The article has some helpful points. But as a programmer-SAAS-founder-who-took-over-ads operation, I have some tips on some insights we gleaned doing paid ads (and getting it to be profitable for us):
1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads?
- Do not do paid ads too early.
- Do it once you know that your product is compelling to your target audience.
- Ads are likely an expensive way of putting your product in front of an audience.
- No matter how good the ad operation, unless your product can convince a user to stay and explore it further, you've just gifted money to Google/X/Meta whoever.
- If you haven't already, sometimes when you think you want ads, what you more likely and more urgently need is better SEO optimization
2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding flows are way more important still.
- Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn't showing conversions, rather than anything inherent to the ad, we found that it was the flows the user encountered _AFTER_ landing on the platform that made the performance suffer.
- In some cases, it's quite trivial: eg. one of our ads were performing poorly because the conversion criterion was a user login. And the login button ended up _slightly_ below the first 'fold' or view that a user saw. That tiny scroll we took for granted killed performance.
3. As a founder, learn the basics
- This is not rocket science, no matter how complex an agency/ad expert may make it look.
- There are some basic jargon that will be thrown around ('Target CPA', 'CPC', 'CTR', 'Impression share'); don't be intimidated
- Take the time to dig into the details
- They are not complicated and are worth your time especially as an early stage startup
- Don't assume that your 'Ad expert' or 'Ad agency' has 'got this'.
- At least early on, monitor the vital stats closely on weekly reviews
- Ad agencies especially struggle with understanding nuances of your business. So make sure to help them in early days.
4. Targeting Awareness/Consideration/Conversion
- Here I have to politely disagree with the article
- Focus on conversion keywords exclusively to begin with!
- These will give you low volume traffic, but the quality will likely be much higher
- Conversion keywords are also a great way to lock down the basics of your ad operation before blowing money on broad match 'awareness' keywords
- Most importantly, unless your competition is play dirty and advertising on your branded keywords, don't do it.
- Do NOT advertise on your own branded keywords, at least to begin with.
- Most of the audience that used your brand keywords to get to your site are essentially just repeat users using your ad as the quickest navigation link. Yikes!
5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits
- You'll find that while your running ads, you are in a somewhat adversarial dance with the ads platform
- Some caveats (also mentioned in the article)
- Ad reps (mostly) give poor advice, sometimes on borderline bad faith. We quickly learnt to disregard most of what they say. (But be polite, they're trying to make a living and they don't work for you.)
- (Also mentioned in the article) Do not accept any 'auto optimization' options from the ads platform. They mostly don't work.
- Set tight limits on spends for EVERYTHING in the beginning. I cannot emphasize this enough. Start small and slowly and incrementally crank up numbers, whether it be spend limits per ad group, target CPA values, CPC values - whatever. Patience is a big virtue here
- If you're running display ads, there are many more leaks to be plugged: disallow apps if you can (article mentions why), and disallow scammy sites that place ads strategically to get stray clicks.
- For display ads, controlling 'placement' also helps a lot
6. Read up `r/PPC` on Reddit
- Especially the old, well rated posts here.
- They're a gold mine of war stories from other people who got burnt doing PPC, whose mistakes you can avoid.
This is super valuable. I see the same things helping game devs with marketing: they're often too keen to put energy and money into marketing when they haven't identified a niche or reached acceptable levels of polish.
If the consumer can't quickly tell what your product does and why it's great, stop wasting your time and fix those problems!
> Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn't showing conversions, rather than anything inherent to the ad, we found that it was the flows the user encountered _AFTER_ landing on the platform that made the performance suffer.
This 100%. When picking a VPS I signed for 9 options. In the end I went with Digital Ocean, largely because of their simple onboarding. Yes this is a one time process, but to me it's a critical one. Get it right.
> - Do it once you know that your product is compelling to your target audience.
I thought a good way to test if your product is compelling is to build a landing page, put out a little bit of cash for ads, and see if you get sign ups?
> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them.
You have to be careful with how you word questions.
If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your face and hard to avoid. But it almost never is what convinces me to try the thing. In some cases ads actually dissuade me from trying the thing.
For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word "proprietary". If that's your selling point, then you automatically fall way down in my list. I like my software boring and useful for my ends, not to be locked into somebody else's system.
Pretty much always what does it for me in the end is positive discussion in technical spaces.
I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can be entirely unaware of this and it still works.
Maybe the ad is not what convinced you, not at all, but it did prompt you to wonder if this LaunchDarkly thing is any good. Youtube kept spamming it in your face and you kept ignoring it, but of course the name stuck and now there are talking about it on HN so you decide to read "that" thread and not the other one about unleash or something you never heard of.
Yes, but it can work in the opposite direction as well.
Eg, all the Youtube ads of NordVPN only did was to convince me that if I'm ever in the market, I'll use someone else. Part because all that advertising has to cost a lot of money, which of course the subscription has to pay for. Part because some of their advertising is less than completely honest about what they provide.
Sure but for every person like you there's several people who are not knowledgable about VPNs and use NordVPN because it's the one thing they heard about the most.
And an absolute truckload of people deep in the para-social relationship who couldn't imagine their 'friend' steering them wrong on a product, intentionally or otherwise
Tom Scott is a good example of the influence of VPN money. He made an entire video about how and why he would not make ads for VPNs because VPN ads are deceptive, this video got millions of views ...and then later he started making ads for VPNs (NordVPN iirc). I always wonder how much they bought him for.
Pretty sure he made a video about him doing those ads when he did them to answer that question, but you kind of answer it in your description anyway. His objection to VPN ads wasn't the fact it was a VPN, but the deceptive content in the ads. Promises they don't deliver, benefits you get from basic SSL anyway etc.
When a VPN was happy to work with him on an ad that wasn't deceptive or misleading he was happy to run it. I think the original video only existed in the first place because at that time he was willing to advertise a VPN for the money offered, but they couldn't agree on ad content he felt was fair. So his price never changed, the VPN company just gave into his 'advertise honestly' demand.
I believe the economics of VPN companies is that they have a quite inexpensive, commodity product which has a lot of churn. The ads get people to sign up for a month or two at any price, which pays for the cost of the ads.
Tom Scott’s video a few years ago helped, but some creators still seem to be saying or implying that using a VPN makes your browsing “safer,” which unless you have a very specific need for a certain kind of safety, is untrue. I wish VPN companies would audit the claims their partners are making about them, but there really isn’t an incentive to do so —- if their brand gets damaged irreparably they can release a new VPN under a different brand.
Nordvpn seemed like a decent choice for streaming bbc but I won’t use them because of a company advertises that hard it must be bad. I would never trust them for privacy they are too big
thr notdvpn ads may have enlarged the consumer market for vpns as well, which may benefit other vpns like mullvad (people that never heard about vpns are convinced by the ad that vpns are needed, searches more on google or reddit and end up selecting what is considered the "most private" one, that is, not nordvpn)
Indeed, you remember the brand, but forget how you got to know it. So even though you learned about something through ads, and you hate ads, eventually you'll forget that it was ads that put it in your brain, but you'll still remember the brand.
That's why I call ads psychological violence. They force themselves in your brain and there's nothing you can do against it
We need a worst offenders list so that every day we can look at the list and make a point to share something true and embarrassing about a company on it
That way it won't be:
> nothing you can do
Then we'll have pretty retribution, which is the first step towards tit-for-tat style cooperation.
Aren't you mostly talking about what the article calls awareness vs conversion? You're saying that ads made you aware and technical discussion is what would make you convert.
The other thing is controversial. "There's no such thing as bad PR" is a saying for a reason. I am also convinced that there are some things that make me never, ever consider a product. And yet: there was this one brand I hated, but it's been a while, and this one looks familiar... was it the good one or the bad one? Never mind, I don't have time to try to dredge that up, this looks familiar at least so I'll just grab it and remember for next time. (Sure I will...)
And that's just one way that bad PR can still be effective. Another is that it gets people talking about you, and some people will argue the other side because the main person's arguments are just bad.
Bad PR is good for awareness. Conversion is often based on different criteria than you expect. You may hate X, but you have a client who has heard of X and hasn't heard of Y, your preferred option.
I think your point is that bad PR affects your decision not to use Intuit's products, but I'd argue they're a perfect example of bad PR not being a problem. They have sensationally bad PR, yet they're worth >$100B, one of the 100 most valuable companies in the world, and they dominate their category.
So many people don’t understand this. “There’s no such thing as bad PR” doesn’t mean you won’t lose customers - it just means that for every 1 lost, 10 more are gained due to simple exposure/awareness.
I think that TurboTax is a winner in the “TurboTax lobbies to make the tax code so complex that you have to use TurboTax” narrative because it makes people more afraid of doing their taxes through the tools the IRS provides than they should be.
>If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your face and hard to avoid. But it almost never is what convinces me to try the thing. In some cases ads actually dissuade me from trying the thing.
In my primary business (used video games) I've found that the #1 way to get sales is:
- Give the consumer every feature they need (ideally communicate this in a picture)
- Be the first search result
It's not about detailed descriptions, super-competitive prices or superior product quality.
People will literally just throw money at the first product they see that ticks all the boxes.
In the SaaS world, where everything has a free trial, I can imagine this "rule" is even more true.
> If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad
Yes, that’s the point of a “branding” ad campaign - to drive upper funnel interest in a company/product.
They can also use retargeting to show the same people “performance” ad campaigns, which are meant to drive a lower funnel conversion like a signup, purchase, or even a demo.
Depending on the product, you can even use an organic discussion about your product as marketing material to get people to see the interest others have in it. Or market a conference or dev day where they show off its capabilities.
There’s a lot of layers to marketing, it’s not as simple as HN makes it out to be.
Yeah, I agree about positive discussion in technical space. Even if it’s just the founder coming on a Reddit thread and shilling their own stuff while still providing value by comparing it to other products.
Example: I was interested in looking more into Dremio the other day but couldn’t really find any good positive technical discussion about it on HN or Reddit so I just… stopped looking into Dremio
Totally agree. Value is the most important thing if you are going to talk about yourself. It's not even like it's that hard to just try to be excellent to people and to users and share something worthwhile. But time and again, this is where people fall down.
Weirdly, google ads and GA4 are great examples of not providing value and not treating people or users well. And yet they cling on.
Even negative discussion can be a positive signal sometimes, e.g. if it's someone complaining about the rough edges that they still use a product in spite of - because it still ultimately solves their problems.
Paths to conversion are typically rather complex and have multiple touch points.
Awareness is a big deal and a necessary step before it's possible to even be in a consideration set.
For example, TV ads typically rank very low in any self-reported market research on influencing purchase intent.
And yet if you run a test in a DMA pulling TV ads you'll see sales decrease dramatically.
While the industry likes to pretend it has come a long way, in many cases marketing and advertising is still just as much "I know half of my ads work and half don't, I just don't know which half is which."
High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/
Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.
Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.
Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.
This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement).
I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found questions from people on forums asking how to accomplish [what our product does] and we'd answer the question with a post recommending our service.
And then we wrote a bunch of tutorials / guides for how to integrate [popular service] <> [our product] to achieve [what our product does] so that if anyone googles "[popular service] [what our product does]" our help docs are usually top of the page.
Posting on forums was fine to get the first few users, but it was long-tail SEO (which is pretty easy to rank since it's long-tail) that got us the next 200. If the search terms are specific enough and the category is relatively undiscovered/unexploited, it's easy to rank. Unfortunately it's really hard to find unexploited niches.
> In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.
Yup. I avoid every single ad I can on principle. Only exception I used to make was for youtube sponsors, mostly out of laziness, until I finally installed sponsorblock.
I've gotten so good at it that at this time I haven't the faintest idea of what movies are there to see at the cinema. Not a single one.
I'm probably a very extreme case in actually having succeeded in disconnecting myself from popular culture to a very large extent.
There is a real problem with discovery without any ads. I'm still aware of movies, but I never have much idea what TV shows exist anymore, or even when shows I like might are back on the air/streaming.
I might hear about about something interesting on social media or a podcast, but won't remember it until I see a picture on the streaming platform months later, when it's already been canceled for lack of viewers.
Youtube is actually the only place I actively block all ads, because they seem unable to stop spamming me with android games that are nothing like the ads at all and are unbelievably annoying. Most websites and stuff I'll let them show ads by default, then block the site if they have more ads than content etc. Although I also just try to avoid those sites in the first place.
In general, I don't want to "discover" products, not at all times of the day, on every web site I visit, every radio and TV station I tune into, every billboard I pass.
Marketers have this notion that people are all merely 24/7 product-consumers, constantly on the lookout to discover new products to consume, and as long as their "message" reaches my brain, it's an unambiguously good thing for both parties.
When I'm browsing the web, or driving to work, or watching a show, or trying to complete some basic task around my life, I'm definitely not trying to discover your product. I wish marketers would stop assuming I am. If I want to look for an unknown product, I'll deliberately go out and do so. In that case, and only in that case, ads are welcome.
Not knowing about whats new on TV is a feature! Given the wealth of tv and movie content available, should you be treating a canceled show that wasn't intriguing enough to look into at the time as a loss?
True, but it still has some upsides. These days I mostly hang out in dark corners of the net. If it's profitable at all to astroturf there, then it's barely so. And if you manage, it's mostly because you actually managed to make a positive contribution to the space at the same time.
perhaps it depends on the audience as well correct? for example, a dev tool has sa technical audience who would primarily not be influenced by say PPC in contrast to form posts
> we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them.
Caveat: I always type in "search engine" or "google" despite the fact that I only use Brave/Bing/DDG. I often find things on random interesting post where the author remarks some benefits that I think applies to me and go checkout those products.
When I see such boxes "where did you hear about our product" I just type in "google" or "search engine" because I don't exactly have the time to go back through 100 tabs I have open and find the exact one article where I found the product and copy-pasta the url.
Nearly all of my colleagues also do this, because it is easier to type "google", so advice is to take these boxes with a grain of salt. A better metrics could be the referrer field on your site logs.
You don't have to give the url, you can just say 'found it online' 'saw it an article'. anything like that will be much more helpful than giving them false information.
Reddit is where I often see this stuff and for those dropdowns i typically select something like 'word of mouth' which is true enough for their purposes.
I think the point is that most people have extremely-low-to-zero motivation to spend time actually thinking about that question, so they pick whatever makes the request go away. I know I'm like that, exemplified by the fact that if the question is mandatory, and I pick something which triggers an extra text field for more information, I am much more like to try and change the intial option to something that doesn't require the extra input rather than having to think about what to write.
I wonder if this is a problem with the branching structure of these sorts of discussion boards? Every comment is in some sense the start of a new conversation… it sometimes feels like there’s a tendency to want to grow a thread to meet that “whole conversation” measure. Maybe the issue is that little details don’t make it, so context gets pulled from the main thread?
It would be interesting is the site had the ability to make linear threads coming out of a comment, or start whole new branches. Then each branch could have an assorted “random asides” spot or something.
I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this list, at least for consideration. I have multiple specialized adblockers installed (as I'm sure many here do) and so the only ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these channels and so I'd almost welcome something else.
I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker. With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the lion's share is probably going to $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't exactly rich.
It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
I would be happy to pay content creators the money they deserve for high quality content. But no matter how good the video is, it's not worth sitting through pitches trying to convince or manipulate you into spending money. At that point I would rather receive lower quality content with no ads.
It's not that people don't want to financially support creators. It's that the targeted advertising business has become so manipulative and hostile that some people do not want to see ads for any product in any context.
Nah can't feel bad using Sponsorblock - it tells you when it skips a chunk, and makes it very easy (just press Enter!) to skip back, check what they're going to talk about - and if it's of no interest just tap Enter again to resume. That way I can see if my favourite Youtube channels are promoting something I might actually be interested in, but Raid Shadow Legends, Raycon and Ridge Wallet can be skipped every time.
This is like fast forwarding through an ad, but done automatically. I don't feel bad at all, some videos have 50%+ or more removed, and with some settings, you can remove also all the self-promotion, "like and subcribe" and other useless crap from the videos.
> whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators
They get paid ad revenue based on ads served, they already got paid for the sponsorship.
Personally I feel that this is the wrong way round (however I'm totally morally ok with blocking ads of all kinds, I'd be a hypocrite otherwise, ads suck)
They get paid for the sponsorship based in part on how many people watch the sponsorship sections of past videos. That can be and is measured, and has a material effect on the amount companies will pay.
I know that the content creators have access to this information, and anecdotally I've heard that it's part of the negotiation process, but to be fair I don't know that for sure.
I've not come across this as a negotiation thing directly or anecdotally, gave you the benefit of the doubt as maybe it was a super new thing that's not hit my radar yet.
We'd be giving ChatGPT the business for hallucinating, my theory is it learned to do that from internet forums :P
There's zero pay if 100% of their viewers blocked ads. There would also be zero pay if 100% of their viewers used SponsorBlock.
I'm not saying that on the balance it's wrong to use SponsorBlock (I'm a heavy ad blocker myself, and most of the arguments against SponsorBlock also apply to ad blocking in general), just that you can't justify it by pretending that you using SponsorBlock doesn't cost them anything.
It's something I'd skip manually via the arrow keys or seek bar anyway, so why not automate the process?
And anyway you can white-list creators you like. SponsorBlock is actually more useful for me to skip filler intro and ending content than to actually skip sponsors, which you can configure it not to skip if you so choose.
Sponsorships rarely go 100% into the pockets of creators. The share varies but it can be anywhere from 25% to 75% because these sponsorships typically come through agencies and management takes a cut too.
It really depends on the video, and the brand sponsoring for me.
I had enough of Raycon, Raid Legend and other bullcrap VPNs. Especially when those sponsors got greedy by asking a 2 minute and on a 8 minutes video. That's a quarter of it.
Broad appeal to a casual technical audience is why you see the same type of sponsorships. VPNs are very high margin and easy to convert. You’ll see the same in across other types of content, e.g: recipe boxes (Hello Fresh) are very common for lifestyle channels, grooming (Manscaped) is very common for male audience channels and language learning apps are very common in educational circles.
A platform like PostHog would struggle to find the right audience on YouTube because it’s such a niche product.
I'm the same and I think it's more like a vpn product, a tutorial site and a certain website builder, where we all know which specific companies I mean.
Disclaimer: I run a small European marketing agency (though our minimum monthly budget for clients is a few times bigger than discussed & recommended in the article).
I think this is a really good article, and I definitely agree both with the suggestion to use an agency (though I suppose I could be biased here!) - there's a lot of low-hanging fruit and it's definitely possible to do plenty yourself, but unless you really can't afford an agency there's surely more important things to work on yourselves. While hiring dedicated marketing people makes sense when you're a certain size or bigger I've still seen the best arrangement to be as few people internally as possible and being people who are not only good at marketing but more importantly good at managing, and have the bulk of the work handled by an agency. Rather than having to deal in giving whole people specific jobs, an agency can provide small amounts of time as needed from a wide range of experts on different aspects.
I also agree that it's a good idea to be familiar with with it all too, though, because that way you can actually judge which agencies are worth working with and you can actually work with them, rather than leave them alone and hope they're going to do a good job.
This article itself is a really great example of what they explained at the beginning - about writing. It's not a paid ad, but it got me interested in potentially using their analytics product from having previously not heard of them.
> This article itself is a really great example of what they explained at the beginning - about writing. It's not a paid ad, but it got me interested in potentially using their analytics product from having previously not heard of them.
FWIW This article reminds me of the regular content on the HN front page 10+ years ago, the stuff that a lot of well known saas wrote to gain traction
Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)
> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks
I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks
I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!
But I disagree on Google Search:
> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.
Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.
I looked through someone's Google Ads account once to find that he has spent several thousand dollars on clicks from mobile games for under 5s. This was B2B software. Never accept Google Ad defaults!
And I want to add: Never trust Google's salespeople on expansions of your campaigns. They will helpfully offer to setup supposedly well targeted reach campaigns for you ;-)
I've spent about $100m on B2B ads in the last 12 years, including to developers. Overall the article is not bad but it's missing some things:
1) "LinkedIn
Good for awareness, bad for conversion." LI can smash it on conversion. Its expensive so you need a high customer lifetime value. Make a compelling offer and try conversation ads.
2) Facebook/IG also does work for targeting developers, better than anything else but LI and Search. It's funny because there's such loud anti-facebook developers out there, but plenty use it anyway.
Have a great offer (get a demo is not enough), try conversation and newsfeed ads, work with a contractor who knows it. Expect to spend 10 to 20k testing though. Not for low budgets.
Quora being a good option is incredibly surprising to me. I never click on Quora links as 90% of the time the "answers" are just ads or people who want to pretend they are a bigger deal than they are and know more than they do.
I'm a little surprised podcast ads weren't tried, mostly because I'd love to know how well those do/don't work out for a tool like this.
It’s great for advertisers for the same reason people still use Nigerian prince scams: the victim has already demonstrated a clear lack of judgment and high susceptibility to bullshit.
Most people I know who actively use Quora are in the 65+ demographic. I've asked what's keeping them, and it turns out they have much more tolerance for things like sponsored posts and mandatory signups than most users would
a) that isn't what's keeping them. people don't stay somewhere because things that bother you, don't bother them. you didn't name anything they like about it.
b) the mandatory signup meme is and has always been ridiculous. it takes 8 seconds to create an account. for anyone who gets value out of something, that's not a big ask. if you're not willing to spend 8 seconds then it wasn't for you anyway.
That is a very disingenuous way to describe signups. You also have to deal with asinine password requirements, and you are guaranteed to be signed up for multiple spam lists you never asked for. Once you get fed up and unsubscribe from them through some obtuse process, you will still inevitably get signed up for some new “digest” or “update” list a few months later…ad nauseam. Not to mention your information is guaranteed to be sold or leaked.
> That is a very disingenuous way to describe signups.
I wasn't describing signups, I was specifically describing the Quora signup. People have been bitching about that for almost 15 years and nobody who actually uses and likes Quora cares. It's like the notch on the iPhone. Only something people who would never own an iPhone bitch about.
I am not saying you should signup. I am saying it's ridiculous to complain about it when it's clearly not a service you even like in the first place. Why do you care what some website you don't even like requires?
I never consciously click on Quora links. Yet, I very often end-up there because I clicked something without checking what it is, and their SEO is extremely effective.
It never helps either, so I go back. And I don't think any ad pass through my ad-blocker. But I'm not very surprised by the ads there being useful.
It was such a special place in the early years. Sad to see what they let happen to it. The saddest part is that it's surely deliberate. They have some really, really smart people working there. And they decided this is what they want.
> Quora being a good option is incredibly surprising to me.
Me too - I'd never heard of it, so I felt compelled to go and look. Bounced off the signup page and thought "That's probably why more people don't use it".
It might be worth signing up, but as I have no clue what it is or if it's any good, why would I invest that time?
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but virtually all social media sites add “nofollow” to links posted on their platform.
This means the link is worthless for your domain authority and tells Google to essentially ignore these links because UGC is notorious for spam. So I doubt it’s having much affect on your organic SEO at all and could in fact be a total waste of your time.
Google has known about comment spam for basically 2 decades.
Also marketing to developers, I've had the most success and enjoyed Reddit the most so far. It feels the most honest. Want to tell a bunch of rails developers about your dynamic logging? You can try to write a useful post that also mentions your product onto r/rubyonrails/ but you're run the risk of being downvoted into oblivion with "venordz spam suxxxx".
But it's fair game to promote the same post on that subreddit, because that's what promotion is supposed to do.
That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments. As my co-founder said "You can’t just shout nonsense into the void without some accountability." I think the internet could use more of that.
(unpaid advert: we're also happily using posthog to track all of this. kudos to them for a great product.)
And surprisingly there are real people giving more than decent answers in Quora on things ranging from relationships through electric cars to software engineering.
Who are those people is a good question, as I never met or heard of someone answering in Quora, and it is rare to see links to answers in it.
A few years back I used to love browsing Quora, I had tamed my feed in such a way that it showed mostly relevant (to me) content that I enjoyed.
For example Alan Kay used to be pretty active on there, and other experts in different fields. As always you had to be careful to take everything with a grain of salt because some people used Quora as a creative writing outlet and it wasn't always obvious. Others ran business scams (sometimes not the get rich quick variety) and there was a famous-ish one made by someone called Gordon Miller on there (but I can't recall all the details).
But there was a lot of good stuff too, for example there was a guy in the fitness circles who accidentally used Quora as a springboard to a YouTube channel (Geoffrey Verity Schofield). But my favorite memory of Quora remains reading Richard Muller's answers regarding physics and life in general (and enjoying them very much) and then years later stumbling upon a book in a book shop that he wrote (Now: The Physics of Time). I don't know why but weirdly I felt more connected to the "creators" on Quora than the ones on other social media.
Long anecdote over, last time I browsed Quora was almost two years ago sadly.
The flip side here: the ads I get on Quora are just terrible -- about 1/3 of it is some "stud briefs" underwear and about 1/3 is promoted CCP propaganda.
These are the ads of "they can't come up with enough ads to show me because not enough people are advertising on this platform".
> Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora.*
It's a horrible website full of horrible answers. the UI is terrible and you often end up reading stuff that has nothing to do with the original question you were looking for. I think it's understandable that advertisers would avoid it based in their personal experience.
Quora was supposed to be the TED of QA. Well, not even TED is the TED of TED anymore so...
I’ve had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I don’t know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid ads.
There is something “emperors new clothes” about the whole industry where we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren’t very good. Yet we all keep paying the Google bills thinking it’s something you have to do.
What is 'not really good'? We had spectacular ROI on adwords ads. BUT, and the article mentions this somewhat, not for tech/freemium saas products. Developers avoid ads like the plague. For consumer stuff that are just immediately paid (there is no free; you pay or you leave the landing page) it works incredibly well in our experience.
This is the one situation where it does work better. Many years ago I was interested in affiliate marketing, where there was a relatively immediate purchase. The aim then was to optimise spend and conversion rate and a profit could be eeked out.
When there is a slower sales cycle and a more complex or less transactional purchase then it all becomes much more vague and significantly harder to find ROI in my experience. The ad-click is likely to be one of a hundred factors compared to transactionally selling a widget.
No, I guess that's where my age or echo chamber shines through; I don't know any developers using those platforms. My colleagues don't; most are > 40, but the 20somethings we work with also don't. That's just my experience, so it says very little. Like I say somewhere else, I'm curious what the conversion for tech products on those forced ad platforms is. Actual numbers.
Yep. As a developer, running a pihole, I don't see any ads and I wouldn't click even if I did.
I thought the tl;dr; of the article was going to be along the lines of "if you're selling a "developer tool", don't bother buying ads because "developers" (i.e. your customers) are likely going to lengths to not see these ads in the first place.
> I’ve had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I don’t know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid ads.
And how many of those startups had a great product market fit and were successful, without a ton of incumbents in the industry eating their lunch?
How much budget did they have and how much of their runway did it eat up to try and run ads?
Many people blame ads for simply having a bad product that no one cares about and never finding the right audience for that product for them to even serve ads to in the first place.
I'll share a small secret. I don't know how replicable this is but I'm curious. Ad sets work really well for a while and then the numbers start getting faker and faker. So what I do is duplicate sets and everyday pause one and start another. This has given me better numbers although never 100% reliable numbers. All ad platforms fake some data and charge you for it.
> we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren’t very good
I don't think that's common. Do you mean like in big corp where they use their deep pockets to make sure they don't leave room for competition?
In other cases, people just expirement in order to find the right channel, similar to this post, which ultimately depends on the objective and target audience. Then they focus their efforts there.
I started using Google Ads in the early days and could get loads of well targetted clicks for £0.05 to £0.10 each. Those days are over. The "law of shitty clickthrus" says that every advertising channel gets less profitable over time.
I see a comment like this on every discussion about ads for businesses, despite the fact that incrementality is easy to measure and quite good for a lot of businesses.
Day after day, the paid(online) ads is becoming traditional and all the startup owners or new entrepreneurs are diverting themselves into guerilla techniques. Buying Tiktok comments, ProductHunt reviews and more. Rather than spending the money on the algorithmic advertisement, they are trying to build a base where they can create a "base" for their possible customers. I really liked the article, and I think this is showing a couple of crucial signs about the topic I mentioned.
Relying on an ad to convert a user is a big ask. Another approach could be to offer something high value to your target market in exchange for their email which you could then use to slowly raise awareness and convert users over a series of emails that offer even more value to them. That way you're greatly increasing the surface area of interactions with potential users while still genuinely helping them.
Yeah, nearly had a heart attack when I opened up the article and saw the company that posted it. I wonder how many people clicked on the ads hoping to see porn?
Thanks for sharing, mainly because I’ve felt like an idiot for utterly failing at marketing my tool (https://HeadlampTest.com) online to developers & testers. I get great results talking 1:1 in person, but nothing else moves the needle.
You’ve articulated the struggle better than anyone, and that’s very comforting for me. I mean, how hard could it be? Answer: super hard!
I haven’t tried hiring an offshore agency, but now you’ve got me thinking about it.
I don't use IG enough to fully understand their ads, but I think the ads are well integrated on Facebook and TikTok, and also well-targeted. I regularly click on ads and buy products from TikTok. There are tons of offers I get to test out advertising at a huge discount on both platforms which would be worth someone taking advantage of to see if it fits your niche. On Facebook you only need some text and an image, but on TikTok you would have to go to the trouble of creating a video, but you could pay someone from Fiverr if you didn't care too much about the quality (which isn't a huge issue on TikTok as lower quality can often come across as more authentic).
This seems like a very techy product; would the audience be there? It's a question as I don't know, but if I see my own usage as a techy, it's not; I don't know anyone who even likes/uses these platform in my cto/decision making circles. But I would really like to know as if there is significant conversion opportunity there (and not just tossing away money) for a very tech product (with code examples on the homepage like this one) then it would be interesting.
I think it’s a mistake to underestimate the amount of tech people on social media. A lot of people who have privacy awareness and say that Meta and ByteDance are evil surveillance capitalism companies still use their services. I might even go as far as arguing that it’s hard not to without feeling left out of the cultural zeitgeist.
My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise software products.
If a product can be shown in a lighting fast video demo, I think Reels and TikTok have great potential.
> My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise software products.
But what's the conversion; as the article (and many more anecdotes and articles and real life P&L's) shows, is that very many companies are just randomly burning money on ads without conversion. So that you see the ads doesn't mean they convert at all. Did you ever buy anything via them? Or even sign up or click one?
I'm not saying you are wrong or so, but it would be good to hear from a similar product to what this posthog company has who has experience and knows conversions.
I think enterprises often just buy enormous inventory of ads and don't really are on top of how they convert; when i'm doing competitor analysis (and I shall include tiktok/insta now), I click on many competitor ads to see what their landing is and their flow; at least 5% of ads I click go to a 404/500/dns error page. So these enterprises are paying for that click (and many more) but cannot convert because it's not actually working. So those are simply monitoring nothing and throwing money in the river for 0 conversions. Probably hired some company to handle the campaigns and seeing it as 'cost of doing business' not expecting much in return in the first place?
> I'm a big fan of hiring an agency if you're a startup – paying $5-10k/mo for a small, outsourced team is way more efficient at this stage than hiring one paid ads specialist.
Agency vs hiring? Yes, it makes sense. But there are A LOT of wonky agencies out there. Don't rely on their promises or even part performance. And be weary of those fond of vanity metrics and such.
Sure, go the agency route, but also do keep them on a shorter leach until they've proven themselves.
What are peoples thoughts on sponsoring open source projects as a way to build awareness for dev tools? I think I've seen PostHogs logo in sponsor sections in some READMEs.
I have never once clicked a "sponsors" logo, but I have definitely seen a logo I know and probably thought better of the company for it - baring GloboMegaCorps that I have long since calcified my opinions about.
Though, if you want to sponsor me GloboMegaCorp, my opinion can definitely be bought.
we mainly do this because it can just help with getting PRs approved if we want to fix an issue in something we rely on (and it is nice / we can list as a perk), and a little influence can be very valuable if we want to give feedback on a project's direction. doesn't do much on the growth side as far as i'm aware, for us at least.
Nice article and PostHog is one of my favourite startups to look for especially on the culture side. Your careers page and compensation calculator is a breath of fresh air.
> [re: bing ads]: Good only if you want to target users at large enterprises where they are forced to use Bing.
Is that a thing now? Companies restricting which search engine you're allowed to use at work? I've worked in some pretty locked down environments before where switching browsers wasn't an option (thankfully less of a thing now), but hadn't ever heard of a company restricting search engines.
I often stumble on clients who use Edge without knowing it, and then using Bing because they don't know how to change it, but I can imagine some might not be able to change any browser settings (although, imo, Google is pretty much as bad as Bing lately).
Off topic: I got distracted by the cookie banner which looks like Nina Brink during the IPO of ISP World Online in 2000, the Netherlands. The brain works in mysterious ways.
PostHog is a fantastic product and I really feel like they are becoming the company that is looking to broadly share their learnings/experience with others.
I don't know how you can get data with such a tiny spend, to be honest.
From experience, I would have thought at _least_ $2000 per test.
I've been doing PPC stuff for 20 years. As soon as someone tells me they are doing PPC I ask them how they enjoy setting fire to all their money. Unless you have oodles of time to spend optimizing it and measuring it, you are guaranteed to just burn all your cash. It is very, very hard to win on PPC. One of the biggest problems is that unknowledgeable people in each domain are bidding on PPC ads without monitoring their spending or conversions and wasting their money, but their ads are bumping up the price of yours too.
geez. I've been thinking of doing some fake door tests but wanted to launch something like 10-20 experiments. Even at $500 that's 5-10k, which is not feasible. How can any startup afford these tests?
If I ran 10 experiments/week, with the $2k measure, you're looking at 80k/month, just to get some validation.
It depends on your cost-per-click, or cost-per-action. If you were in a niche that was pennies per action then you could do it on a smaller budget. It's just that you require a lot of data to get any meaningful results. My PPC traffic wavers up and down and it would be hard to know if it was the weather or some other factor unless you had enough traffic to average things out.
Really appreciate this article and wanted to add a few of my thoughts. I’ve been an inhouse marketer in the Dev Tool space for 2 different SDK companies over the last 5 years. The majority of my focus has been on paid / organic search channels (primarily google) because these two channels had the largest impact in the number of leads we generate.
The first thing I wanted to touch on is the idea that developers hate marketing - this is 100% accurate and I would recommend anyone doing marketing in the dev tool space to have this mindset.
For me the way I’ve dealt with this concept is to try to reframe what my objective is as a marketer. Fundamentally the SDK’s I’ve worked for do deliver value to a developer by helping them develop tools faster and in a more polished fashion. For some developers this is super useful and for others it will never be an option. For obvious reasons I focus on the developers that would see value in this and do everything in my power to make them aware that our solution exists.
My approach to developer marketing:
- Try to be direct as possible in how I communicate the features / capabilities / benefits while avoiding marketese / jargon etc
- I have a philosophy that if you provide value without any strings you benefit in the long run. That’s why I’ve always opposed gated content or even gating trials if possible.
- Developer experience is fundamental to the success of dev tools business. In my organization marketing takes an active role in dev experience - for example we helped reorganize documentation to make it more accessible and easier to navigate for our users. This had a dramatic impact in product adoption.
- Having a good demo should be the cornerstone of your marketing activities. It’s how developers see what you can do and gives your sales team the tools to sell your product effectively.
- Make use of things like live demos so developers can anonymously learn and observe your team without directly talking to a sales representative.
Some of the things I disagree with in the article.
Google display never works:
- This is not always the case. For obvious reasons retargeting is especially disliked in the developer world but in some cases it works. For me I’ll run a Google display campaign that targets any user that’s downloaded our SDK. For these users I focus on delivery display ads that help them integrate the product more effectively. For example I will create ads for these users that promote free trial support to help them build their POC. Typically marketing is not incentivized to drive an increase in support calls but if a user is having trouble building a POC then this is the ideal candidate for us to send to support.
- This also works for marketing pages - users who land on a marketing page will see ads for ungated content like “Buy vs Build” etc
The missing link between paid and organic traffic
Something that seems to be consistently overlooked is how the effort and money you spend on paid channels should help you make better decisions on increasing organic traffic. This is sometimes the main downside with hiring an agency - they might be really good on managing the paid side but don’t provide input on how you can use this to increase organic channels. For example:
- Identify which paid keywords drive conversions and use this data to prioritize your organic channels.
- Use the number of search impressions for your keywords to accurately measure demand for a service
- Use A/B testing to improve CTR in organic search. For example we had a really good blog article that did not have a great title. I ran a display campaign with different titles for this blog article. After about a month there was a clear winner and we renamed the blog article resulting in the ranking and traffic going up for the article.
Paid search and SEO do increase brand awareness
We primarily focused on paid search and SEO which resulted in a significant increase in the total number of users that searched for a brand year-over-year. The number of people searching for your brand is one of the best ways for you to measure brand awareness.
With all this said I do believe that ultimately any success you have marketing to developers manifests from your intentions. I’ve always believed that my intention as a marketer was to “help developers” by providing them tools to make their lives easier. I think this intention is mirrored in the work I do and has been a part of the reason we’ve been successful.
A past startup had the same experience with Reddit ads. The initial replies were so negative ("I could do this 3x cheaper myself" etc), and often negative for the sake of negativity. It took a little time, but we replied to most of them with gentle words along the lines of "thank you for your thoughts and comments; we're a small business trying to do things ethically; getting it from us saves you the time/cost of leaving the house and we know how valuable your time is" - and it actually ended up quite a decent ad.
People just love to hate, especially when there's no human face to something. Or, I think in the case of places/networks where the community is tight and niche, if you're going to interject your product you'd better have enough of an understanding to answer as if you belong/have been a silent part of it all along.
Complete aside - I'm glad I've never had to market to devs, haha.
Go a step further, write some company blog posts outlining how to do it yourself. Do a good job, honestly show how easy it is to host your own alternative, you're making the world a better place by doing so.
You want readers to think "that would be easy, maybe I'll do it". They start to believe it's important they have what you're offering and they think they'll do it themselves.
Well, we know how attention spans are these days, if something takes 30 minutes of work it will probably never get done. Most of the people will give up, and a lot of them will buy your hosted service instead because they've already convinced themselves it's important. If it's important enough to someone that they would spend their time on it, they'll spend money on it too. You want people willing to spend time / money on something to have good will towards your company.
I think this really works. While at Datadog, at one point I would write deep dives on monitoring applications like HAProxy, OpenStack and others. I would start with what to look for, how to monitor those things with off-the-shelf tooling, and finally how to do it with Datadog. The response from the community was overall very positive, regardless of whether or not they ended up converting to users (though many did).
As long as it's tastefully done. I forgot what it was but I was reading something like this to learn and they plugged their product like every 2 paragraphs. It came off really incincere and I wasn't even sure if the content was trustworthy at that point.
That's a really great bridge into "hey here is the fairly functional / maybe naive path" that lets the dev imagine "oh but all the exceptions and the ... oh yeah this is more than <just logging or something else/>".
Now we're on a track where we understand the value more than the front page of a website that "hey we sell <boiled down product description that to a dev doesn't sound like much>".
People are going to hate it just because it’s an ad that they don’t want to see while scrolling their feeds. You could have the greatest product on earth and simply because it’s an advertisement it will receive negative feedback, and snarky replies.
Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, for any product or service. You’re already at a disadvantage by being the source of the end user’s ire, so winning them over is extra hard.
>Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, //
Something like Instagram is all ads, isn't it. But people do want to see the ads because they're mostly "content". I devour ads for Creality 3D printers which look like "how to make this neat gizmo". Similarly I love ads for outdoor gear that are couched as "how to tie this knot" or "how to make a Swedish candle fire without wire". And the "how to make this pottery" which is really, 'my pots are awesome, buy some'.
Just recently I've been into adverts for comedian's tours on Facebook, which are little 2-5 minute excerpts from their routine.
So, yeah. I don't think I'm an outlier.
I'm with the person suggesting "show them how to do it for themselves" as a pretty good advert, but I've not looked at the OP yet, maybe they'll give away the crown jewels.
‘Show HN’ posts often have a mix of different comparatively negative comments: from the (classic) I could do this quicker/cheaper/easily, alternatives being posted, genuine criticisms (+/- misunderstandings) of the offering, criticism of the underlying website due to choices made around design/fonts/contrast/processor utilisation/JS use…
It’s such a nice surprise when there’s a ‘Show HN’ and the comments are predominantly supportive and/or positive!
A buddy of mine actually shared his product on Show HN and I was worried he would more or less get dumped on because I know how the HN crowd can be so negative towards stuff. To my surprise the feedback was actually very supportive and any criticism he received was constructive and not hateful.
Truth is, you're more likely to get positive feedback if you're posting something genuine or at least useful. Negativity is often a (justified) response to ads, marketing fluff, and lazy attempts at "growth hacking".
Unless the HN crowd is the customer base the feedback can be relative anyways.
Lots of people don’t end up shipping and sometimes the allergic reaction to someone else shipping says more about the commenter than what’s being shared.
I like the mixed reviews. A lot of times there is truth in the non-positive feedback. It's the authors ego that gets hurt and to that I say, deal with it.
Totally with you - feedback is a gift. The challenge (in all fora, not just HN!) is parsing out the well-meaning, helpful, truthful feedback from the other noise.
I value the alternatives - it gets all the tools of the same class on the same page. If I was putting up a "Show HN" post, I'd definitely add all the similar tools I'd found in a follow-up comment.
Then when I say it and think "I really just need a little bit of what this does, and this API is kinda complicated for that." and I go and start creating the thing it evolves and changes and "Hey this looks a lot like that complicated API ... ooooooohhhhh I see why that is what it is... this is going to take a long while."
It's just so easy to boil down something into something simple and think that's all it is, but do even that thing reliably and all the corner cases and other things you need, suddenly you find it is way more than your initial poo pooing if whatever the thing is.
I’m fairly sure the Twitter portion is because they named their product synonymous to a common social media expression for “share a picture of your (male) genitalia”.
It’s an unfortunate scenario for anyone who had to look at those tweets, I’m sure.
It's 100% this, the only place I've heard about this thing before seeing it on hn is people making fun of the name.
Then again, I've seen memes about it several times from completely outside of the dev/tech sphere because of this, so maybe in a way it works since it made me look up the company.
Yes, "hog" is slang for penis. Telling someone to "post hog" is a particularly common expression among more... online leftists. A degradation of their character, basically telling them that their opinions are worthless so they had better have a large member to make up for it.
That’s super ideal as opposed to what I’ve got on Reddit, which is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product designed for parents for their children. The comments were basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I’ve reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said “yeah, we’re not going to be removing that as it doesn’t violate our community guidelines”. I closed the account then and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.
The first rule in enterprise sales is that the first human reaction will always be “No.”
The former CEO of Routeware before he sold it to Vista Equity Partners said that he required his sales team to secure three clear “No’s” for each buyer within an organization before fully disqualifying a lead.
So if you’re selling to a “software architect” and the CTO has to provide the final sign off.
- three no’s from the architect
- three no’s from the CTO
It’s funny how easily we give up on potentially successful concepts by not getting to a “No” faster or even at all.
I hope they're counting each individual instance of a "no", so that if I say "no" three times during the same cold call, they'll GTFO and never call again.
One could say you're doing the exact same thing to Redditors that you say they do. Being negative for the sake of being negative. Just love to hate when there is no human face - or even someone to reply. But oops, here one is ;)
Redditors are entitled and they are demanding and they are quick to jump all over you. And they can be wrong. But it's not for the sake of negativity and it's not because there is no human there.
That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. If you want to bring Redditors some overpriced vaporware you are absolutely right they're going to rip you apart. They're just doing what Redditors do - calling out bullshit.
Bring them a product worthy of praising and they'll make entire subreddits dedicated to your awesome product.
> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.
Lol, that’s not at all what the culture is good at. It’s an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment. Any subreddit that isn’t severely moderated is gamed by people who know how to appeal to the local crowd.
Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”. It just means they need a different type of marketing.
I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.
> It just means they need a different type of marketing.
That's correct. And Step #1 is to have a product which will make it past the collective bullshit detector. Step #2 is to provide real and actual value. To have a legitimately good product.
So much of marketing is built on deception. If you try to deceive Redditors, you're going to get told to fk urself.
People who can't complete step 1 or 2 and want to employ deception-based marketing often tell a tail like yours. It's our fault for not just taking what you tell us at face value and handing over our money.
However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.
You have way too much faith in reddit and it’s given you a huge blind spot.
It’s trivial for companies to get past Reddit’s “bullshit detector”. Just sound like a scrappy small business that cares deeply about users and not money.
There is a trail of overfunded kickstarters with nothing to show years later that demonstrates how gullible redditors are.
Your overconfidence in a bunch of armchair experts is exactly why they are so gullible. Being susceptible to marketing is one thing. Thinking you’re not is so much worse.
> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.
You don’t speak for the community of which I’m a part. They also didn’t hurt me, they hurt the people they doxxed and I watched it happen years ago. That’s why there are strict doxxing bans now.
Redditors as a collective are as dumb as the average population (everyone gets equal votes), which doesn’t make for a good SNR.
> However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.
I do this too, but what you’re failing to grasp is that you don’t realize you’re also reading deception-based marketing pages. Corporations wised up to social media a decade ago and have armies of social media experts that know exactly how to target various online communities.
I think the problem is that we're talking about "reddit" like it's one group of people who have the same characteristic responses to things across time. But the whole point of reddit is for there to be disparate communities who may or may not communicate with each other and may or may not share or hold diametrically opposing views on any topic that can be written in words.
When submitting to reddit, you elplicitely cannot submit just to "reddit", you have to choose a subreddit. These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can, even when apparently sharing the same topic/goal. Subreddits turn toxic sometimes, sometimes they're made that way intentionally. Some are hard fought places of positive intent with strong moderation and some are 'wild west'. Sometimes places get toxic enough that someone else creates a similarly named subreddit with an identical goal but attempts to cultivate and moderate a positive environment. If you didn't know about this you'd see 2 identical subreddits, when you post you'll get 2 very different receptions.
"Reddit"s response is entirely dependent upon subreddit. We cannot argue about how "reddit" reacts, and it's impractical to talk about individual redditors, the communities within, the subreddits, are the unit about which we can have meaningful conversation. There's no point in arguing about whether reddit has hurt someone or not or whether their reception was beneficial or degrading the community without knowing _which_ Community. There are places that will hurt everyone, there are places that will reject every product, there are places that won't. They are different places
> These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can
I've never been anywhere on Reddit that doesn't have the specific characteristic that I'm referring to. If people think you are wrong, they tell you. If they think you're lying or spinning bullshit, they say so. If they think your method is suboptimal, they let you know the way they think is best.
This also applies to people on HN. We're engaged in it right now.
> Lol, that’s not at all what the culture is good at. It’s an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment.
You're both wrong :). There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is scoped to a subreddit. You and GP are likely hanging out on different kinds of subreddits - but if your experience is that of "an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment", I strongly suggest you rethink which subreddits you follow. Yes, they probably need a different type of marketing, but they're probably also not worth it for technical products.
> Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”.
It's hard to tell, because cynicism and healthy realism overlap nearly 100% when it comes to modern business.
Oh I’m aware different subreddits have different cultures, but doxxing and mob behavior emerge from any large enough online anonymous crowd. Humans at scale are petty and vindictive. HN even has to have rules about it because it’s been a problem here even when the site was much smaller.
Any particular subreddit will have a specific ideological soft spot that a dedicated marketer will be able to identify and craft turf to exploit. It’s a fundamental flaw to anonymity.
> There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is scoped to a subreddit.
There is both.
For example, anonymity. There is nothing stopping people from using their real name as their username or openly revealing who they are, where they live and work etc. But the Reddit culture is to be anonymous.
Are there exceptions? Yes. But those exceptions don't change that it's an anonymous culture.
Same, in my experience it’s the opposite. The downvoting and moderation creates an echo chamber where there are certain things get accepted as obvious facts that don’t have much (or any) basis. Once that happens, almost everyone seems to uncritically repeat that without bothering to see if it’s actually true, and anyone who questions it is downvoted off the page (or in more extreme cases, the posts are removed/the user is blocked).
Reddit also seems to suffer from something you see in a lot of online communities, where in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king. People with a slight amount experience (or even hobbyists that just post a lot) get taken as authoritative sources that can’t be questioned. Working on your history degree? You can go to Reddit and be treated with more authority than most people even give accomplished historians. One of the many individuals who served as a squad leader in the army? You can get treated as if you’re an expert on all things military and are able to more accurately predict the outcome of conflicts than the Defense Department is.
Is it perfect at those things? Of course not. Can you and I and others provide a bunch of examples of those things not happening? Of course. It's still damned good at them.
Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?
I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge. I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.
> Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?
I'm talking about the culture of the entire site. From tiny subreddits to huge ones and every topic.
> I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge.
Maybe we're talking about different things here. You seem to be referring to jerks. I was referring to people calling stuff out. People can call things out politely. One could say you're doing it right now - you disagree with me and you're explaining why. You're not being negative but what you're doing would be an example of what I mean. Redditors do this. If they see something they think is wrong, they say so. Sometimes in great numbers. Sometimes politely, sometimes very rude. Sometimes with the IQ of a hamster and sometimes it's a genius. But they let you know.
> I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.
I don't know what you mean by trusting. They're not always right. I don't automatically believe whatever they say. It's like in Jackie Brown. 'You can't trust melanie, but you can always trust melanie to be melanie.' I trust Reddit to be Reddit. If they see something they don't agree with or think is false or think is misleading or think is not the best way - they're gonna let you know.
> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.
No idea how anyone can say this earnestly about Reddit while having spent as much time there as you claim you have. It's a horrible corner of the internet rife with all kinds of bigotry and hatred and negativity for the sake of it. Not to mention it's the easiest place to astroturf ever.
I guess it depends at what point you buy. A lot of people on Reddit got generational fuck you money betting on GME, Bitcoin and a lot of other stuff. But if you're getting your Reddit tips from CNN then ya you're probably too late.
Probably what's happening is I'm doing a poor job of communicating what I mean. To me if I say 'they aren't always right' that's enough and I have clearly articulated that Reddit can be and is on a regular basis, completely idiotic, absurdly wrong and all flavor of other bad things. But evidently not as people keep saying things like you just did.
Very interesting way you put that and sorta gets to the heart of the matter.
To me it doesn't even make sense, like, why would I get my information on social media. I'm telling you what I've seen on Reddit. But you went to what people say other places. Which is clearly how a lot of you are getting your information.
And ya, I've seen the receipts. I've got some receipts of my own.
Just for context, your responses read here as full of sarcasm and self assurance. I think your ideas might be more well received if you communicated them with a kinder and more accepting tone. For what it's worth it does sound like you spend a lot of time in toxic online communities, and i believe you have an expertise in those areas.
HN is one of the few places on the internet that there's even the slightest chance at having a substantive discussion that isn't full of short, mocking, casually dismissive comments ala Reddit and Twitter. Tone is crucial to HN's quality. Encouraging a sincere and charitable tone is one of HN's founding principles and is the main focus of the posting guidelines.
Also keep in mind that people tend to be in a bad mood when you do the digital equivalent of tapping them on the shoulder while they are wearing headphones and concentrating.
no, people are suffering themselves, competitive pressures, personal failure and doubt, but more the external F-U response.. drugs like alcohol also play a part.. What is true is that without actual interaction, the social filters change quickly
That is how they can do it 3x cheaper. When you do not spend your time dealing with the business, marketing, etc. that frees up a lot of time and thus cost.
If one was looking to open it up to a wider audience, it would see their costs rise 3x too, but if one is only looking to use something for internal use there isn't much need to incur any of those additional costs.
Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)
FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader. When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab.
I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _do_ suspect I'm the sort of potential customer that isn't easily studied in an A/B test.
If you're talking about that obnoxious left sidebar, I agree. The table of contents widget on the right too. The article itself is squeezed between a bunch of shit I don't want to look at. It makes the page feel crowded and like it's trying to get me. Please just let us read the content! If it's any good, it'll speak for itself.
Can confirm this. When scrolling down to about half-way through the article it jumps back up. It appears to happen when the blog list on the left is loaded (which takes like 5 seconds to load).
I can see why the dev didn't notice this when debugging locally, as there it probably loads the left menu without delay.
Take a lawn sign. Paint it white and black. In it, just put your domain and your uri. iamaretardbuyingads.com/test1 <- just put this in your lawn sign. Test a lawn sign vs 2k a month google budget. WELL, I have tried this. The lawn sign wins.
1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads?
2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding flows are way more important still. 3. As a founder, learn the basics 4. Targeting Awareness/Consideration/Conversion 5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits 6. Read up `r/PPC` on Reddit