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Comment by trimboffle | Hacker News Reader

This is such impressive blather that I’m now convinced I know nothing at all about modern sales and marketing.

It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood.

Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.

I feel like this a really uncharitable reading of the article. This is a real business that has built itself up from nothing to $100,000 per month in revenue (which is important as it means they aren't just burning VC cash in random acts of marketing) and they're speaking in precise terms about specific actions they've taken and the results they've gotten.

I've no doubt that if you're unfamiliar with marketing that these terms are new (in the same way that if you're a marketer and reading about database indexing you're going to have to do a little work to figure out what everything means.)

This is important to me not because I've any stake in this (I've no affiliation with Uploadcare) but because I worry that the knee jerk rejection of any kind of marketing by developers really hurts startups and bootstrappers.

There is definitely blather in the marketing world [1], I'm just saying this isn't it.

1 - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...

The fact that they admit to targeting keywords that have no relevance to their product is just... I dunno.

Slight clarification: they targeted keywords that they didn't have a specific landing page for, this might be like sending people to a landing page that generically talks about "file uploads" instead of a landing page that hyper-specifically talks about "file uploads for laravel".

They were saying they should have held off on targeting those more specific terms until they had those matching and more specific landing pages in place.

Michael .... it’s really bad writing.

You can’t say “hey ordinary person I’ll save you wasting $50k on AdWords” then instantly drop straight deep into the most arcane of mumbled, cryptic, faded rune digital marketing magic speak.

Refer to the comment below from HN user 83457 who explains same but in English.

It is not aimed at ordinary person, though... it is a technical post-mortem for digital marketing insiders.

The structure of the article is weird yes but the sections are entirely relevant to marketing analytics.

The writer establishes they have some baseline analytics and understanding of demand generation prior to embarking on paid.

Then they embark on paid.

Then they tell you what they learned.

FWIW for any organization new to paid, this article will probably save you some 10s of thousands in spend if you internalize it properly.

The arguments and rationales are all sound and pretty detailed. You get a sense of the goals and the steps taken and lessons learnt. A simple Google will tell you what CTR rates are did you want the author to explain these concepts? Good luck starting a ad words ccampaign not knowing these words

This article is shop talk for digital marketing and I see nothing particularly wrong with it. It’s actually a pretty interesting write up from a nuts and bolts perspective.

I am _not_ a marketer and I did not find this cryptic. If you've at all ever been involved in startups, you will know most terms.

When doing my own writing, I try to remember a quotation from Kenneth Hudson's The Jargon of the Professions:

> The best minds in any profession are never guilty of jargon, expect when they are very tired. Pedestrian minds are drawn towards it automatically and to the most frightening extent. Jargon, one could suggest, is the natural weapon of highly paid people with very little of any value to say. It is a sad and ironical comment on our society that many people feel released from the pressure to use jargon only when they have reached the top of their profession, by which time it may be too late to change one's habits. , however one might wish to. Ambitious people, still busy climbing the ladder, may well consider it professional dangerous to use straightforward language. One therefore has the paradox that only the person who has finally arrived, with [their] reputation secure, can afford to be simple and jargon-free. Lesser mortals appear to need their jargon, as a membership-badge of their profession. They do not have the confidence to face the world without it.

Do I escape the tendency towards jargon? No, not by a long shot, but pieces like this are a good reminder as to why it is worth the effort to keep trying.

The target audience is other founders.

And so just like you wouldn't remove the jargon from a medical journal not sure why you would want to in this case.

Founder is not a profession, and this kind of impenetrable jargon here doesn't add value to the conversation. It's marketing talk where some jargon words make sense while others are more of a "professional fence".

In every field there’s usually a few brilliant minds who can boil complex ideas down to simple words. Even if your audience is very technical, they’ll still appreciate when a writer takes the effort to find the clearest way to say things, keeping the “jargon” to the bare minimum. The eraser is the writer’s friend.

> The eraser is the writer’s friend.

I'd say pretty much everybody's :)

You should see some of the [redacted] reports that are presented to senior management.

I saw one where they where talking about keyword density and counting the names of the <div> elements.

The name of the consultancy is redacted

>>> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we’re fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations.

I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared things up.

It reads like a Markov chain autocomplete. Let's see what my phone produces if prompted with the first bit:

Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we are looking for ways to improve the quality of our products by providing a service to our clients with the highest level of service for the remainder of the year.

Here are some Talk to Transformer outputs:

> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we're able to deliver the highest quality services available. We're focused on delivering your most productive platform, whatever you're doing with it. From your smartphone and tablet to servers in data centers and data centers in offices. Our solutions help you store, process and manage everything from plain text and binary data to HD video and audio files. About Us: Cisco is a leading technology company known for innovation, innovation, innovation. We use technology to create a better world. With global operations in more than 100 countries, Cisco provides the essential technologies that enable companies to compete and win in today's global economy. For more information, visit www.cisco.com.

> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, our deliverables are performing better than ever. We are further expanding our market reach and capabilities, making us more competitive and reducing cost through better processing, architecture, security and data centers. That's the good news. The bad news is, we're reaching our head-end capacity and need more help. The Rails team members that work on applications and features on a daily basis don't want to burden the engineering team with refactoring and maintenance. They know that when the infrastructure is gone, they have a new responsibility to help build applications for new players. And there is a new player, but we are still in its infancy.

> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we have secured the Ecosystem. This Ecosystem is already in the technology and revenue channels process. We have a team working on it, including the core guys and big but skilled giants who have also invested their expertise and assets to become the gateway into our ecosystem. As more people start to use this new feature, they will ask for news. In terms of devs, we already have more than 40 developers on board. We have identified a cluster in Africa which is running our client, and have a major team dedicated to project execution and content creation. As development work is ongoing and we don't have exact numbers, we can't officially announce how many people we have on board, however we are not aware of any

Every business basically has 4 ways revenue increases or decreases month over month.

New customers spending new money (net new)

Current customers increasing spend (expansion)

Current customers decreasing spend (contraction)

Current customers leaving (traditional churn)

Net negative churn means when you add up the bottom three, revenue has increased.

Another way to say it is you don’t have to add new customers to keep growing revenue.

They are getting more new customers (edit: others have pointed out it also includes increased revenue from existing customers), thanks primarily to personal recommendations (word of mouth), than they are losing customers.

That's not true

They are getting more increased revenue from existing customers than they lose from cancelling customers, which is very different

You sir, should have written the article.

Except that this rewritten version is not correct!

They aren’t necessarily getting more new customers than old customers cancelling, but the combination of revenue from new customers and added revenue from upgrades from existing customers is more than the revenue lost from customers who cancel.

Which, btw, is exactly what they say, using standard industry terms, and it’s not ambiguous. It just wasn’t written for you, that’s all.

Inbound -> people coming to the site (instead of salespeople calling them up)

Churn -> people canceling their subscriptions.

Churn Rate -> rate at which they're canceling (ex: 5% a month)

Net Negative Churn Rate -> if the overall dollar amount of people moving from $50/mo plans to $100/mo plans is higher than the dollar amount of people canceling subscriptions.

So while the Churn Rate doesn't change (still 5% a month) the overall monthly revenue is still increasing. This is really hard to do and it's a good indicator that they're making something that people really want and are willing to pay to use.

I don't think this is that jargony. Anyone in the target audience for the article should know what "churn" means, and given that knowledge should be able to work out what "net negative churn" means. Probably the clarification would've been better if it had started "meaning the revenue from usage-driven upgrades" (and likewise "usage-driven" and "net" in "net negative" don't add anything) but overall it should still be comprehensible.

let churn = (reduced income from existing customers cancelling the service)

let use_increase = (Increased income from existing customers using the service more)

assert churn > use_increase;

net_churn = churn - use_increase;

assert is_negative(net_churn);

I am laughing harder than I should really

It kind of reminds me of people discussing stock using what looks to me like numerology. They don't really focus on the underlying company or what it does, they mainly look at the stock graph and use more or less complicated models to try to predict future performance. Sometimes they actually have no idea what the company does.

I feel a bit the same way reading this article. There's a lot of talk about conversion rates and funnels and semantic cores and awareness ladders but in the end does do they have a product that people actually want?

Having bad SEO and a confusing website is bad because it could make it harder for people to buy your product but it's not going to magically make people buy something they don't want.

Also I wonder if focusing entirely on "conversion rate" is fair. There are other benefits to advertisement, such as increasing brand awareness for instance. After all look at the vast majority of real world ads, there's basically a 0% conversion rate. People don't see a Coca Cola ad on TV and immediately go the supermacket to buy a bottle. I don't see a football player wearing Nikes and immediately go online to shop for shoes.

Maybe somebody will click on your ad, browse your website for a bit, think it's interesting and months later they'll convince their boss to use it for their next big product.

I think focusing on conversion rate is fair in this case. I would think Google Ads (formerly AdWords) is more for conversions and less for brand awareness.

Their example query of "file upload php" is someone who's looking for a solution right this second, so it's not unreasonable that they would sign up and try out the service right this second.

Did you read the article? Your last paragraph refers to a demographic and should be accounted for in a rung in the awareness ladder.

The reason people focus on conversion rate is because you can easily calculate spend and predict RoI. Coke can spend on a TV ad because it's a drop in the bucket but every dollar is valuable to a bootstrapped company. Exactly why you want to know what you'll get before one blow 50k on adwords.

I love how the actual product was one line out of several hundred on that breakdown.

Then when I go to the website: "Full stack adaptive delivery"

I have no idea why their adverts aren't converting, I mean who isn't into full stack adaptive delivery? So. Damn. Compelling...

I’ve spent the last year in a marketing role and as I read this article I was thinking to myself “would I have understood an HN post like this 1 year ago?” Thanks for confirming that I probably wouldn’t have! It is a lot of jargon.

This is pretty basic stuff for a SaaS company.

Might be worth watching some of the YC Startup School videos to get up to speed.

Ah yes, “YC Startup School“ where dumbos like me may learn the basic things, thanks I’ll seek it out to come up to speed.

Basic for a consumer-facing SaaS company, perhaps. I work for a SaaS company, but B2B, and I agree with the other comments - it could almost be a satirical take on a founder's pitch.

If you operate an online SaaS business you will know most of these terms (and if you do run such a business and don’t know them it would be highly advisable to learn them). This isn’t an article for the general public but specifically for people that bootstrap (SaaS) businesses, so I think it’s adequate to use the terminology of the field.

Hear here!

Now, where are the statistical metrics and causal inference assessments?

I was expecting the worst after reading comments like these but it was actually quite easy to read. If terms like CTR/CPC need to be explained then it would be safe to say you were not the target group for this article.

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