> We spend 80%+ on writing.
Gotta admit, I read the article but I'm spending more time looking at the product. The writing brought me in, and now I'm aware of their product.
Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
211–220 of 290 posts
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#212The 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…
> Such an easy thing to say.
Everything is easy for the people who don't have to do it!
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#213That mascot/logo is adorable. I just want to feed it!!
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#214Earlier 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…
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Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#215The 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…
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Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content creators They get paid ad revenue based on ads served, they already got paid for the sponsorship. Personally I feel that this is the wrong way round (however I'm totally morally ok with blocking ads of all kinds, I'd be a hypocrite otherwise, ads suck)
They get paid for the sponsorship based in part on how many people watch the sponsorship sections of past videos. That can be and is measured, and has a material effect on the amount companies will pay.
Sounds like they're still being paid then. There's zero pay when blocking ads.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#217> This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they sign up or book a demo – it's a simple (optional) free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them. You have to be careful with how you word questions. If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your…
also check if it's just alphabetically sorted - "a" comes before the other options, and people being lazy just pick that
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#218Earlier 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. No idea how anyone can say this earnestly about Reddit while having spent as much time there as you claim you have. It's a horrible corner of the internet rife with all kinds of bigotry and hatred and negativity for the sake of it. Not to mention it's the easiest place to astroturf ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki…
I think you just set the World Record for most strawmen in one comment. Congratulations.
If you took what I said to be some type of blanket 'Reddit is a perfect and wonderful place' you misunderstood.
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#219Have 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…
I looked through someone's Google Ads account once to find that he has spent several thousand dollars on clicks from mobile games for under 5s. This was B2B software. Never accept Google Ad defaults!
And I want to add: Never trust Google's salespeople on expansions of your campaigns. They will helpfully offer to setup supposedly well targeted reach campaigns for you ;-)
Re: Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
#220> 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 h…
geez. I've been thinking of doing some fake door tests but wanted to launch something like 10-20 experiments. Even at $500 that's 5-10k, which is not feasible. How can any startup afford these tests?
If I ran 10 experiments/week, with the $2k measure, you're looking at 80k/month, just to get some validation.