Failed HN Launch vs. Reddit Paid Advertising: Which Converts Better

I've done a lot of PPC over the years and the one thing I learned over and over again is the best ROI always comes when you inject yourself into the end of the buying cycle. What I mean is, the closer to making a purchasing decision they are, the more likely they are to buy whatever product fits what they are looking for because they've already been educated about the problem, solution, etc.

In the affiliate marketing world, this is why review sites are so darn popular for making money. People go to them when they are making a buying decision and if they click on the product link after reading the review, it drops a cookie and in many cases they will buy that same session anyway.

Price comparison or deal sites are also kind of in the same end point of the buying cycle. The person has already decided to buy a particular item, so whoever can offer the best deal or whoever has the best bonus item/service/brand is going to probably make the sale.

By being on HN, there are probably a lot more people looking for your particular solution than just the average reddit reading programmer. There is some overlap, but I would imagine the average HN user is closer to a devops role than the average reddit programmer. If only cuz I'd imagine a lot of reddit programming readers are working on some enterprise software where they aren't allowed to touch the DNS anyway.

Also, good job on making a follow up post that did make it on HN. When life gives you lemons...

I am still lost to the benefits of managing DNS with github. I can't see the documentation, and the free trial button leads to the scariest signup page in history. It wants read/write access to my private repos.

I think a general pattern is people subscribe to subreddits and just let reddit do it's thing to populate their front page, never actually visiting the specific subreddit. I do this myself for a lot of subreddits I subscribe to.

I wonder if reddit has any plans to modify the ad display logic to display ads on the front page that are targeted to specific subreddits if the user is subscribed to the same subreddit. I think that'd be interesting.

A 1.2% conversion ratio end-to-end for SaaS startups that don’t ask for a credit card in advance suggests that if we can get 1000 visitors, then we should expect 100 trial users, converting to 1 paid user. At least that’s the theory.

I follow that the 1.2% is from the total visitors. 10% * 15% * 80% = 1.2%. So they should have expected 12 paid users per 1000 visitors.

One question on the conclusion... Indeed Show HN seems to be a much better (more efficient) option for a good product. But how do you scale it? There are only so many communities you can find. Advertising can be much more easily scaled. If you want 100 more view, pays 100 more times the money. Or perhaps 50 times the money if you can get a volume discount.

In general, our conversion rate from visit to signup is around 30% but with HN traffic it was significantly lower, around ~8% for that burst of traffic. Obviously, HN is not our target demographic of users.

We do not have a paying option, thus we only have the front end conversion number at this point.

> The conclusion I’ve drawn from this is that paid advertising, even highly targeted paid advertising, is no match for actual user outreach.

What you did was not "highly targeted." Nor does it make sense to draw a conclusion about an entire form of advertising from a single attempt. Paid advertising works very well for some companies (I've run them dozens of times), and can be optimized over time to do even better.

My numbers were very different.

For WeCombinate, I received 84 visits from HN or HN related (showhn.com etc) but for Payments Plugin I saw a spike up to 386 for one day straight from HN.

The WeCombinate post fell away very quickly with zero comments but the post with the Payments Plugin link stayed around on the bottom on the home page for about 6-8 hours.

Overall, I didn't see any conversions as a result of the HN traffic although I don't think HN is my target audience really.

Just thought I'd add some more data points into the conversation.

I would say your sample size is not nearly large enough to be conclusive. :)

I think its possible that your product could have gone over many peoples heads, at least in that particular sub.

Have you looked into subreddits like r/webdevelopment or r/html5( or javascript,CSS)? They have less readers but maybe they're more your target?

- a generic Udemy ad on a generic site: 10k impressions, 11 clicks, 0 conversion - a specific course advertised on a niche newsletter: 1800 impressions, 15 clicks, 0 conversion

And for conversions I mean neither a sale nor a new signup into the system.

Numbers that low could be attributed to miss-clicks, users who thought it was an r/programming post.

All speculation mind.