Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned
posthog.com
posthog.com
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 product in front of an audience.
- No matter how good the ad operation, unless your product can convince a user to stay and explore it further, you've just gifted money to Google/X/Meta whoever.
- If you haven't already, sometimes when you think you want ads, what you more likely and more urgently need is better SEO optimization
- Most of the time, when we debugged why an ad wasn't showing conversions, rather than anything inherent to the ad, we found that it was the flows the user encountered _AFTER_ landing on the platform that made the performance suffer.
- In some cases, it's quite trivial: eg. one of our ads were performing poorly because the conversion criterion was a user login. And the login button ended up _slightly_ below the first 'fold' or view that a user saw. That tiny scroll we took for granted killed performance.
- This is not rocket science, no matter how complex an agency/ad expert may make it look.
- There are some basic jargon that will be thrown around ('Target CPA', 'CPC', 'CTR', 'Impression share'); don't be intimidated
- Take the time to dig into the details
- They are not complicated and are worth your time especially as an early stage startup
- Don't assume that your 'Ad expert' or 'Ad agency' has 'got this'.
- At least early on, monitor the vital stats closely on weekly reviews
- Ad agencies especially struggle with understanding nuances of your business. So make sure to help them in early days.
- Here I have to politely disagree with the article
- Focus on conversion keywords exclusively to begin with!
- These will give you low volume traffic, but the quality will likely be much higher
- Conversion keywords are also a great way to lock down the basics of your ad operation before blowing money on broad match 'awareness' keywords
- Most importantly, unless your competition is play dirty and advertising on your branded keywords, don't do it.
- Do NOT advertise on your own branded keywords, at least to begin with.
- Most of the audience that used your brand keywords to get to your site are essentially just repeat users using your ad as the quickest navigation link. Yikes!
- You'll find that while your running ads, you are in a somewhat adversarial dance with the ads platform
- Some caveats (also mentioned in the article)
- Ad reps (mostly) give poor advice, sometimes on borderline bad faith. We quickly learnt to disregard most of what they say. (But be polite, they're trying to make a living and they don't work for you.)
- (Also mentioned in the article) Do not accept any 'auto optimization' options from the ads platform. They mostly don't work.
- Set tight limits on spends for EVERYTHING in the beginning. I cannot emphasize this enough. Start small and slowly and incrementally crank up numbers, whether it be spend limits per ad group, target CPA values, CPC values - whatever. Patience is a big virtue here
- If you're running display ads, there are many more leaks to be plugged: disallow apps if you can (article mentions why), and disallow scammy sites that place ads strategically to get stray clicks.
- For display ads, controlling 'placement' also helps a lot
- Especially the old, well rated posts here.
- They're a gold mine of war stories from other people who got burnt doing PPC, whose mistakes you can avoid.If the consumer can't quickly tell what your product does and why it's great, stop wasting your time and fix those problems!
I thought a good way to test if your product is compelling is to build a landing page, put out a little bit of cash for ads, and see if you get sign ups?
This 100%. When picking a VPS I signed for 9 options. In the end I went with Digital Ocean, largely because of their simple onboarding. Yes this is a one time process, but to me it's a critical one. Get it right.
You have to be careful with how you word questions.
If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then yes, an ad may well be it because ads are so in your face and hard to avoid. But it almost never is what convinces me to try the thing. In some cases ads actually dissuade me from trying the thing.
For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word "proprietary". If that's your selling point, then you automatically fall way down in my list. I like my software boring and useful for my ends, not to be locked into somebody else's system.
Pretty much always what does it for me in the end is positive discussion in technical spaces.
Example: I was interested in looking more into Dremio the other day but couldn’t really find any good positive technical discussion about it on HN or Reddit so I just… stopped looking into Dremio
Weirdly, google ads and GA4 are great examples of not providing value and not treating people or users well. And yet they cling on.
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 it, but of course the name stuck and now there are talking about it on HN so you decide to read "that" thread and not the other one about unleash or something you never heard of.
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.
When a VPN was happy to work with him on an ad that wasn't deceptive or misleading he was happy to run it. I think the original video only existed in the first place because at that time he was willing to advertise a VPN for the money offered, but they couldn't agree on ad content he felt was fair. So his price never changed, the VPN company just gave into his 'advertise honestly' demand.
Tom Scott’s video a few years ago helped, but some creators still seem to be saying or implying that using a VPN makes your browsing “safer,” which unless you have a very specific need for a certain kind of safety, is untrue. I wish VPN companies would audit the claims their partners are making about them, but there really isn’t an incentive to do so —- if their brand gets damaged irreparably they can release a new VPN under a different brand.
If basically every NordVPN ad on YouTube is talking about safety, you can be fairly confident that it was a talking point provided by NordVPN.
That's why I call ads psychological violence. They force themselves in your brain and there's nothing you can do against it
That way it won't be:
> nothing you can do
Then we'll have pretty retribution, which is the first step towards tit-for-tat style cooperation.
High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/
Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.
Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.
Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.
This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement).
I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found questions from people on forums asking how to accomplish [what our product does] and we'd answer the question with a post recommending our service.
And then we wrote a bunch of tutorials / guides for how to integrate [popular service] <> [our product] to achieve [what our product does] so that if anyone googles "[popular service] [what our product does]" our help docs are usually top of the page.
Posting on forums was fine to get the first few users, but it was long-tail SEO (which is pretty easy to rank since it's long-tail) that got us the next 200. If the search terms are specific enough and the category is relatively undiscovered/unexploited, it's easy to rank. Unfortunately it's really hard to find unexploited niches.
Yup. I avoid every single ad I can on principle. Only exception I used to make was for youtube sponsors, mostly out of laziness, until I finally installed sponsorblock.
I've gotten so good at it that at this time I haven't the faintest idea of what movies are there to see at the cinema. Not a single one.
I'm probably a very extreme case in actually having succeeded in disconnecting myself from popular culture to a very large extent.
I might hear about about something interesting on social media or a podcast, but won't remember it until I see a picture on the streaming platform months later, when it's already been canceled for lack of viewers.
Youtube is actually the only place I actively block all ads, because they seem unable to stop spamming me with android games that are nothing like the ads at all and are unbelievably annoying. Most websites and stuff I'll let them show ads by default, then block the site if they have more ads than content etc. Although I also just try to avoid those sites in the first place.
Marketers have this notion that people are all merely 24/7 product-consumers, constantly on the lookout to discover new products to consume, and as long as their "message" reaches my brain, it's an unambiguously good thing for both parties.
When I'm browsing the web, or driving to work, or watching a show, or trying to complete some basic task around my life, I'm definitely not trying to discover your product. I wish marketers would stop assuming I am. If I want to look for an unknown product, I'll deliberately go out and do so. In that case, and only in that case, ads are welcome.
(People forget that humans invented the advertising industry precisely to shield civilization from this kind of "word of mouth".)
Yes, that’s the point of a “branding” ad campaign - to drive upper funnel interest in a company/product.
They can also use retargeting to show the same people “performance” ad campaigns, which are meant to drive a lower funnel conversion like a signup, purchase, or even a demo.
Depending on the product, you can even use an organic discussion about your product as marketing material to get people to see the interest others have in it. Or market a conference or dev day where they show off its capabilities.
There’s a lot of layers to marketing, it’s not as simple as HN makes it out to be.
The other thing is controversial. "There's no such thing as bad PR" is a saying for a reason. I am also convinced that there are some things that make me never, ever consider a product. And yet: there was this one brand I hated, but it's been a while, and this one looks familiar... was it the good one or the bad one? Never mind, I don't have time to try to dredge that up, this looks familiar at least so I'll just grab it and remember for next time. (Sure I will...)
And that's just one way that bad PR can still be effective. Another is that it gets people talking about you, and some people will argue the other side because the main person's arguments are just bad.
Bad PR is good for awareness. Conversion is often based on different criteria than you expect. You may hate X, but you have a client who has heard of X and hasn't heard of Y, your preferred option.
intuit/turbotax. Will never use them, ever. Looking forward to the day that product is eliminated from existence by regular online filing.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
I think that TurboTax is a winner in the “TurboTax lobbies to make the tax code so complex that you have to use TurboTax” narrative because it makes people more afraid of doing their taxes through the tools the IRS provides than they should be.
You may enjoy this: https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-t...
In my primary business (used video games) I've found that the #1 way to get sales is:
- Give the consumer every feature they need (ideally communicate this in a picture)
- Be the first search result
It's not about detailed descriptions, super-competitive prices or superior product quality.
People will literally just throw money at the first product they see that ticks all the boxes.
In the SaaS world, where everything has a free trial, I can imagine this "rule" is even more true.
Awareness is a big deal and a necessary step before it's possible to even be in a consideration set.
For example, TV ads typically rank very low in any self-reported market research on influencing purchase intent.
And yet if you run a test in a DMA pulling TV ads you'll see sales decrease dramatically.
While the industry likes to pretend it has come a long way, in many cases marketing and advertising is still just as much "I know half of my ads work and half don't, I just don't know which half is which."
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 some benefits that I think applies to me and go checkout those products.
When I see such boxes "where did you hear about our product" I just type in "google" or "search engine" because I don't exactly have the time to go back through 100 tabs I have open and find the exact one article where I found the product and copy-pasta the url.
Nearly all of my colleagues also do this, because it is easier to type "google", so advice is to take these boxes with a grain of salt. A better metrics could be the referrer field on your site logs.
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.
It would be interesting is the site had the ability to make linear threads coming out of a comment, or start whole new branches. Then each branch could have an assorted “random asides” spot or something.
It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
I had enough of Raycon, Raid Legend and other bullcrap VPNs. Especially when those sponsors got greedy by asking a 2 minute and on a 8 minutes video. That's a quarter of it.
So I don't feel bad anymore for sponsorblock.
They get paid ad revenue based on ads served, they already got paid for the sponsorship.
Personally I feel that this is the wrong way round (however I'm totally morally ok with blocking ads of all kinds, I'd be a hypocrite otherwise, ads suck)
I'm not saying that on the balance it's wrong to use SponsorBlock (I'm a heavy ad blocker myself, and most of the arguments against SponsorBlock also apply to ad blocking in general), just that you can't justify it by pretending that you using SponsorBlock doesn't cost them anything.
I've not come across this as a negotiation thing directly or anecdotally, gave you the benefit of the doubt as maybe it was a super new thing that's not hit my radar yet.
We'd be giving ChatGPT the business for hallucinating, my theory is it learned to do that from internet forums :P
It's not that people don't want to financially support creators. It's that the targeted advertising business has become so manipulative and hostile that some people do not want to see ads for any product in any context.
You can do that with YouTube Premium + Sponsorblock. Or pay them in other ways while blocking all ads.
And anyway you can white-list creators you like. SponsorBlock is actually more useful for me to skip filler intro and ending content than to actually skip sponsors, which you can configure it not to skip if you so choose.
Other than that making the video is a sunk cost, the only company you cost money is Google.
A platform like PostHog would struggle to find the right audience on YouTube because it’s such a niche product.
I think this is a really good article, and I definitely agree both with the suggestion to use an agency (though I suppose I could be biased here!) - there's a lot of low-hanging fruit and it's definitely possible to do plenty yourself, but unless you really can't afford an agency there's surely more important things to work on yourselves. While hiring dedicated marketing people makes sense when you're a certain size or bigger I've still seen the best arrangement to be as few people internally as possible and being people who are not only good at marketing but more importantly good at managing, and have the bulk of the work handled by an agency. Rather than having to deal in giving whole people specific jobs, an agency can provide small amounts of time as needed from a wide range of experts on different aspects.
I also agree that it's a good idea to be familiar with with it all too, though, because that way you can actually judge which agencies are worth working with and you can actually work with them, rather than leave them alone and hope they're going to do a good job.
This article itself is a really great example of what they explained at the beginning - about writing. It's not a paid ad, but it got me interested in potentially using their analytics product from having previously not heard of them.
FWIW This article reminds me of the regular content on the HN front page 10+ years ago, the stuff that a lot of well known saas wrote to gain traction
> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks
I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks
I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!
But I disagree on Google Search:
> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.
Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.
1) "LinkedIn Good for awareness, bad for conversion." LI can smash it on conversion. Its expensive so you need a high customer lifetime value. Make a compelling offer and try conversation ads.
2) Facebook/IG also does work for targeting developers, better than anything else but LI and Search. It's funny because there's such loud anti-facebook developers out there, but plenty use it anyway.
Everyone I know who’s ever tried Ads there has gotten little or no conversions at all, while spending a ton of money (LI advertising is expensive!)
I'm a little surprised podcast ads weren't tried, mostly because I'd love to know how well those do/don't work out for a tool like this.
It never helps either, so I go back. And I don't think any ad pass through my ad-blocker. But I'm not very surprised by the ads there being useful.
b) the mandatory signup meme is and has always been ridiculous. it takes 8 seconds to create an account. for anyone who gets value out of something, that's not a big ask. if you're not willing to spend 8 seconds then it wasn't for you anyway.
I wasn't describing signups, I was specifically describing the Quora signup. People have been bitching about that for almost 15 years and nobody who actually uses and likes Quora cares. It's like the notch on the iPhone. Only something people who would never own an iPhone bitch about.
I am not saying you should signup. I am saying it's ridiculous to complain about it when it's clearly not a service you even like in the first place. Why do you care what some website you don't even like requires?
It was such a special place in the early years. Sad to see what they let happen to it. The saddest part is that it's surely deliberate. They have some really, really smart people working there. And they decided this is what they want.
Me too - I'd never heard of it, so I felt compelled to go and look. Bounced off the signup page and thought "That's probably why more people don't use it".
It might be worth signing up, but as I have no clue what it is or if it's any good, why would I invest that time?
But it's fair game to promote the same post on that subreddit, because that's what promotion is supposed to do.
That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments. As my co-founder said "You can’t just shout nonsense into the void without some accountability." I think the internet could use more of that.
(unpaid advert: we're also happily using posthog to track all of this. kudos to them for a great product.)
Ah, maybe you meant "honest" comments.
Below where? What a tease.
Cpms? Amount of impressions? Reach? What about viewability? Brand lift studies won't be possible at these budgets either.
Do they mean just asking people where they heard about them?
>
> Dark horse – good for conversion and awareness.
> Quite cheap, good targeting.
> Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora.
Amazed to hear that. All my homies hate Quora, I would assume its the same amongst other developer groups.
Who are those people is a good question, as I never met or heard of someone answering in Quora, and it is rare to see links to answers in it.
For example Alan Kay used to be pretty active on there, and other experts in different fields. As always you had to be careful to take everything with a grain of salt because some people used Quora as a creative writing outlet and it wasn't always obvious. Others ran business scams (sometimes not the get rich quick variety) and there was a famous-ish one made by someone called Gordon Miller on there (but I can't recall all the details).
But there was a lot of good stuff too, for example there was a guy in the fitness circles who accidentally used Quora as a springboard to a YouTube channel (Geoffrey Verity Schofield). But my favorite memory of Quora remains reading Richard Muller's answers regarding physics and life in general (and enjoying them very much) and then years later stumbling upon a book in a book shop that he wrote (Now: The Physics of Time). I don't know why but weirdly I felt more connected to the "creators" on Quora than the ones on other social media.
Long anecdote over, last time I browsed Quora was almost two years ago sadly.
These are the ads of "they can't come up with enough ads to show me because not enough people are advertising on this platform".
Maybe they are talking about the old Quora-- the one from 4-5 years ago?
It's a horrible website full of horrible answers. the UI is terrible and you often end up reading stuff that has nothing to do with the original question you were looking for. I think it's understandable that advertisers would avoid it based in their personal experience.
Quora was supposed to be the TED of QA. Well, not even TED is the TED of TED anymore so...
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.
If they can.
They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
But I was surprised when I syndicated my content there, that so many devs where engaging there.
When there is a slower sales cycle and a more complex or less transactional purchase then it all becomes much more vague and significantly harder to find ROI in my experience. The ad-click is likely to be one of a hundred factors compared to transactionally selling a widget.
Yep. As a developer, running a pihole, I don't see any ads and I wouldn't click even if I did.
I thought the tl;dr; of the article was going to be along the lines of "if you're selling a "developer tool", don't bother buying ads because "developers" (i.e. your customers) are likely going to lengths to not see these ads in the first place.
I don't think that's common. Do you mean like in big corp where they use their deep pockets to make sure they don't leave room for competition?
In other cases, people just expirement in order to find the right channel, similar to this post, which ultimately depends on the objective and target audience. Then they focus their efforts there.
And how many of those startups had a great product market fit and were successful, without a ton of incumbents in the industry eating their lunch?
How much budget did they have and how much of their runway did it eat up to try and run ads?
Many people blame ads for simply having a bad product that no one cares about and never finding the right audience for that product for them to even serve ads to in the first place.
> Turn off replies to ads (or have thick skin!)
Probably good advice in general, but most brand names don't need to worry about unwanted attention as much as "Post Hog".
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 (254 points | 7 months ago | 72 comments)
You’ve articulated the struggle better than anyone, and that’s very comforting for me. I mean, how hard could it be? Answer: super hard!
I haven’t tried hiring an offshore agency, but now you’ve got me thinking about it.
I’m surprised they haven’t been considered.
My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise software products.
If a product can be shown in a lighting fast video demo, I think Reels and TikTok have great potential.
But what's the conversion; as the article (and many more anecdotes and articles and real life P&L's) shows, is that very many companies are just randomly burning money on ads without conversion. So that you see the ads doesn't mean they convert at all. Did you ever buy anything via them? Or even sign up or click one?
I'm not saying you are wrong or so, but it would be good to hear from a similar product to what this posthog company has who has experience and knows conversions.
I think enterprises often just buy enormous inventory of ads and don't really are on top of how they convert; when i'm doing competitor analysis (and I shall include tiktok/insta now), I click on many competitor ads to see what their landing is and their flow; at least 5% of ads I click go to a 404/500/dns error page. So these enterprises are paying for that click (and many more) but cannot convert because it's not actually working. So those are simply monitoring nothing and throwing money in the river for 0 conversions. Probably hired some company to handle the campaigns and seeing it as 'cost of doing business' not expecting much in return in the first place?
Agency vs hiring? Yes, it makes sense. But there are A LOT of wonky agencies out there. Don't rely on their promises or even part performance. And be weary of those fond of vanity metrics and such.
Sure, go the agency route, but also do keep them on a shorter leach until they've proven themselves.
Though, if you want to sponsor me GloboMegaCorp, my opinion can definitely be bought.
But, I do think it helps awareness as we do get some folks that tell us I saw you on this repo or that.
We also do it to support projects we think are neat/useful to others even if we don’t use it.
Gotta admit, I read the article but I'm spending more time looking at the product. The writing brought me in, and now I'm aware of their product.
Is that a thing now? Companies restricting which search engine you're allowed to use at work? I've worked in some pretty locked down environments before where switching browsers wasn't an option (thankfully less of a thing now), but hadn't ever heard of a company restricting search engines.
Starting with the misconceptions:
> Paid ads =/= marketing
To be honest Meta are so good at target advertising. Everytime I open Facebook or Instagram, I must find an advert about something I am interested in.
Same with GoDot recently, once on Humble Bundle, then again on HN
Woah, do you really need to spend this much on 1 experiment to get quality data? That kinda sucks
From experience, I would have thought at _least_ $2000 per test.
I've been doing PPC stuff for 20 years. As soon as someone tells me they are doing PPC I ask them how they enjoy setting fire to all their money. Unless you have oodles of time to spend optimizing it and measuring it, you are guaranteed to just burn all your cash. It is very, very hard to win on PPC. One of the biggest problems is that unknowledgeable people in each domain are bidding on PPC ads without monitoring their spending or conversions and wasting their money, but their ads are bumping up the price of yours too.
If I ran 10 experiments/week, with the $2k measure, you're looking at 80k/month, just to get some validation.
The first thing I wanted to touch on is the idea that developers hate marketing - this is 100% accurate and I would recommend anyone doing marketing in the dev tool space to have this mindset.
For me the way I’ve dealt with this concept is to try to reframe what my objective is as a marketer. Fundamentally the SDK’s I’ve worked for do deliver value to a developer by helping them develop tools faster and in a more polished fashion. For some developers this is super useful and for others it will never be an option. For obvious reasons I focus on the developers that would see value in this and do everything in my power to make them aware that our solution exists.
My approach to developer marketing:
- Try to be direct as possible in how I communicate the features / capabilities / benefits while avoiding marketese / jargon etc
- I have a philosophy that if you provide value without any strings you benefit in the long run. That’s why I’ve always opposed gated content or even gating trials if possible.
- Developer experience is fundamental to the success of dev tools business. In my organization marketing takes an active role in dev experience - for example we helped reorganize documentation to make it more accessible and easier to navigate for our users. This had a dramatic impact in product adoption.
- Having a good demo should be the cornerstone of your marketing activities. It’s how developers see what you can do and gives your sales team the tools to sell your product effectively.
- Make use of things like live demos so developers can anonymously learn and observe your team without directly talking to a sales representative.
Some of the things I disagree with in the article.
Google display never works:
- This is not always the case. For obvious reasons retargeting is especially disliked in the developer world but in some cases it works. For me I’ll run a Google display campaign that targets any user that’s downloaded our SDK. For these users I focus on delivery display ads that help them integrate the product more effectively. For example I will create ads for these users that promote free trial support to help them build their POC. Typically marketing is not incentivized to drive an increase in support calls but if a user is having trouble building a POC then this is the ideal candidate for us to send to support.
- This also works for marketing pages - users who land on a marketing page will see ads for ungated content like “Buy vs Build” etc
The missing link between paid and organic traffic
Something that seems to be consistently overlooked is how the effort and money you spend on paid channels should help you make better decisions on increasing organic traffic. This is sometimes the main downside with hiring an agency - they might be really good on managing the paid side but don’t provide input on how you can use this to increase organic channels. For example:
- Identify which paid keywords drive conversions and use this data to prioritize your organic channels.
- Use the number of search impressions for your keywords to accurately measure demand for a service
- Use A/B testing to improve CTR in organic search. For example we had a really good blog article that did not have a great title. I ran a display campaign with different titles for this blog article. After about a month there was a clear winner and we renamed the blog article resulting in the ranking and traffic going up for the article.
Paid search and SEO do increase brand awareness
We primarily focused on paid search and SEO which resulted in a significant increase in the total number of users that searched for a brand year-over-year. The number of people searching for your brand is one of the best ways for you to measure brand awareness.
With all this said I do believe that ultimately any success you have marketing to developers manifests from your intentions. I’ve always believed that my intention as a marketer was to “help developers” by providing them tools to make their lives easier. I think this intention is mirrored in the work I do and has been a part of the reason we’ve been successful.
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; getting it from us saves you the time/cost of leaving the house and we know how valuable your time is" - and it actually ended up quite a decent ad.
People just love to hate, especially when there's no human face to something. Or, I think in the case of places/networks where the community is tight and niche, if you're going to interject your product you'd better have enough of an understanding to answer as if you belong/have been a silent part of it all along.
Complete aside - I'm glad I've never had to market to devs, haha.
It’s an unfortunate scenario for anyone who had to look at those tweets, I’m sure.
Then again, I've seen memes about it several times from completely outside of the dev/tech sphere because of this, so maybe in a way it works since it made me look up the company.
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 there.
That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. If you want to bring Redditors some overpriced vaporware you are absolutely right they're going to rip you apart. They're just doing what Redditors do - calling out bullshit.
Bring them a product worthy of praising and they'll make entire subreddits dedicated to your awesome product.
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.
> 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.
Dude doesn't seem hurt, they're just spitting facts.
Have those things happened on Reddit? Ya. Was that in any way an accurate summary of what Reddit is? No. And it's absurd to claim that it is.
"But look at this example and this one"
I could make a huge list of the times Reddit has been bad, too. That doesn't change a single thing about what I just said.
When submitting to reddit, you elplicitely cannot submit just to "reddit", you have to choose a subreddit. These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans can, even when apparently sharing the same topic/goal. Subreddits turn toxic sometimes, sometimes they're made that way intentionally. Some are hard fought places of positive intent with strong moderation and some are 'wild west'. Sometimes places get toxic enough that someone else creates a similarly named subreddit with an identical goal but attempts to cultivate and moderate a positive environment. If you didn't know about this you'd see 2 identical subreddits, when you post you'll get 2 very different receptions.
"Reddit"s response is entirely dependent upon subreddit. We cannot argue about how "reddit" reacts, and it's impractical to talk about individual redditors, the communities within, the subreddits, are the unit about which we can have meaningful conversation. There's no point in arguing about whether reddit has hurt someone or not or whether their reception was beneficial or degrading the community without knowing _which_ Community. There are places that will hurt everyone, there are places that will reject every product, there are places that won't. They are different places
I've never been anywhere on Reddit that doesn't have the specific characteristic that I'm referring to. If people think you are wrong, they tell you. If they think you're lying or spinning bullshit, they say so. If they think your method is suboptimal, they let you know the way they think is best.
This also applies to people on HN. We're engaged in it right now.
It’s trivial for companies to get past Reddit’s “bullshit detector”. Just sound like a scrappy small business that cares deeply about users and not money.
There is a trail of overfunded kickstarters with nothing to show years later that demonstrates how gullible redditors are.
Your overconfidence in a bunch of armchair experts is exactly why they are so gullible. Being susceptible to marketing is one thing. Thinking you’re not is so much worse.
> I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry.
You don’t speak for the community of which I’m a part. They also didn’t hurt me, they hurt the people they doxxed and I watched it happen years ago. That’s why there are strict doxxing bans now.
Redditors as a collective are as dumb as the average population (everyone gets equal votes), which doesn’t make for a good SNR.
> 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.
I do this too, but what you’re failing to grasp is that you don’t realize you’re also reading deception-based marketing pages. Corporations wised up to social media a decade ago and have armies of social media experts that know exactly how to target various online communities.
You're both wrong :). There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is scoped to a subreddit. You and GP are likely hanging out on different kinds of subreddits - but if your experience is that of "an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment", I strongly suggest you rethink which subreddits you follow. Yes, they probably need a different type of marketing, but they're probably also not worth it for technical products.
> Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”.
It's hard to tell, because cynicism and healthy realism overlap nearly 100% when it comes to modern business.
There is both.
For example, anonymity. There is nothing stopping people from using their real name as their username or openly revealing who they are, where they live and work etc. But the Reddit culture is to be anonymous.
Are there exceptions? Yes. But those exceptions don't change that it's an anonymous culture.
Any particular subreddit will have a specific ideological soft spot that a dedicated marketer will be able to identify and craft turf to exploit. It’s a fundamental flaw to anonymity.
That’s not my experience at all. I’m curious what makes you think that?
15+ years of living on Reddit.
Is it perfect at those things? Of course not. Can you and I and others provide a bunch of examples of those things not happening? Of course. It's still damned good at them.
I expanded at length here on how this works with regard to people trying to promote their products: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37703112
But it applies to all sorts of stuff, depending on the subreddit. Investing advice, sports trivia, historical facts, whatever.
Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?
I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge. I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.
I'm talking about the culture of the entire site. From tiny subreddits to huge ones and every topic.
> I’ve found the negativity on Reddit to be more likely as to come from completely ignorant sources as anyone with actual knowledge.
Maybe we're talking about different things here. You seem to be referring to jerks. I was referring to people calling stuff out. People can call things out politely. One could say you're doing it right now - you disagree with me and you're explaining why. You're not being negative but what you're doing would be an example of what I mean. Redditors do this. If they see something they think is wrong, they say so. Sometimes in great numbers. Sometimes politely, sometimes very rude. Sometimes with the IQ of a hamster and sometimes it's a genius. But they let you know.
> I'm pretty surprised anyone on there for a long period of time would be so trusting of the community there.
I don't know what you mean by trusting. They're not always right. I don't automatically believe whatever they say. It's like in Jackie Brown. 'You can't trust melanie, but you can always trust melanie to be melanie.' I trust Reddit to be Reddit. If they see something they don't agree with or think is false or think is misleading or think is not the best way - they're gonna let you know.
Reddit also seems to suffer from something you see in a lot of online communities, where in the valley of the blind the one eyed man is king. People with a slight amount experience (or even hobbyists that just post a lot) get taken as authoritative sources that can’t be questioned. Working on your history degree? You can go to Reddit and be treated with more authority than most people even give accomplished historians. One of the many individuals who served as a squad leader in the army? You can get treated as if you’re an expert on all things military and are able to more accurately predict the outcome of conflicts than the Defense Department is.
Meanwhile the “inverse Reddit” investing strategy works even better than “inverse Cramer”
Reddit comments are the whiskey to YouTube comment’s beer on the stupidity index.
Very interesting way you put that and sorta gets to the heart of the matter.
To me it doesn't even make sense, like, why would I get my information on social media. I'm telling you what I've seen on Reddit. But you went to what people say other places. Which is clearly how a lot of you are getting your information.
And ya, I've seen the receipts. I've got some receipts of my own.
If someone needs their ass kissed to recognize I'm right, that's on them. Not me.
The poster you're replying to is 100% correct.
No idea how anyone can say this earnestly about Reddit while having spent as much time there as you claim you have. It's a horrible corner of the internet rife with all kinds of bigotry and hatred and negativity for the sake of it. Not to mention it's the easiest place to astroturf ever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_of_Sunil_Tripathi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_celebrity_nude_photo_leak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversial_Reddit_communiti...
If you took what I said to be some type of blanket 'Reddit is a perfect and wonderful place' you misunderstood.
‘Show HN’ posts often have a mix of different comparatively negative comments: from the (classic) I could do this quicker/cheaper/easily, alternatives being posted, genuine criticisms (+/- misunderstandings) of the offering, criticism of the underlying website due to choices made around design/fonts/contrast/processor utilisation/JS use…
It’s such a nice surprise when there’s a ‘Show HN’ and the comments are predominantly supportive and/or positive!
Lots of people don’t end up shipping and sometimes the allergic reaction to someone else shipping says more about the commenter than what’s being shared.
Such an easy thing to say.
Then when I say it and think "I really just need a little bit of what this does, and this API is kinda complicated for that." and I go and start creating the thing it evolves and changes and "Hey this looks a lot like that complicated API ... ooooooohhhhh I see why that is what it is... this is going to take a long while."
It's just so easy to boil down something into something simple and think that's all it is, but do even that thing reliably and all the corner cases and other things you need, suddenly you find it is way more than your initial poo pooing if whatever the thing is.
Everything is easy for the people who don't have to do it!
You want readers to think "that would be easy, maybe I'll do it". They start to believe it's important they have what you're offering and they think they'll do it themselves.
Well, we know how attention spans are these days, if something takes 30 minutes of work it will probably never get done. Most of the people will give up, and a lot of them will buy your hosted service instead because they've already convinced themselves it's important. If it's important enough to someone that they would spend their time on it, they'll spend money on it too. You want people willing to spend time / money on something to have good will towards your company.
Now we're on a track where we understand the value more than the front page of a website that "hey we sell <boiled down product description that to a dev doesn't sound like much>".
There is always someone that think they can do it faster and better but happens to never do anything that anybody buys.
If one was looking to open it up to a wider audience, it would see their costs rise 3x too, but if one is only looking to use something for internal use there isn't much need to incur any of those additional costs.
The former CEO of Routeware before he sold it to Vista Equity Partners said that he required his sales team to secure three clear “No’s” for each buyer within an organization before fully disqualifying a lead.
So if you’re selling to a “software architect” and the CTO has to provide the final sign off.
- three no’s from the architect
- three no’s from the CTO
It’s funny how easily we give up on potentially successful concepts by not getting to a “No” faster or even at all.
It’s completely foreign to software engineers.
Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, for any product or service. You’re already at a disadvantage by being the source of the end user’s ire, so winning them over is extra hard.
Something like Instagram is all ads, isn't it. But people do want to see the ads because they're mostly "content". I devour ads for Creality 3D printers which look like "how to make this neat gizmo". Similarly I love ads for outdoor gear that are couched as "how to tie this knot" or "how to make a Swedish candle fire without wire". And the "how to make this pottery" which is really, 'my pots are awesome, buy some'.
Just recently I've been into adverts for comedian's tours on Facebook, which are little 2-5 minute excerpts from their routine.
So, yeah. I don't think I'm an outlier.
I'm with the person suggesting "show them how to do it for themselves" as a pretty good advert, but I've not looked at the OP yet, maybe they'll give away the crown jewels.
no, people are suffering themselves, competitive pressures, personal failure and doubt, but more the external F-U response.. drugs like alcohol also play a part.. What is true is that without actual interaction, the social filters change quickly
Sometimes they are simply not the target market (yet) and that’s okay.
I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _do_ suspect I'm the sort of potential customer that isn't easily studied in an A/B test.
Cheers!
Perhaps it's time for a "Best viewed on Firefox" button?
@james_impliu: I like simple text websites. Why do web devs love making simple things complex?
It's mind-blowing but a lot of people think react, nextjs and vercel (to pick a random provider) is the only way to make web apps.
I can see why the dev didn't notice this when debugging locally, as there it probably loads the left menu without delay.
Ah, its entire point is to stalk unwitting users. I guess my filter was correct!