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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

#141

Post by marcosdumay »

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.

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.

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

#142

Post by sjm »

kyle-rb wrote: post #28

> Twitter > Turn off replies to ads (or have thick skin!) Probably good advice in general, but most brand names don't need to worry about unwanted attention as much as "Post Hog".

lol exactly, especially on Twitter. Who's in charge of branding here? dril?

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

#143

Post by 22289d »

romafirst3 wrote: post #124
22289d wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

lol parroting what they say on social media.

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.

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

#144

Post by cm2012 »

anonzzzies wrote: post #56
dangus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> 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…

I've targeted developers on FB/IG at high budgets successfully with good ROI attributed to it.

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

#145

Post by Buttons840 »

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…

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.

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

#146

Post by meiraleal »

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"

There is always someone that think they can do it faster and better but happens to never do anything that anybody buys.

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

#148

Post by nico »

cm2012 wrote: post #138

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…

What’s your secret for LinkedIn?

Everyone I know who’s ever tried Ads there has gotten little or no conversions at all, while spending a ton of money (LI advertising is expensive!)

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

#149

Post by 22289d »

duxup wrote: post #133
romafirst3 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm suspecting this other user has some naive / ideological-ish belief in the reddit community or something.

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.

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

#150

Post by vax425 »

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.

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