ShowHN: My first company – AdTemple | Hacker News Reader

ShowHN: My first company – AdTemple

10 pointsadammacleod8 comments

Hey HN,

AdTemple is an advertising platform that lets you create adverts using Mustache templates. Simple, unimaginative and hopefully useful.

AdTemple started because I liked the idea and thought I could build a MVP very quickly. Unfortunately things always take longer than intended and motivation dies as FUD kicks in. I struggle with anxiety like many developers and finishing a project becomes increasingly hard.

I have reached the point where the extra potential motivation gained from seeking customers/feedback has outweighed my fears of showing my product publicly. I have always been fully aware of finding customers before building a product and I guess this is my belated effort at doing so.

I would love to hear your thoughts on both my company idea and the execution of my sales page. I am eager to learn and welcome any and all feedback. My plan now is to look for critique followed by some paid advertising to see if I can hopefully engage some customers.

You can view my site at http://www.adtemple.net/ and contact me via adam@adtemple.net if you wish.

My Sincerest Thanks, Adam

I signed up for your newsletter.

I might not be the typical user, but since you're trying to embrace an international market, you might want to add support for Bitcoin as a currency.

I see that this is a service that helps you create advertisements, but I don't see anything about where the advertisements go.

I'm a newb when it comes to the online advertising space. All the acronyms (PPC, CPC, etc) and economics that power the whole thing make me avoid placing any ads because I can never get an intuitive feel if my money is being wasted or not.

Edit: Some more thoughts... If you do add a section for site owners who are wanting to place advertisements on their page, make sure to focus on things like the ability to control the CSS of the ad so the fonts look good.

Does anyone know if Google might accidentally see ads like these as being linkspam?

Hi Deftnerd,

Thanks for your feedback, it is greatly appreciated.

Bitcoin would certainly make things easier from a currency perspective and I imagine there are other benefits too. I will investigate it as an option.

The advertisements are just plain HTML and can be worked into your site anywhere you please. Perhaps it isn't super clear but the site owners are the ones who define the advertisements, not the advertisers. This means that the site owners fully control how the ads look and what information is collected.

Google linkspam isn't something I'd thought about, thank you for bringing it up. I'm not entirely familiar with how Google treats such things but I will look into it. If anyone has anything to suggest that would be fantastic.

It should be enough to place those links as "nofollow"

Thanks trienthusiast, I will look into it further :)

The site is cool, and the Idea is more cooler than that, but below are the views IMHO,

What your site does and how it works can be more informative.. 1) I have read it top to bottom three times but still unable to get a clear picture out of it.. A short video of how it works could be included...

2) Make the user's feel they will get more incentive for using the service..

3) create some extra pages, a blog would look good, and along with some pricing details would be more nice to have..

Hi bluerail,

Thanks for taking time to reply! You are correct about it being hard to follow, I have had that come up a few times now. I hadn't thought about a video but I will investigate that option!

Your 2nd and 3rd points also make a lot of sense and I will work to include them.

Thanks :)

I like it.

I really like it.

Banner, video, graphic ads are annoying.

Many users intrinsically ignore them, others have ad-blocking software.

This will work.

Publishers will love it (if the CPM's are high enough).

User's will engage with it.

Websites will look less spammy.

Thanks factorialboy! I really appreciate the vote of confidence.

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