Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>, Facebook may just be the wrong audience for a B2B tool.

Well, at least you can say that the 20k € was spent to learn that signups from Facebook have a near-zero retention rate. (That's not meant to be a flippant comment.)

A lot of successful websites seem to know (or learned) which market channels bring in the right customers.

For Stackoverflow.com: most traffic comes via referrals from google.com searches -- but not facebook

For Craftsy.com: it's referrals from Facebook -- but not google search queries

For a project management tool like yours, neither Google Adwords(1) nor Facebook newsfeed ads will work. Maybe a strategy such as hosting for free a high-profile open-source project so your brand gains mindshare. Then it may attract non-open-source paying customers.

That subsidy strategy for non-profit customers is not foolproof (as it didn't seem to help BitKeeper) but it did seem to work for Github.

(1) I suppose you could try running an AdWords campaign on keywords such "project management" and related competitor keywords such as "Jira" and "Microsoft Project" -- but I doubt you'd get quality clicks from it

Their problem is they are B2B, not B2C, for which social channels tend to be better at. Regardless of traffic, they should always think about running search ads for their branded keywords at least.

Also their differentiation from the rest of the market is E2E encryption, for which there is a small target demographic within project management. Like you said, rather than rely on advertising channels they need to offer functionality to stand out from the crowd, which should be useful but not give away their core revenue services.

They're already starting to do the right thing - Blog posts demonstrating they are subject matter experts, that can get exposure on places like HN (which tends to have demographics who care about E2E encryption).

A lot of successful websites seem to know (or learned) which market channels bring in the right customers.

Yeah. We do grant writing for nonprofit and public agencies (see http://www.seliger.com if you're curious), along with some small tech companies, and for us ads that target conventional consumers are useless. We did find Google Adwords useful for many years, but over time its effectiveness has declined to the point where we stopped using it. We've tried some advertising in other domains but found them ineffective too. A lot of our traffic actually comes from search queries that pull up blog posts.

I think the larger point is that what works today may not work tomorrow.

I find it amusing that a product focused on privacy choose to advertise on Facebook. I bet that being on the front page of HN is well worth those 20k though, but maybe that was the plan from the beginning.

Are the assumptions here that:

1) Facebook News Feed users don't care about their privacy

2) The OP was more motivated by viral HN marketing than actual direct results on Facebook?

These are interesting claims. Can you substantiate them?

"but I doubt you'd get quality clicks from it"

I don't think it's the quality that will be the problem but the cost in a highly competitive area like project management.

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