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$200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

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Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#11

Post by mildlyclassic »

dtwest wrote: post #9

Is it really $200k in sales if the people that are buying are guaranteed a rate of return? When I looked at the site a month ago it looked like these PoPs were being marketed as an investment. Given the capped upside, it looked as if the buyers were not buying equity, instead providing more of a loan with an expectation of getting their money back and more. Don't get me wrong, I think this is a very cool project. I j…

That's a great question. You're right, It's a commercial agreement, not equity. We think it counts as a sale, but I'm totally open to a more appropriate term.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#13

Post by londons_explore »

Crazyontap wrote: post #10

Interesting product. Since this is kind of related what avenues do you guys (HNers doing SaaS) use for SaaS advertising nowadays? I used to get good results from FB ads (AdWords never worked for me after 2012) but now FB ads are also a loss. So wondering what other people are using for advertising?

TikTok has a decent rate of return.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#14

Post by mildlyclassic »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #8

Nice. I have few technical questions if you do not mind: How strong are those lasers how many watts? What is wave length and what is optical spread over distance? Lastly, how does system handle flock of birds or any other optical barrier?

40W typical usage. Wavelength 1535nm - 1565. Birds haven't been much of an issue in our testing over the last 12 months.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#15

Post by jjoonathan »

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #8

Nice. I have few technical questions if you do not mind: How strong are those lasers how many watts? What is wave length and what is optical spread over distance? Lastly, how does system handle flock of birds or any other optical barrier?

Rain and fog are the traditional enemies, difficult to defeat with redundancy. I suspect the answer is that downtime does happen but customers value the price/performance more than they dislike the downtime. The steepness of the tradeoff also probably depends on local climate, but that's a blessing as well as a curse: initial deployments can preferentially happen in advantageous locations.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#16

Post by giarc »

Crazyontap wrote: post #10

Interesting product. Since this is kind of related what avenues do you guys (HNers doing SaaS) use for SaaS advertising nowadays? I used to get good results from FB ads (AdWords never worked for me after 2012) but now FB ads are also a loss. So wondering what other people are using for advertising?

I haven't used, but I've been wanting to hear more about Spotify's new ad model. You provide the copy, they provide the voice acting and production. I figure rates are cheap as the product is new.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#17

Post by mildlyclassic »

jjoonathan wrote: post #15
NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #8

Nice. I have few technical questions if you do not mind: How strong are those lasers how many watts? What is wave length and what is optical spread over distance? Lastly, how does system handle flock of birds or any other optical barrier?

Rain and fog are the traditional enemies, difficult to defeat with redundancy. I suspect the answer is that downtime does happen but customers value the price/performance more than they dislike the downtime. The steepness of the tradeoff also probably depends on local climate, but that's a blessing as well as a curse: initial deployments can preferentially happen in advantageous locations.

Could not have said it better myself. One more thing, keeping the units within 2-3km pretty much negate the rain/fog issues.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#19

Post by m12k »

Crazyontap wrote: post #10

Interesting product. Since this is kind of related what avenues do you guys (HNers doing SaaS) use for SaaS advertising nowadays? I used to get good results from FB ads (AdWords never worked for me after 2012) but now FB ads are also a loss. So wondering what other people are using for advertising?

I would love to know this too. I never got AdWords or FB ads to work for us. A big part of our SaaS's value proposition is its integrations (G Suite, Slack, O365) - so my hypothesis is that most of the potential users that care about integrations will tend to find us via those app marketplaces, and thus most of the leads that are left for us to pick up from other channels are just less qualified. It certainly doesn't help that there's no way to target 'decision makers at companies that use Slack/G Suite' as a demographic.

Anyways, I've heard of people having success with LinkedIn for B2B SaaSes - but my impressions is that this is mostly lead generation for sales rather than automated marketing.

Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement

#20

Post by hobofan »

londons_explore wrote: post #12

This whole thing looks like more of a university project than a serious attempt at deploying connectivity... I'm going to take a guess that $20k will never be returning to the 'investors'.

I'm also really curious how much of real "ownership" there is to the PoPs, especially given the unaddressed comments in one of their previous threads about foreign ownership of Indian ISPs.

A lot of the language on their website seems very reminiscent of the one used by many cryptocurrency projects.

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