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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

#121

Post by zarzavat »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #114
zarzavat wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#122

Post by 22289d »

throwaway743 wrote: post #119
22289d wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That was an extremely biased and jaded characterization that focuses only on a narrow set of negatives.

Have those things happened on Reddit? Ya. Was that in any way an accurate summary of what Reddit is? No. And it's absurd to claim that it is.

"But look at this example and this one"

I could make a huge list of the times Reddit has been bad, too. That doesn't change a single thing about what I just said.

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

#123

Post by duxup »

22289d wrote: post #110
duxup wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

That link didn’t really explain anything.

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.

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

#124

Post by romafirst3 »

22289d wrote: post #112
newZWhoDis wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Have you seen the receipts or are you just parroting what they are saying on social media?

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

#125

Post by bnralt »

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?

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.

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

#126

Post by duxup »

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…

>"I could do this 3x cheaper myself"

Such an easy thing to say.

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.

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

#127

Post by aeonik »

devmor wrote: post #40
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…

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.

I'm confused, do you mean "PostHog"? I've never heard of this being used that way.

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

#128

Post by Ylpertnodi »

jdwyah wrote: post #78

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…

>That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments.

Ah, maybe you meant "honest" comments.

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

#130

Post by 22289d »

duxup wrote: post #123
22289d wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

That link didn’t really explain anything. 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.

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