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

posthog.com

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

#71

Post by aquariusDue »

2rsf wrote: post #53
glitchalumni wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was quite convinced that Quora only consists of SEO spam nowadays - kind of a surprise reading that there are real people using it.

And surprisingly there are real people giving more than decent answers in Quora on things ranging from relationships through electric cars to software engineering. Who are those people is a good question, as I never met or heard of someone answering in Quora, and it is rare to see links to answers in it.

A few years back I used to love browsing Quora, I had tamed my feed in such a way that it showed mostly relevant (to me) content that I enjoyed.

For example Alan Kay used to be pretty active on there, and other experts in different fields. As always you had to be careful to take everything with a grain of salt because some people used Quora as a creative writing outlet and it wasn't always obvious. Others ran business scams (sometimes not the get rich quick variety) and there was a famous-ish one made by someone called Gordon Miller on there (but I can't recall all the details).

But there was a lot of good stuff too, for example there was a guy in the fitness circles who accidentally used Quora as a springboard to a YouTube channel (Geoffrey Verity Schofield). But my favorite memory of Quora remains reading Richard Muller's answers regarding physics and life in general (and enjoying them very much) and then years later stumbling upon a book in a book shop that he wrote (Now: The Physics of Time). I don't know why but weirdly I felt more connected to the "creators" on Quora than the ones on other social media.

Long anecdote over, last time I browsed Quora was almost two years ago sadly.

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

#72

Post by throwawysn38 »

> 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...

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

#73

Post by intrasight »

k__ wrote: post #38
anonzzzies wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'not really good'? We had spectacular ROI on adwords ads. BUT, and the article mentions this somewhat, not for tech/freemium saas products. Developers avoid ads like the plague. For consumer stuff that are just immediately paid (there is no free; you pay or you leave the landing page) it works incredibly well in our experience.

"Developers avoid ads like the plague." If they can. They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.

Why do you think that?

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

#74

Post by ajsnigrutin »

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.

This is like fast forwarding through an ad, but done automatically. I don't feel bad at all, some videos have 50%+ or more removed, and with some settings, you can remove also all the self-promotion, "like and subcribe" and other useless crap from the videos.

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

#75

Post by n_ary »

> 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 some benefits that I think applies to me and go checkout those products.

When I see such boxes "where did you hear about our product" I just type in "google" or "search engine" because I don't exactly have the time to go back through 100 tabs I have open and find the exact one article where I found the product and copy-pasta the url.

Nearly all of my colleagues also do this, because it is easier to type "google", so advice is to take these boxes with a grain of salt. A better metrics could be the referrer field on your site logs.

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

#76

Post by jjgreen »

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 didn't see that until I enabled JS on the page. Just sayin',

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

#77

Post by 22289d »

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…

You don't have to give the url, you can just say 'found it online' 'saw it an article'. anything like that will be much more helpful than giving them false information.

Reddit is where I often see this stuff and for those dropdowns i typically select something like 'word of mouth' which is true enough for their purposes.

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

#78

Post by jdwyah »

Also marketing to developers, I've had the most success and enjoyed Reddit the most so far. It feels the most honest. Want to tell a bunch of rails developers about your dynamic logging? You can try to write a useful post that also mentions your product onto r/rubyonrails/ but you're run the risk of being downvoted into oblivion with "venordz spam suxxxx".

But it's fair game to promote the same post on that subreddit, because that's what promotion is supposed to do.

That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments. As my co-founder said "You can’t just shout nonsense into the void without some accountability." I think the internet could use more of that.

(unpaid advert: we're also happily using posthog to track all of this. kudos to them for a great product.)

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

#79

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

_a_a_a_ wrote: post #24
brettermeier wrote: post #2

While I try reading this, the site loads something and scrolls to the top of the page, even on 2. try. Who designed this? This page sucks.

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.

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

#80

Post by 22289d »

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…

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 there.

That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. If you want to bring Redditors some overpriced vaporware you are absolutely right they're going to rip you apart. They're just doing what Redditors do - calling out bullshit.

Bring them a product worthy of praising and they'll make entire subreddits dedicated to your awesome product.

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