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Comment by jmduke | Hacker News Reader

The argument OP makes is 'I made $10,000 in one day thanks to Facebook, thus Facebook is a superior platform' which is undeniably faulty.

1. The OP did not make $10,000 in one day. 2. We don't know how well this would have done on a non-Facebook platform.

My point is that this is like arguing that Facebook is a wonderful platform because Apple makes a lot of money and Apple uses Facebook to advertise. Apple would be making a lot of money without Facebook ads, too; if a company using Facebook ads generates $X revenue, that doesn't mean those Facebook ads were responsible for a specific amount of the revenue.

In short: congrats to the author! But this doesn't really prove anything.

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I'm curious - what other ad platform could I have turned to drive local commerce? Always interested to hear how other folks would approach the same problem.

I still have some records left over, thinking about doing another sale, would be game to test another means of customer acquisition and report back with results.

Really quickly, the first thing that I would turn to would be Craigslist - is there a reason you chose Facebook ads over Craigslist?

His business is in facebook ads ...

While a worth while experiment, you are still going to have a hard time getting a comparable result set. You have records left over... presumably all the ones that the first batch of shoppers didn't want. You are also targeting a local set of people... hundreds of which already attended your sale and have picked up the records they wanted. If your next sale is solely advertised on, say, Craigslist, I would not be surprised if your take was much less than $10k. But I would not necessarily blame that on Craigslist when those other factors are just as likely to affect a second Facebook advertised sale as well.

jeff chimed in before me. if I were in your shoes, I would have probably leaned on Craigslist and the area subreddit (the latter is very hit or miss, but I could see something niche like records doing really well.) I'm not a vinyl guy, but I'm sure there are a TON of niche forums out there worth looking at as well.

I really wish you could apply multi-armed bandit approaches to physical problems like these more easily; obviously its hard to do A/B testing when you only have one actual supply.

Yeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet.

There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past).

In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.

The OP did not make $10,000 in one day.

Now you're almost willfully missing the point.

Yes, but you did not read the title did you. It's an obvious Jab at the fact that FB overcharges. However the point was, the OP made a net profit of < 10k. The OP used it as a facebook EVENT not a click-through link. So this is not an Apples - to - Apples comparison.

You're almost wilfully ignoring that the poster is claiming that he's devised a way of making $10000 profit at 3000%+ ROI but decided instead to make a startup aimed solely around facebook ads - which coincidently were the things he took advantage of to achieve this massive product.

Surely something with stats as lucrative as this yard sale would mean that he would create a startup based around selling other peoples stuff after advertising through FB events instead??

It's actually an idea that I've entertained before, and I think there's tons of businesses that could be built in this space (for example, I'm a huge fan of Yardsale, and this could be an interesting growth strategy for them, to build Facebook Ads directly into their platform).

Right now though, I'm having a blast working on Facebook Analytics with my team at PageLever.

Are you so naive as to think that the only reason people do startups is to make money ?

Are you so naive as to think that someone would create a Facebook ad analytics company for something other than money? Not exactly changing the world bettering humanity type of stuff.

A lot of people happen to find analytics and mathematics quite stimulating.

So many in fact there are even university courses for it.

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