A Week of Meta Ads, Five Trials, and No Retained Customers

When I wanted to get Kashi in front of more businesses, I tried paid acquisition.

For about a week I spent roughly MXN 200 a day on Meta ads. They brought around 100 visits per day, about 20 registrations, and five trial users.

Every trial user canceled.

It's a small experiment, not a universal benchmark. But it was useful because it showed me where my thinking was wrong.

The clicks weren't the main problem

I initially wanted more traffic. The ads gave me some. People clicked, and some registered. But they weren't staying.

I could have spent more to get more visitors. Instead I needed to understand what happened between registration and the first useful result.

A small-business owner opening Kashi might need to add products, configure inventory, understand the interface, and change how their staff work. From my side, that was onboarding. From their side, it was unpaid work before they received any value.

The ad promised a simpler way to run a business. The product still asked users to do a lot before they could see that simplicity.

Free didn't solve it either

After the trials canceled, I added a free plan to test whether pricing was the obstacle. Adoption remained low: one or two active users.

That didn't prove pricing never matters. It suggested that price wasn't the only barrier for these users. Switching costs, setup, and an unclear first outcome still existed.

What I would measure first

Before running another campaign, I'd choose a meaningful activation event and instrument the funnel around it.

For a POS product, that could be a first completed sale. For a quoting workflow, a first quote actually sent. I would track how many new users reach that point and speak directly with people who stop short.

I'd ask what they were trying to do, what they expected, where they got stuck, and what they currently use instead. Those answers would be more useful than another dashboard showing cheaper clicks.

I wouldn't call the ads a success. They didn't generate retained customers. But they helped me see that getting someone to visit a product and giving them a reason to use it again are different jobs.