> Each experiment will need ~$500 Woah, do you really need to spend this much on 1 experiment to get quality data? That kinda sucks
2 weeks and $500. Everyday is around $35. Based on my experience, it is quite a reasonable number.
Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
151–160 of 290 posts
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#152The 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…
The first rule in enterprise sales is that the first human reaction will always be “No.”
The former CEO of Routeware before he sold it to Vista Equity Partners said that he required his sales team to secure three clear “No’s” for each buyer within an organization before fully disqualifying a lead.
So if you’re selling to a “software architect” and the CTO has to provide the final sign off.
- three no’s from the architect
- three no’s from the CTO
It’s funny how easily we give up on potentially successful concepts by not getting to a “No” faster or even at all.
It’s completely foreign to software engineers.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#153The 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…
People are going to hate it just because it’s an ad that they don’t want to see while scrolling their feeds. You could have the greatest product on earth and simply because it’s an advertisement it will receive negative feedback, and snarky replies.
Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, for any product or service. You’re already at a disadvantage by being the source of the end user’s ire, so winning them over is extra hard.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#154The 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…
I think this really works. While at Datadog, at one point I would write deep dives on monitoring applications like HAProxy, OpenStack and others. I would start with what to look for, how to monitor those things with off-the-shelf tooling, and finally how to do it with Datadog. The response from the community was overall very positive, regardless of whether or not they ended up converting to users (though many did).
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
[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 ba…
I didn’t know that. You learn something new every day.
Still, it’s been a great method for getting people to take interest in my website.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#156Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that most people have extremely-low-to-zero motivation to spend time actually thinking about that question, so they pick whatever makes the request go away. I know I'm like that, exemplified by the fact that if the question is mandatory, and I pick something which triggers an extra text field for more information, I am much more like to try and change the intial option to something that doesn't r…
one day i will figure out how to respond to a minor detail, without making people think i'm addressing the main point.
I wonder if this is a problem with the branching structure of these sorts of discussion boards? Every comment is in some sense the start of a new conversation… it sometimes feels like there’s a tendency to want to grow a thread to meet that “whole conversation” measure. Maybe the issue is that little details don’t make it, so context gets pulled from the main thread?
It would be interesting is the site had the ability to make linear threads coming out of a comment, or start whole new branches. Then each branch could have an assorted “random asides” spot or something.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#158The 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…
That’s super ideal as opposed to what I’ve got on Reddit, which is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product designed for parents for their children. The comments were basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I’ve reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said “yeah, we’re not going to be removing that as it doesn’t violate our community guidelines”. I closed the account then and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#159Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)
> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks
I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks
I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!
But I disagree on Google Search:
> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.
Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#160The 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…
That's a really great bridge into "hey here is the fairly functional / maybe naive path" that lets the dev imagine "oh but all the exceptions and the ... oh yeah this is more than ".
Now we're on a track where we understand the value more than the front page of a website that "hey we sell ".