We spent +$250 testing Reddit ads for Causo Fundraising. They paid for themselves.
A couple of weeks ago we started testing Reddit ads for Causo Fundraising, mainly because Reddit has already been one of our strongest organic acquisition channels.
After ~2 weeks:
£226 spent
31,483 impressions
165 clicks
0.52% CTR
£1.37 CPC
~10 conversions
Those conversions have roughly covered the ad spend, so technically the campaign has paid for itself.
Still, the results are quite a bit weaker than we expected.
The biggest surprise has been the difference between creatives.
One ad got 0.052% CTR.
Another got 1.51% CTR.
That is roughly a 29x difference within the same campaign.
And the winner is probably the simplest ad we made:
“17,000+ investors. AI matches you with the ones that fit your raise. Free to browse.”
No clever hook. No complicated messaging. Just the size of the database, what the product does, and the fact that you can try it for free.
The targeting data is even stranger.
Reddit says only 0.23% of the audience is associated with “Startups & Small Business”, despite Causo being a fundraising product for founders.
At the same time, Reddit says 20% of the audience belongs to its “Ambitious Startup Founders” persona, with communities like r/SaaS, r/startups, r/vibecoding and r/SideProject showing up.
So we are still figuring out how seriously to take Reddit’s audience reporting.
Overall, I would call the experiment promising, but definitely not a win yet.
We have found a creative that works, acquired real users, and recovered the spend. Now the question is whether we can improve the economics enough to make Reddit a channel worth scaling.
Next step is killing the weak creatives and making a lot more variations around the one that is working.
I’ll attach the screenshots with the actual numbers.
For context, Causo Fundraising matches founders with relevant individual VC investors from a database of 17,000+ investors, and helps them run the outreach.
Curious if anyone here has scaled Reddit ads successfully for an early-stage product. Did performance improve materially once Reddit had more conversion data?
Replies
One ecperiment I'd run next is seperating founders by fundraising stage. Someone preparing a first a first round probably needs very different messaging from a founder already talking to VCs. Did you collect enough data to segment conversions this way?
Causo
@aaronsaas It's good thinking, but we're talking about reddit ads here - it would be wonderful to be able to target people so precisely, but generally, the segmentation here is happening on inferred characteristics from people's demographics, and interests on reddit. I can't really launch an ad that specifically targets a "founder that is in VC chats", at least not using official reddit channels :)
I’d definitely keep testing variations around the winner. “17,000+ investors” is a strong concrete number, and “free to browse” removes a pretty obvious barrier. Maybe test different version that lead with the problem rather than the database size.
Causo
@albert_nelson1 Indeed, indeed! Hopefully we will be able to adjust the form factor too!
Causo
@albert_nelson1 yep we will keep iterating on the winning combos
Causo
Causo
@dawid_baranowski yessss, now my AI psychosis has the new best friend - Ad psychosis
0.052% vs 1.51% CTR is honestly ridiculous 😂 Same platform, same product, completely different outcome. That alone makes the experiment worth running.
Causo
@liam_bennett1 100%! There is also the size of the ad factor - which in my view ruins the purety of experiment, but we will try to speak to our reddit rep about it
Causo
@mazin_assaf you did indeed haha, may be your are our best add!
I ll see if i can measure Maz-CTR :P
Causo
@mazin_assaf mazin ctr is unbeatable