Fika December 25 update + PR Launch

Ok, this was the last month of 2025 and we did some interesting things. Today I’m going to share all our numbers, 100% crystal clear, all our investments, results, what we did and what we learned.

What I did at Fika in December:

This month was a short month, meaning that after December 23 I mainly invested my free time in eating and enjoying time with our family. Something really important for us at Ramensoft, the long-awaited work-life balance.

We want to make this work, not because Pau Ramon invested a significant amount of money, but because we truly believe we can make this work, create a healthy, challenging environment, and a profitable business, while enjoying our life, family, and free time.

Back to business, here’s what I did this December as CRO:

• Growth writing challenge: we did a challenge in November and it was the perfect excuse for us to launch Fika and go after our previous ICP, people who want to write but don’t have time or don’t know how to do it. We attracted many new writers in November. We failed on this one.
  
  This new challenge was about growing your community, no publishing requirements but a minimum subscriber generation. We failed. We generated some new writers but completely failed in the mission of gaining many subscribers for these writers. The message didn’t resonate in the same way and conversion rates and costs related to the challenge increased compared to the previous period.

• Alternative to landing pages: I found a decent search volume for keywords like “alternative to Substack”, “alternative to Medium”, etc., so I built some simple landing pages to start ranking for these keywords. We are getting some impressions and the first leads are coming. https://fika.bar/alternatives-to
  

  

• New paid campaigns: We were preparing the press release launch and we had a big problem, our name is a generic name, “Fika”, and we are not ranking in the first positions for it yet. So I decided to open a classic brand campaign just for Spain, the target of the PR campaign.

  Also, in order to accelerate new leads coming from “alternative to” and validate the hypothesis, I created one campaign for “Alternative to Substack”. Target language English, open to the whole world, manual CPC, capped at only 0.20€ per click. The result, we are generating leads at less than 3–4€ depending on the day.

• More social media but less than the previous month.

• Find a freelance content writer. If you want to receive dozens of CVs from qualified candidates, you can post a job offer for free on https://www.domestika.org/es/jobs. You will get many applications, so I suggest creating a dedicated email address just for this job offer.

• After searching and finding some really nice candidates, we finally hired Benjamin McBrayer, another ex employee of Factorial. I hired him as a super junior content writer when I was leading the US marketing team and trained him in everything related to SEO and content management. He was a fast learner, helped us grow significantly in terms of traffic and organic growth, and then he left 😢

  During my search, I found out that he was coming back to Barcelona and open to work, so I wrote him a message and, after a few conversations, he accepted our offer. Now we are two inside the Marketing team 😊

• Launch our first PR campaign. We finally announced to the rest of Spain, beyond our friends and family on social media, that Ramensoft and Fika are live. I hired a PR agency I had worked with in the past while at Factorial, and it went really well.

  

  We appeared in all these online media outlets. It cost us 425€, and we generated an estimated value of 6,485€ if we had had to pay to appear in each of them individually.
  
  You can read the pr note here: English & Spanish.
  
  But the best part is that we also appeared in a printed newspaper, La Vanguardia. That makes me really happy because it was the first time. When I was working at Factorial, the ones who usually appeared there were Jordi Romero, Bernat Farrero, and Pau Ramon, the founders. Some of us had been there since the beginning, more or less, and my father was cutting out all those articles.

  

  Now I’m proud that he could cut one where I also appear.

December Fika results:

We are trying to build in public, and that means showing everything we are doing and being as transparent as we can.

Paid campaigns:

This month we built on the learnings from the previous one and finally got all the events correctly set up across the platform and the rest of the tools. It had been a long time since I last used Google Tag Manager, it used to be handled by tech in my previous companies. Feels good to be back in the field.

Reddit ads results for December:

The idea with Reddit this month was to promote the Growth Challenge and test our personalized landing pages targeting different ICPs.

In total, we spent 373,76€ for around 813.456 impressions, 3.964 clicks, and a total of 34 leads. That gives us a CPL of 10,99€.

Apart from promoting the challenge, which as we said before did not go as expected, the campaign targeting founders also did not work. That month, Reddit was not our channel.

We also had an issue with the account and with the fact that Reddit does not generate invoices unless you spend 5.000€ per month, they only provide receipts, so we cannot include this as expenses like the other invoices.

In summary, I am going to put Reddit paid on hold and focus on the organic part.

Meta & TikTok ads results for December:

With that, this will be quick. We invested a total of 36€ and generated only 1 completed signup. I put that on hold until we had enough resources to create a relevant amount of content for our social media profiles, so we can benefit from the extra exposure, not only for leads. Now that we have more resources, we will be able to restart the campaigns.

Google Ads results:

A light at the end of the tunnel. That month we launched our first Google Ads campaigns. The event tracking was not set correctly, so the only way to track the results was via UTM parameters.

Because the events were not arriving correctly to the platform, I decided to launch our first campaigns with the bid strategy Maximize clicks and a max CPC of 0,30€ (old school style 😎).

One campaign was focused on our brand keywords (Fika, Fika Blog, etc.), because as said before, we have a generic name with a lot of real fika bars as competition, and because we are still not ranking top 1 for “Fika” in Google Spain, I had to run this campaign.

The other, and more interesting, campaigns were: “Alternative to Substack”. We targeted people who were not happy with their platforms, language English and worldwide, a mistake to be explained next month and a similar campaign for Spain in Spanish with nearly no results.

The result: a total investment of 124€, 15.000 impressions, 549 clicks, and a total of 35 completed signups. That gives us a CPL of 3,54€. We got something here.

In the next chapter I will go deeper into the quality of these signups, but suddenly we saw a permanent flow of completed signups arriving on the platform and new blog posts published by these users.

Rest of the channels December results:

This was, in terms of completed signups, a nice month. Later I will explain why I am emphasizing “completed signup”.

Thanks to the press release, the fact that we started to rank for some keywords, and the actions we are doing on social media (mainly LinkedIn), we generated an extra 111 leads.

Here you can see the number of visits and completed signups generated by channel:

Final summary for December 2025

In total, we spent 958,76€ and generated 182 completed signups (people who confirmed their email and finished the initial onboarding), with a blended CPL of 5,26€.

Even if it seems like a good month in the end, it was not that good.

Why? Because we are not looking for completed signups, we are looking for active writers who generate traction with their content and, in the end, bring new subscribers who could become paid subscribers in the future.

Here you can check our real numbers and internal KPIs:

We generated a total of 58 active blogs, with 53 new active blogs, meaning the conversion rate from completed signup to active blog was 31,86%.

We still do not know if that is a good or a bad number, but it is far from our business plan.

Also, these new writers and the existing ones did not bring as many visits as we expected.

The rest of our internal KPIs:

Subs per blog is in green (yay), but the rest are in red, except that people are, on average, publishing more than expected.

So we have a huge challenge in front of us, we are still figuring out the real conversion rates and internal KPIs.

My next big challenge: me doing sales

What we realized is that by doing inbound we are not going to attract those medium or big players that would help us start the snowball effect.

We need to target people who can bring their audience to the platform, their subscriber base, and who are also used to writing and like writing.

That is why we decided to change our ICP for this quarter and focus on journalists who do not have a publication on other platforms (Substack, Medium, Beehiiv, etc.), but already have an interesting audience.

So that is why I will need to learn and start doing outbound sales 😅.

Yes, first I will need to find where I can reach these people, contact them, convince them to come to Fika (with some very special conditions), and help us grow. Of course, we will help them grow too and generate an extra source of income, maybe even their main source of income, so we will grow together.

That said, if you know a journalist or an interesting person who likes to write and already has a user base that would want to read their publications, send me a message 🙂

Also, sales experts are welcome to have a virtual or onsite coffee so you can share your expertise with me.

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