What we tried, what it cost, what the numbers said
We build IDEA Base for developers, and we run the company on it. These are write-ups of things we actually did — including the ones that did not work, with the real figures attached.
How these posts are written and maintained
Drafted with AI assistance. Every factual claim is registered with a primary source, verified before publishing, and re-checked on a schedule. Each post carries a dated status block generated from that record — not typed by hand — so you can see when its claims were last confirmed.
- Holds
- Every claim re-verified and still accurate.
- Decayed
- Still broadly true, but at least one claim has moved enough to matter.
- Superseded
- A central claim is no longer true. The post stays up, and says what changed.
- Retracted
- A claim was wrong. The post keeps its URL, with the correction on top and the original preserved below it.
We do not delete posts to tidy up a mistake. Spotted an error? Tell us at [email protected] and the correction gets logged on the post.
-
What $97.68 of search ads bought us: 66 clicks and no customers
A full accounting of two paid search campaigns for a developer tool — spend, clicks, conversions — and the unit arithmetic that showed the channel could never work at our budget. Including the kill-line we set that was mathematically unable to fire.