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

201–210 of 290 posts

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

#201

Post by whimsicalism »

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.

I see a comment like this on every discussion about ads for businesses, despite the fact that incrementality is easy to measure and quite good for a lot of businesses.

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

#202

Post by qingcharles »

willsmith72 wrote: post #147

> Each experiment will need ~$500 Woah, do you really need to spend this much on 1 experiment to get quality data? That kinda sucks

I don't know how you can get data with such a tiny spend, to be honest.

From experience, I would have thought at _least_ $2000 per test.

I've been doing PPC stuff for 20 years. As soon as someone tells me they are doing PPC I ask them how they enjoy setting fire to all their money. Unless you have oodles of time to spend optimizing it and measuring it, you are guaranteed to just burn all your cash. It is very, very hard to win on PPC. One of the biggest problems is that unknowledgeable people in each domain are bidding on PPC ads without monitoring their spending or conversions and wasting their money, but their ads are bumping up the price of yours too.

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

#203

Post by satvikpendem »

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.

It's something I'd skip manually via the arrow keys or seek bar anyway, so why not automate the process?

And anyway you can white-list creators you like. SponsorBlock is actually more useful for me to skip filler intro and ending content than to actually skip sponsors, which you can configure it not to skip if you so choose.

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

#204

Post by qingcharles »

dangus wrote: post #8

What about Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok? I’m surprised they haven’t been considered.

I don't use IG enough to fully understand their ads, but I think the ads are well integrated on Facebook and TikTok, and also well-targeted. I regularly click on ads and buy products from TikTok. There are tons of offers I get to test out advertising at a huge discount on both platforms which would be worth someone taking advantage of to see if it fits your niche. On Facebook you only need some text and an image, but on TikTok you would have to go to the trouble of creating a video, but you could pay someone from Fiverr if you didn't care too much about the quality (which isn't a huge issue on TikTok as lower quality can often come across as more authentic).

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

#205

Post by satvikpendem »

cwillu wrote: post #17
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 :)

FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader. When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab. I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _…

I use a hide sticky extension / web script, works great for removing all this sticky header garbage so that I can actually read the content.

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

#206

Post by satvikpendem »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #79
_a_a_a_ wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disable JS & it works lovely. Not the first time I've found blocking JS has unborked a borked web page either. @james_impliu: I like simple text websites. Why do web devs love making simple things complex?

Because most new web devs have simply never made a html page served on apache before. It's mind-blowing but a lot of people think react, nextjs and vercel (to pick a random provider) is the only way to make web apps.

It's not the only way of course, but as someone who's made pure HTML pages served on Apache or nginx, React and NextJS sure are nice to have.

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

#207

Post by smithcoin »

two_handfuls wrote: post #171
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.

Same. The Quora website feels actively user-hostile, I avoid it.

Just like Reddit- it wasn’t always that way.

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

#209

Post by rideontime »

aeonik wrote: post #127
devmor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you search twitter for “post hog,” the very first result is a person sharing a photograph of their erect penis.
Post reply on HN