Why getting traction is so hard these days | Hacker News Reader

Why getting traction is so hard these days

andrewchen.co

100 pointsjanober31 comments

This article is a mess.

Traction (esp. on mobile) has been hard for a long, long time; it's absolutely not a new problem in 2017. Why? The competition to get and keep user attention is BRUTAL.

On one side, we've got large, entrenched players (FB, Google, etc.). And when something catches their eye, they pull it into their platform (FB vs Foursquare, FB vs Snap, Apple vs Instapaper, etc.). This puts a soft upper-bound on certain kinds of mobile ideas.

On the other side, we've got an amazingly efficient ecosystem for anyone with a $200 laptop, a free Wifi connection, and talent to build the next great app. To the first order: hosting, tools, etc are all free -- there are effectively no barriers to entry.

On the article's content, some of the charts are 5-10+yrs old, which is forever in Internet terms. It also says, "Paying for acquisition is one of the key channels still available" -- for very large national or global brands...maybe..? But if you are a startup or midsized mobile app company and your plan is to pay for customers, you need a new plan.

>> "there are effectively no barriers to entry."

IMO, this will work against you in the long run. I suppose it allows you to test out ideas easily. Profit will be very hard to come by though.

Well, no barriers to entry basically means it's a commodity market and that consolidation/scale is the key to competitive advantage.

Next to the old charts you mention, the author writes:

"This is just the 2017 version of The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs, which I wrote about a few years ago, where I showed some stats indicating that email marketing open rates are on the decline … and that traditional banner CTRs seem to be asymptotically approaching zero".

I.e., he indicates that this is a continuation of long-running trend, and that those particular charts illustrate the trend from several years ago, so your criticism misses the mark.

I thought it was a very interesting article, and identifies a set of fundamental trends. The main weakness is too much focus on B2C, but that's the author's area of interest.

>Traction (esp. on mobile) has been hard for a long, long time; it's absolutely not a new problem in 2017. Why? The competition to get and keep user attention is BRUTAL.

That doesn't make the article "a mess", just because it doesn't delve into a particular pain point of one aspect of what it discusses -- that's classic "first HN comment" hyperbole.

The article offers a much broader view, and goes into discussing trends, similar patterns in history, for several aspects way beyond "mobile traction".

Which is also why "some of the charts are 5 years old". Because the cycle the article refers to is not some short-term trend, but an overall assessment of where things were and are going.

..but a chart that is five years old and a fast-moving space like the Internet: difficult to argue patterns, since the patterns may have changed dramatically since the chart was made!

Full page 'give me your email' popover on firstload is a great way of losing traction from me.

Yes, anytime I see that happen the website immediately loses all respect. I guess the A/B split tests might tell you do it but it is still a pretty dick thing to do.

This is why I believe ad tech is a zero-sum game.

New channels (banner ads, social ads, online video ads, etc) appear ad old ones dry (TV, radio, etc) up. But the spend doesn't -- an ad buyer has a campaign budget of $X, and is looking to maximize the amount of lift they can get for that budget.

You are correct. See: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-03/advertisi....

Ad spend as a % of U.S. GDP remains relatively constant since the 1920s.

"50% of your advertising budget is wasted, the problem is no one can tell you which 50%."

I don't think that's changed?

It's changed a little bit -- 50% of your advertising budget is wasted, and you can generally tell which 50% -- but past performance is now a poor indicator of future returns. So you can tell what 50% was wasted, but it's harder to tell what's going to work next time.

The question of which 50% gets even murkier the more data we have. For example, cross-channel/cross-device attribution used to be a known thing, but it was always pretty hazy because pretty much all analytics and conversion tracking was last click (or first touch if you're a direct mail company).

Then we started getting attribution tools and getting different pieces of the puzzle. Now the issue has become that there's all these ways of looking at the data that can point you in the right general direction, but short of dynamic/data-driven attribution models with MASSIVE amounts of data feeding into them, it can still be difficult to say "actually this is what this channel did for us."

For orgs comfortable with data that is a bit fuzzier, that's fine, but for orgs where people are held to strict numbers based on the last click, it can hobble them when it comes to higher-funnel or view-through heavy channels like social, display, PR, etc.

As an ad buyer who has done so both at agencies and client-side, I'll say that this is true to an extent, but that maximizing lift isn't always the priority.

For example, I may be able to eek out a small incremental gain in performance on some tiny network or via a deeply-integrated direct buy, but how much time would that suck up? What would I need to do from a tracking perspective? How much would it cost to get all of the necessary creative? What about reporting? Does the data get pulled into my existing reporting automatically, or will I need to perpetually marry up some extra data set in Excel and dramatically increase reporting time? What about time for ongoing management that happens outside of my existing tools?

These are all important considerations. Actual channel performance is one of them, but far from the only or even the most important depending on circumstances.

#6 Competing with boredom is easier than competing with Facebook + Google

^ this one stood out as a particularly strong point -- there's a finite amount of time people have to burn on apps for non-utilitarian purposes, and social networks have been pretty effective at eating that all up.

To me it suggests that consumer applications no longer can afford to merely be fun or entertaining (unless they're good enough at that to compete with Facebook, Snapchat, etc for more than a week of usage). The focus really has to be on utility and solving pain-points that go beyond disrupting boredom and/or "connecting people" in what have become conventional formats.

At the end of the article it says: PS. Get new updates/analysis on tech and startups

Why on earth would I sign up to a regular update from a person who simply lists all the ways in which it is hard to get traction? It's absolutely the case that you need to be clever to market a business and can't just throw shit at a wall. I welcome that, because it increases the barrier to entry.

This means that those who get it right can generate some serious revenue/profits and ultimately a sustainable business.

Relevant previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12044872

I agree that web and mobile both seem to have gotten kind of stagnant. Is there a next big platform on the horizon? (I worry that there isn't)

Yes. :-)

Give attention to the latest SLAM and other 3D tracking solutions for a sneak peak.

I don't think there is an obvious one that stands out. Feels like a couple years before one really emerges. Lots of really early stuff in the hype cycle with blockchain, autonomous vehicles, VR, etc. There are also professional messaging platforms (Slack and its competitors) but they don't seem to have the reach yet to enable a huge company on the back of it. Then it seems that most of these are taking a more closed approach to monetize vs the early platforms.

AR / VR ?

Yes. There's a heck of a lot you could do with AR nobody's done yet.

On the other hand, if you get into that business now you're in direct competition with the likes of Google and Apple.

Me clicks on the link.

Me get's greeted with a giant fullscreen email grabbing popup.

Me thinks: Ok, I know why this guy has problems getting traction.

Don't bug people to follow you. Instead, make something people want.

And sell it, right? I mean, at some point you need the money. Either 1. you get it from the ads, and the people get bugged up front, or 2. you just have a paywall and sell it or, 3. you are contributing content to the internet and not looking for monetary compensation.

We need much more of #3 than what we have. In relative terms, it seems #3 is shrinking on the Internet over the decades.

I've had the solution to this for like twenty years. I don't have the time or inclination to do it.

Automate MLM (Multi-Level Marketing), six or more levels deep.

"Affiliate Program" six or more levels (degrees of separation) to make a word-of-mouth network that rewards people for making connections between sellers and customers. Public all the data. Self-reinforcing, self-stabilizing.

I have no idea why no one has done this before. To me it is blindingly obvious.

You could start tomorrow and eat Amazon's lunch within the year. Do it right and nothing could stop you, no one could even begin to compete thanks to Metcalfe's law. (In other words, if someone could do a better job than you the correct thing to do would be to quit and join their network. In other words, there is a strange attractor that results in automatic partition healing.)

Blah blah blah yadda yadda waves hands

I'll leave the details as the proverbial "exercise for the reader".

Regular affiliate networks (which can be viewed as 1-level MLM networks) have been around for over 20 years and are a very mature market.

Why would making this 6-deep make things any better?

Amazon's view of the world is "Your margin is my opportunity". They would certainly relish the kind of margins required to sustain a 6-level deep MLM scheme.

could you care to elaborate a bit more on that? if you don't feel like discussing here, my contact info is on my profile.

email sent.

You can see for yourself one of the reasons why I don't try to pursue it: skeptics. Thank you for having an open mind dude! ;-)

You assume there is enough margin to share that many levels deep.

> You could start tomorrow and eat Amazon's lunch within the year

Wut?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com