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Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

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Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#101

Post by benjaminwootton »

anonzzzies wrote: post #34
benjaminwootton wrote: post #32

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.

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#102

Post by cj »

dale_glass wrote: post #62
YetAnotherNick wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you list down some non popular digital service you pay for(i.e. not google workspace, AWS etc.) and how you heard about it?

Sure. 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 e…

In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.

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.

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#103

Post by [deleted] »

cushychicken wrote: post #98
joshstrange wrote: post #91

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.

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#104

Post by _Algernon_ »

cushychicken wrote: post #98
joshstrange wrote: post #91

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.

[flagged]

"organic"

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#105

Post by hzzhdev »

mft_ wrote: post #100
iamben wrote: post #35

The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh. 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; gett…

Not dissimilar to HN then :) ‘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’…

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.

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#107

Post by newZWhoDis »

22289d wrote: post #80
iamben wrote: post #35

The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh. 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; gett…

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 th…

>That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts.

Meanwhile the “inverse Reddit” investing strategy works even better than “inverse Cramer”

Reddit comments are the whiskey to YouTube comment’s beer on the stupidity index.

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#108

Post by InvaderFizz »

rchowe wrote: post #96
dale_glass wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 certai…

In the vast majority of cases, these creators are only taking slight liberties with talking points provided by the advertiser.

If basically every NordVPN ad on YouTube is talking about safety, you can be fairly confident that it was a talking point provided by NordVPN.

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#109

Post by ryder9 »

joshstrange wrote: post #91

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.

[dead]

Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

#110

Post by 22289d »

duxup wrote: post #94
22289d wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. That’s not my experience at all. I’m curious what makes you think that?

> I’m curious what makes you think that?

15+ years of living on Reddit.

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.

I expanded at length here on how this works with regard to people trying to promote their products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37703112

But it applies to all sorts of stuff, depending on the subreddit. Investing advice, sports trivia, historical facts, whatever.

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