I spent $50/Day on Reddit Ads for a finance app: 10-Day results and lessons

I'm building My Financé, which is a tool that allows you to understand your finances, and plan for the future.

I launched on PH in September, got some users and have been iterating.

I have so far observed that:

1. I am very good at churning users

2. Relatedly, I am very bad at converting users to paying customers

3. I have done a bad job at finding a narrow scope to be excellent at

From this, I considered if there is a way I could re-position the tool.

My thinking was:

personal finance -> no dopamine, dread, either already in a great place, or don't want to know.

quitting your job -> many people want to do this, very appealing, dreamy, something to work towards.

So I built some forecasting tools. One thing you can do with them is understand if you could reasonably quit your job, how long you could do it for, etc.

(source: https://demo.myfinancereport.com/plan-generic )

I was wondering if this messaging would resonate with users, so I figured I would try to run paid ads.

I also really didn't understand how ads worked and what to expect, so it seemed like a fun experiment.

I started running ads on Reddit and immediately got my ad rejected for it's crude nature:

I sat through various calls with their sales team trying to understand what I needed to do to get my ad to be approved.

Here is where we ended up:

and this is running on Reddit at around $50 per day.

so far after about 10 days:

very meh results. @GoatCounter reports about 313 page views from Reddit, with 2 people creating accounts and nobody fully converting.

I assume this is probably a combination of factors (in order of descending importance)

1. i don't think i'm really solving a problem people care about

2. i think my landing pages are probably weak in terms of social proof / legitimacy

3. i'm probably logistically doing things wrong with the ad campaign itself.

I'm not sure what I'll do next. I have more or less all the features in the tool that I personally want, so I may just occasionally write some posts about it (like this one) and let it simmer out there in the ether.