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Comment by elenak | Hacker News Reader

Marketing is essential and the biggest problem with most startups. And I'm a founder in a startup that suffered for a while from lack of new users.

If you have the money, you should try advertising in places you feel that will bring you customers. But you probably knew that and don't have the money ;)

Well, having a partner that has some background on marketing would be good. Also, posting on hackernews and similar sites can give you a small boost shorterm. But you've obviously thought of that :P

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You're correct that money is a problem, I can't afford to spend a lot of money on ads until I reach the point where they generate enough subscription revenue to be profitable. Polishing the product to bring it out of beta and then raising the price could help here.

I actually did run a tiny experiment with $20 on Google adwords, but I wasn't impressed because:

- I had to pay over ¢30 per click. - It gave me a high proportion of users using IE <= 9 on which the site doesn't work properly.

I'll probably work on a new ad in future. Do you have any suggestions apart from Google Ad-words that may be appropriate?

Facebook advertising has always appealed to me. The amount of parameters you can filter users to display your ads to is so specific, you can really squeeze it down to your exact target demographic. e.g. Only to users that are over 18 (so they can pay for your service), under xx age (whichever age you expect people won't be interested), by interests (language learning!), by current location and birthplace (might be able to figure out some combinations that would be ideal for language learners. E.g. if they were born in the UK but living in France) and so on. It defaults to CPM, but I'd definitely go for CPC.

Thanks, funnily enough I started a tiny Facebook ad campaign to familiarise myself with it just yesterday. Need to put in some work to make the facebook page and ad more attractive before drawing any conclusions about its effectiveness though.

I agree the amount of targeting you can do is very cool.

Marketing guy here. Word of caution: FB ads are notoriously bad at getting clicks. Usually worse than AdWords. It's always great to test, but don't bet the farm on a FB ad campaign.

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