Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

posthog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 290 posts

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

#111

Post by morning-coffee »

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.

> Developers avoid ads like the plague.

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.

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

#112

Post by 22289d »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #107
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. 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.

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.

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

#113

Post by mort96 »

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]

I hope you recognize that you're everything that's wrong with the modern web.

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

#114

Post by Lord-Jobo »

zarzavat wrote: post #87
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.

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

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

#115

Post by pembrook »

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]

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.

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

#116

Post by mgbmtl »

EspressoGPT wrote: post #66
james_impliu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Where do you host this site? It's freaking fast.

Seems to be Vercel / Next.js (I'm not affiliated, only did an IP lookup because I was curious)

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

#117

Post by somedude895 »

> Awareness-based ads are a small part of creating demand. This takes more effort to measure, but is totally possible - see below.

Below where? What a tease.

Cpms? Amount of impressions? Reach? What about viewability? Brand lift studies won't be possible at these budgets either.

Do they mean just asking people where they heard about them?

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

#118

Post by mgbmtl »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #97

> [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).

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

#119

Post by throwaway743 »

22289d wrote: post #89
kortilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.

Dude doesn't seem hurt, they're just spitting facts.

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

#120

Post by dave7 »

pydry wrote: post #54
MaKey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SponsorBlock ( https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock ) to the rescue!

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.

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.
Post reply on HN