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

281–290 of 290 posts

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

#281

Post by lionkor »

hermitcrab wrote: post #186
throwawysn38 wrote: post #72

> Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora.* It's a horrible website full of horrible answers. the UI is terrible and you often end up reading stuff that has nothing to do with the original question you were looking for. I think it's understandable that advertisers would avoid it based in their personal experience. Quora was supposed to be the TED of QA. Well, not even TED is the TED of TED anymore so.…

It seems to be increasingly full of pro-Putin trolls. and ridiculous 'questions' such "Why is such a shithole?".

You mean people who are of a pro-Putin opinion, or trolls? The Venn diagram for that is certainly far from a circle.

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

#283

Post by 414techie »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #275
j4yav wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering the same thing. Is there a new ad-free version of this?

find a few people in your target audience and talk to them?

Personally, I don’t think this is an either/or. I think both prospective user interviews and ads are tools for this.

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

#285

Post by shantnutiwari »

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…

yeah, I find the HN crowd hates FB, but other developers, most of whom arent on HN, dont mind it

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

#286

Post by shantnutiwari »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #14

> Quora > > Dark horse – good for conversion and awareness. > Quite cheap, good targeting. > Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora. Amazed to hear that. All my homies hate Quora, I would assume its the same amongst other developer groups.

> All my homies hate Quora, I would assume its the same amongst other developer groups.

Maybe they are talking about the old Quora-- the one from 4-5 years ago?

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

#288

Post by moneywoes »

cj wrote: post #102
dale_glass wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good e…

In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services. This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement). I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found…

perhaps it depends on the audience as well correct? for example, a dev tool has sa technical audience who would primarily not be influenced by say PPC in contrast to form posts

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

#289

Post by moneywoes »

mcbrienollie wrote: post #20

Day after day, the paid(online) ads is becoming traditional and all the startup owners or new entrepreneurs are diverting themselves into guerilla techniques. Buying Tiktok comments, ProductHunt reviews and more. Rather than spending the money on the algorithmic advertisement, they are trying to build a base where they can create a "base" for their possible customers. I really liked the article, and I think this is s…

what are some other pertinent 'guerrilla' techniques

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

#290

Post by aembleton »

carlosjobim wrote: post #224
n_ary wrote: post #75

> 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. Caveat: I always type in "search engine" or "google" despite the fact that I only use Brave/Bing/DDG. I often find things on random interesting post where the author remarks so…

"I don't remember" needs to be an option for this question.

It's a free form optional text box, so you can just type `I don't remember`
Post reply on HN