Great post, and so true.
Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless. A hacker that builds great product is hard enough to find, a hacker that BUILDS TRACTION?! Holy God would that be amazing.
Unfortunately, "user acquisition hackers" are basically priceless. A hacker that builds great product is hard enough to find, a hacker that BUILDS TRACTION?! Holy God would that be amazing.
That's good to know, and the hundreds of startup people emailing me asking for advice on getting traffic seem to confirm the incredible demand.
I'm still wondering why more hackers don't go into the traffic generation space. There are tremendous opportunities for someone who knows how to code to use automation to scale campaigns and completely dominate a niche.
I can barely throw together a few lines of PHP, and I'm still leaps and bounds ahead of most of the marketers I'm competing against.
In some ways, different traffic sources are like programming languages. They each have different methods, rules, and tricks, and being a good marketer means being familiar enough with them to figure out the right tools for the job.A lot of that knowledge comes from testing and experience.
You know that you wouldn't build a chat website in BASIC and I know that I wouldn't send international RON traffic to a dating site.
It all boils down to arbitraging traffic and finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the market- you have to answer the fundamental question of "where is the amount and quality of traffic I want priced lower than it would be in a perfect market?"
Obviously, if you can build technology to answer this question in a scalable way, as I and others are trying to do, you can do very well in the space.
There's a reason enterprise-class PPC bid management tools sell for thousands of dollars a month(and 5% of spend).
I lean towards building apps, but that's mostly my developer bias showing.
Do you have any advice (off channel, even)? Are there any resources you can recommend?