Paid Ads Playbook

Andrew Wilkinson launched Capital Daily, a local news newsletter for Victoria, Canada, after noticing his local newspaper had no real journalism. He spent $200k on ads to quickly acquire 25,000 subscribers, then hired journalists to build out the team. After burning money on inefficient operations, he partnered with Farhan (who had scaled Vancouver's biggest local news site) as CEO. The business is now expanding across Canada under the parent company Overstory Media Group.

Capital Daily is a local news newsletter for Victoria, Canada that grew from a simple idea into a 40,000-subscriber operation (25% of the city's population) in about 1.5 years. Andrew Wilkinson started it with a stay-at-home mom friend, scaled it using PPC advertising at $2 per acquisition, and later hired actual journalists to do original reporting. The business has become larger than the traditional local paper and is now exploring expansion across Canada and potentially the US.

Kimp is a subscription-based design company offering graphic design and video design services for a flat monthly fee. Founded by serial entrepreneur Senthu Velnayagam and his brother Ven, it was built by bootstrapping revenue from their previous design businesses (BannersMall and Doto) after those faced declining market conditions. Within a month of their soft launch in February 2019, they scaled to global traction through social media and Google Ads, eventually building a remote team across multiple continents.

Kopely was a mobile stress relief app founded by Andrew Laux, a health and fitness entrepreneur, that aimed to help users manage stress through actionable coping strategies and psychology-based tools. From December 2019 to March 2020, Andrew generated significant pre-launch traction through SEO and Facebook ads, building an interested user base. The startup was killed when COVID-19 hit and the equity-backed development team deprioritized the project to focus on their own survival, resulting in zero revenue and indefinite pause.

Onepagetrip was a travel itinerary sharing marketplace that failed after over a year of development. The startup struggled to monetize, trying hotel affiliate bookings and pay-to-access itineraries without success. The founders' biggest mistakes were building without validating the idea first, not having a monetization plan from the beginning, and competing against billion-dollar travel companies while maintaining day jobs.

QuickHaggle was a skill-exchange marketplace built on a barter system model where users could trade services without payment. Despite positive reception and $500+ in Facebook Ads, the platform failed after a year with zero completed trades due to trust issues between parties and high customer acquisition costs.

Toby Allen built two side projects—I Voted Remain (a Brexit-themed dropshipping t-shirt business) and RealityHunt (a Product Hunt clone for AR/VR)—to learn and test ideas. I Voted Remain generated only £70 profit from 10 t-shirt sales before shutting down due to high advertising costs and political sensitivities. RealityHunt cost €1,000-€2,000 but failed to gain traction due to poor execution and insufficient market maturity, though Toby believes the problem still exists today.

Sport Draftr was a Daily Fantasy Sports platform in the UK offering leagues in the English Premier League and UEFA Champions League. The product achieved strong product-market fit with engaged users and grew to 1,000 users with 50% playing weekly, but failed due to unfavorable gambling legislation changes that scared off investors and made scaling impossible without significant capital.

The Punjab Kitchen was a homemade North Indian food delivery startup founded by Amit Gogia and his wife in Gurgaon, India. After 18 months of operations, the business failed due to pricing pressure from competitors, achieving only $800 in revenue while burning $1,200 monthly in expenses. The founders couldn't achieve economies of scale or break-even before shutting down.