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

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

#81

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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'll share a small secret. I don't know how replicable this is but I'm curious. Ad sets work really well for a while and then the numbers start getting faker and faker. So what I do is duplicate sets and everyday pause one and start another. This has given me better numbers although never 100% reliable numbers. All ad platforms fake some data and charge you for it.

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

#82

Post by alice-i-cecile »

hannofcart wrote: post #13

The article has some helpful points. But as a programmer-SAAS-founder-who-took-over-ads operation, I have some tips on some insights we gleaned doing paid ads (and getting it to be profitable for us): 1. Most important tip: is your product ready for ads? - Do not do paid ads too early. - Do it once you know that your product is compelling to your target audience. - Ads are likely an expensive way of putting your prod…

This is super valuable. I see the same things helping game devs with marketing: they're often too keen to put energy and money into marketing when they haven't identified a niche or reached acceptable levels of polish.

If the consumer can't quickly tell what your product does and why it's great, stop wasting your time and fix those problems!

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

#83

Post by frereubu »

22289d wrote: post #77
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.

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 require the extra input rather than having to think about what to write.

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

#84

Post by JCharante »

oldtownroad wrote: post #59
wantsanagent wrote: post #36

I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this list, at least for consideration. I have multiple specialized adblockers installed (as I'm sure many here do) and so the only ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these channels and so I'd almost welcome something else.

Broad appeal to a casual technical audience is why you see the same type of sponsorships. VPNs are very high margin and easy to convert. You’ll see the same in across other types of content, e.g: recipe boxes (Hello Fresh) are very common for lifestyle channels, grooming (Manscaped) is very common for male audience channels and language learning apps are very common in educational circles. A platform like PostHog wou…

Fireship, Theo, Primeagen, and the rest of developer-tube is the right spot for advertising for developer tools.

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

#85

Post by 22289d »

frereubu wrote: post #83
22289d wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#86

Post by kortilla »

22289d wrote: post #80
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 th…

> 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 just means they need a different type of marketing.

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

#87

Post by zarzavat »

dale_glass wrote: post #64
Lutger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can be entirely unaware of this and it still works. Maybe the ad is not what convinced you, not at all, but it did prompt you to wonder if this LaunchDarkly thing is any good. Youtube kept spamming it in your face and you kept ignoring…

Yes, but it can work in the opposite direction as well. Eg, all the Youtube ads of NordVPN only did was to convince me that if I'm ever in the market, I'll use someone else. Part because all that advertising has to cost a lot of money, which of course the subscription has to pay for. Part because some of their advertising is less than completely honest about what they provide.

Sure but for every person like you there's several people who are not knowledgable about VPNs and use NordVPN because it's the one thing they heard about the most.

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

#88

Post by kortilla »

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.

They already made the money, they don’t get paid for shilling by you watching.

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

#89

Post by 22289d »

kortilla wrote: post #86
22289d wrote: post #80

Earlier 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. 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 told to fk urself.

People who can't complete step 1 or 2 and want to employ deception-based marketing often tell a tail like yours. It's our fault for not just taking what you tell us at face value and handing over our money.

However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.

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

#90

Post by bombcar »

gbillig wrote: post #43
wantsanagent wrote: post #36

I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this list, at least for consideration. I have multiple specialized adblockers installed (as I'm sure many here do) and so the only ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these channels and so I'd almost welcome something else.

Check out SponsorBlock for skipping YouTube ads that are baked into the video

Watching old videos is always amusing when the sponsor part about a company that since died comes up.
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