US market. [source]

Copied fitness app (Israel): He copied a big US app for Israel, where CPMs are much lower than in the US, so ads were profitable without much testing or capital. Paid ads took it to about $20K a month in four months. [source]

Chart Detector AI (Timo): Timo finds that countries other than the US give a better return on ad spend. [source]

Journable (Steve): iOS CPMs were almost four times Android's while iOS users converted only about 20% better, so the team runs Google Ads aimed at Android users in the US, which also spill over into iOS installs. Steve has spent just under $500,000 on Google Ads and made about the same back in attributed revenue, a break-even he accepts while capital-constrained. [source]

Niche mobile app (Lino): The same creatives that got 2 to 2.5x return on Meta got 4 to 5x on TikTok Ads, which Lino puts down to TikTok's younger audience fitting the app. [source]

Mobile app (Mal Baron): Meta at $20 a day cost $10 per trial. TikTok, with a broad US-only campaign and his top UGC videos, cost $4 per trial, so he scaled TikTok. [source]

Simple app (Max): Max finds Meta stronger than TikTok right now for app ads: views are worth more, buyers have higher intent and the audience is more willing to pay. [source]

Puff Count (Steven): Steven tested both TikTok and Meta, but says to lock down one platform first rather than splitting a small budget, so it gathers enough data. [source]

Subscription app: Apple Search Ads on relevant keywords bring in customers at about $130 each against a lifetime value of $750 to $1,000, for about $500 a month in spend. Email nurturing turns the downloads into paying users. [source]

App Store keyword app: He uses Apple Search Ads to test which keywords actually convert, then targets them in App Store optimization, alongside checking App Store autocomplete. [source]

Indie iOS app: He spends about $100 a month on Apple Search Ads hoping for a ranking boost, because he believes Apple favours developers who also advertise on its platform. [source]

Five newsletters (Alex): After growing with Twitter threads, Alex layered in paid acquisition on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Reddit, and now scales with paid cross-promotions in other newsletters. [source]

Product brand: Beyond Facebook, Instagram, Google and Amazon ads, he sponsors podcasts and YouTube channels chosen by his own taste, and says those sponsorships outperform traditional ads. [source]