Zeronel (Deal Neil / Zenevy) growth strategy

Built V1 in a single weekend, added Stripe, and immediately launched Google Ads campaigns targeting high-intent keywords: Meta API, TikTok API, Twitter API, YouTube API. All traffic sent directly to the main landing page. Campaigns were set up and left running with minimal ongoing management.

Continued scaling ad spend while iterating on the product based on support tickets and customer feedback. Kept team costs low (solo founder) to maintain ad budget. Did not obsess over CAC/LTV early — focused on MRR and cash in bank as primary metrics.

Made first hire — a developer — to avoid bottlenecking growth on product quality. Followed up with a second developer focused entirely on support/bug fixes to handle the volume of ~150 daily support conversations and maintain low churn.

Began parallel SEO effort targeting the same high-intent keywords performing in Google Ads, plus long-tail variants. Initially used AI to generate large volumes of blog content. Strategy later shifted to fewer, higher-quality pieces after mass AI content failed to rank for competitive branded terms.

Launched on Product Hunt as an additional acquisition experiment alongside existing channels.

Doubled ad spend month-over-month in parallel with MRR doubling. Targeted doubling of funnel signups each month mathematically. Moved from self-managed campaigns to an agency, added dedicated landing pages per campaign segment, and improved creative targeting.

Focused on closing larger software companies with many end-user accounts. These clients create deep integration lock-in: migrating away requires disconnecting all user accounts, making churn structurally difficult. Prioritized this segment over small individual developers.

Beginning to explore YouTube and partnerships with creators in the dev tools space as a third acquisition channel, while maintaining Google Ads and SEO as primary growth engines.