Stopping the ad experiment and building custom solution

Today we decided to stop the initial ad experiment we were running with Kit of Happiness. It gave us the initial insights we needed. It gets the interest, and can have easy outreach, but before building the trust and conversion it's losing money at this stage. For 40 bucks and a few days with some tweaks, it gave us the learnings we needed.

Interest is there, we just need to fulfill this properly to have conversion. This is why we made a few additional decisions:

• Shopify charges 33 euro/month for us and comes with friction with a not-customizable theme. As we're developers with already some comfort tools, it blocks us from doing the things we do and makes us depend on another person, which did not work for us.

• As there is only one product for us at the moment, while building the base and organic growth, we decided to not give this money to Shopify and build a custom solution we got used to with Next.js.

• Google AI Studio already did a pretty good start. Next, I will just tweak it and the listing copy and publish it soon, maybe with Gumroad redirect for sales for quick iteration and later build a full sales flow with Stripe.

This decision already feels good as I was sad to spend this money for nothing at our stage. So basically, without any pressure, we can explore this idea more freely and in a way that we want, and more interactive as we can build and do any integration we need ourselves.