[HN Gopher] Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool - what we'v...
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Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool - what we've learned
Author : fmerian
Score : 492 points
Date : 2023-09-29 08:30 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (posthog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (posthog.com)
| [deleted]
| vax425 wrote:
| Thanks for sharing, mainly because I've felt like an idiot for
| utterly failing at marketing my tool (https://HeadlampTest.com)
| online to developers & testers. I get great results talking 1:1
| in person, but nothing else moves the needle.
|
| 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.
| throwawysn38 wrote:
| > Seriously, I don't know why more people don't use Quora.*
|
| 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...
| hermitcrab wrote:
| It seems to be increasingly full of pro-Putin trolls. and
| ridiculous 'questions' such "Why is <country> such a
| shithole?".
| dale_glass wrote:
| > This is why we ask all users where they heard about PostHog
| whenever they sign up or book a demo - it's a simple (optional)
| free text field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or
| similar that we know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of
| them.
|
| 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.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| Yeah, I agree about positive discussion in technical space.
| Even if it's just the founder coming on a Reddit thread and
| shilling their own stuff while still providing value by
| comparing it to other products.
|
| 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
| doggerel wrote:
| Totally agree. Value is the most important thing if you are
| going to talk about yourself. It's not even like it's that
| hard to just try to be excellent to people and to users and
| share something worthwhile. But time and again, this is where
| people fall down.
|
| Weirdly, google ads and GA4 are great examples of not
| providing value and not treating people or users well. And
| yet they cling on.
| [deleted]
| Lutger wrote:
| I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps
| you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it
| automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can
| be entirely unaware of this and it still works.
|
| 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.
| navane wrote:
| Indeed, you remember the brand, but forget how you got to
| know it. So even though you learned about something through
| ads, and you hate ads, eventually you'll forget that it was
| ads that put it in your brain, but you'll still remember the
| brand.
|
| That's why I call ads psychological violence. They force
| themselves in your brain and there's nothing you can do
| against it
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| We need a worst offenders list so that every day we can
| look at the list and make a point to share something true
| and embarrassing about a company on 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.
| dale_glass wrote:
| Yes, but it can work in the opposite direction as well.
|
| 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.
| rchowe wrote:
| I believe the economics of VPN companies is that they have
| a quite inexpensive, commodity product which has a lot of
| churn. The ads get people to sign up for a month or two at
| any price, which pays for the cost of the ads.
|
| 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.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| In the vast majority of cases, these creators are only
| taking slight liberties with talking points provided by
| the advertiser.
|
| 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.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| Nordvpn seemed like a decent choice for streaming bbc but
| I won't use them because of a company advertises that
| hard it must be bad. I would never trust them for privacy
| they are too big
| adra wrote:
| Apparently VPNs are stupidly high margins so the more
| lemmings to convert, the more pockets lined.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| There did not seem to be a lot of lower cost options for
| watching bbc they all cost about the same dispite high
| margins
| nextaccountic wrote:
| thr notdvpn ads may have enlarged the consumer market for
| vpns as well, which may benefit other vpns like mullvad
| (people that never heard about vpns are convinced by the ad
| that vpns are needed, searches more on google or reddit and
| end up selecting what is considered the "most private" one,
| that is, not nordvpn)
| zarzavat wrote:
| Sure but for every person like you there's several people
| who are not knowledgable about VPNs and use NordVPN because
| it's the one thing they heard about the most.
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| And an absolute truckload of people deep in the para-
| social relationship who couldn't imagine their 'friend'
| steering them wrong on a product, intentionally or
| otherwise
| zarzavat wrote:
| Tom Scott is a good example of the influence of VPN
| money. He made an entire video about how and why he would
| not make ads for VPNs because VPN ads are deceptive, this
| video got millions of views ...and then later he started
| making ads for VPNs (NordVPN iirc). I always wonder how
| much they bought him for.
| hennell wrote:
| Pretty sure he made a video about him doing those ads
| when he did them to answer that question, but you kind of
| answer it in your description anyway. His objection to
| VPN ads wasn't the fact it was a VPN, but the deceptive
| content in the ads. Promises they don't deliver, benefits
| you get from basic SSL anyway etc.
|
| 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.
| swyx wrote:
| also check if it's just alphabetically sorted - "a" comes
| before the other options, and people being lazy just pick that
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Could you list down some non popular digital service you pay
| for(i.e. not google workspace, AWS etc.) and how you heard
| about it?
| dale_glass wrote:
| Sure.
|
| 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.
| cj wrote:
| In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.
|
| 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.
| dale_glass wrote:
| > In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.
|
| 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.
| hennell wrote:
| There is a real problem with discovery without any ads.
| I'm still aware of movies, but I never have much idea
| what TV shows exist anymore, or even when shows I like
| might are back on the air/streaming.
|
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| In general, I don't want to "discover" products, not at
| all times of the day, on every web site I visit, every
| radio and TV station I tune into, every billboard I pass.
|
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| Not knowing about whats new on TV is a feature! Given the
| wealth of tv and movie content available, should you be
| treating a canceled show that wasn't intriguing enough to
| look into at the time as a loss?
| Metacelsus wrote:
| >For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word
| "proprietary".
|
| You may enjoy this: https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-
| ive-been-exposed-t...
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| sfink wrote:
| Aren't you mostly talking about what the article calls
| awareness vs conversion? You're saying that ads made you aware
| and technical discussion is what would make you convert.
|
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| > Bad PR is good for awareness
|
| 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/...
| gascoigne wrote:
| What do you use to do your taxes then?
| Retr0id wrote:
| Even _negative_ discussion can be a positive signal sometimes,
| e.g. if it 's someone complaining about the rough edges that
| they still use a product in spite of - because it still
| ultimately solves their problems.
| yunohn wrote:
| > If you ask how I first noticed that something exists, then
| yes, an ad
|
| 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.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Wouldn't that still be a beneficial thing? It's like how I
| don't need a plumber but if I did need a plumber I'd go reach
| for the last one I remember.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > [re: bing ads]: Good only if you want to target users at large
| enterprises where they are forced to use Bing.
|
| 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.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| I often stumble on clients who use Edge without knowing it, and
| then using Bing because they don't know how to change it, but I
| can imagine some might not be able to change any browser
| settings (although, imo, Google is pretty much as bad as Bing
| lately).
| [deleted]
| mcbrienollie wrote:
| Day after day, the paid(online) ads is becoming traditional and
| all the startup owners or new entrepreneurs are diverting
| themselves into guerilla techniques. Buying Tiktok comments,
| ProductHunt reviews and more. Rather than spending the money on
| the algorithmic advertisement, they are trying to build a base
| where they can create a "base" for their possible customers. I
| really liked the article, and I think this is showing a couple of
| crucial signs about the topic I mentioned.
| zegl wrote:
| What are peoples thoughts on sponsoring open source projects as a
| way to build awareness for dev tools? I think I've seen PostHogs
| logo in sponsor sections in some READMEs.
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| We do a little bit of this with depot.dev and it doesn't have
| meaningful conversion.
|
| 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.
| james_impliu wrote:
| we mainly do this because it can just help with getting PRs
| approved if we want to fix an issue in something we rely on
| (and it is nice / we can list as a perk), and a little
| influence can be very valuable if we want to give feedback on a
| project's direction. doesn't do much on the growth side as far
| as i'm aware, for us at least.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| I have never once clicked a "sponsors" logo, but I have
| definitely seen a logo I know and probably thought better of
| the company for it - baring GloboMegaCorps that I have long
| since calcified my opinions about.
|
| Though, if you want to sponsor me GloboMegaCorp, my opinion can
| definitely be bought.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Hah, this site was in the filter list for my firewall.
| jdwyah wrote:
| Also marketing to developers, I've had the most success and
| enjoyed Reddit the most so far. It feels the most honest. Want to
| tell a bunch of rails developers about your dynamic logging? You
| can try to write a useful post that also mentions your product
| onto r/rubyonrails/ but you're run the risk of being downvoted
| into oblivion with "venordz spam suxxxx".
|
| 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.)
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| >That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky
| comments.
|
| Ah, maybe you meant "honest" comments.
| datavirtue wrote:
| That mascot/logo is adorable. I just want to feed it!!
| asicsp wrote:
| Related: https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-for-startups
|
| Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 _(254
| points | 7 months ago | 72 comments)_
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Awareness-based ads are a small part of creating demand. This
| takes more effort to measure, but is totally possible - see
| below.
|
| 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?
| mdopslevel wrote:
| [flagged]
| rideontime wrote:
| Definitely limit your twitter replies if your company is named
| something like "post hog."
| https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=post%20hog (possibly
| NSFW)
| gmanis wrote:
| Nice article and PostHog is one of my favourite startups to look
| for especially on the culture side. Your careers page and
| compensation calculator is a breath of fresh air.
| [deleted]
| dielll wrote:
| I found it weird that they did not use Meta's products(Facebook
| and Instagram) but used Twitter.
|
| 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.
| callalex wrote:
| This company must have done something totally awful, the whole
| domain is automatically blocked by my DNS filters...
|
| Ah, its entire point is to stalk unwitting users. I guess my
| filter was correct!
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| Off topic but I love the Posthog brand, marketing and tone of
| voice. A real exemplar of how to market a developer tool.
| nico wrote:
| It would be very useful for a lot of people who commented on this
| previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702) to
| read this article
|
| Starting with the misconceptions:
|
| > Paid ads =/= marketing
| [deleted]
| aldousd666 wrote:
| This page is down, I can't read the article.
| ripdog wrote:
| It's probably being blocked by your DNS-adblocker.
| mavhc wrote:
| I learned about them from yesterday's HN post about Open source
| and profitability, and this post. 2 mentions in a row sticks in
| my mind.
|
| Same with GoDot recently, once on Humble Bundle, then again on HN
| d--b wrote:
| Ok, so that page itself is an ad for PostHog. Sigh.
| sakerbos wrote:
| Relying on an ad to convert a user is a big ask. Another approach
| could be to offer something high value to your target market in
| exchange for their email which you could then use to slowly raise
| awareness and convert users over a series of emails that offer
| even more value to them. That way you're greatly increasing the
| surface area of interactions with potential users while still
| genuinely helping them.
| zubairq wrote:
| I would recommend content marketing myself, addressing a pain
| point that the problem solves in a blog post.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the
| developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)
|
| > 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I looked through someone's Google Ads account once to find that
| he has spent several thousand dollars on clicks from mobile
| games for under 5s. This was B2B software. Never accept Google
| Ad defaults!
| warpspin wrote:
| And I want to add: Never trust Google's salespeople on
| expansions of your campaigns. They will helpfully offer to
| setup supposedly well targeted reach campaigns for you ;-)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > I'm a big fan of hiring an agency if you're a startup - paying
| $5-10k/mo for a small, outsourced team is way more efficient at
| this stage than hiring one paid ads specialist.
|
| 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.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| > Twitter
|
| > 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".
| sjm wrote:
| lol exactly, especially on Twitter. Who's in charge of branding
| here? dril?
| dangus wrote:
| What about Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok?
|
| I'm surprised they haven't been considered.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| This seems like a very techy product; would the audience be
| there? It's a question as I don't know, but if I see my own
| usage as a techy, it's not; I don't know anyone who even
| likes/uses these platform in my cto/decision making circles.
| But I would really like to know as if there is significant
| conversion opportunity there (and not just tossing away money)
| for a very tech product (with code examples on the homepage
| like this one) then it would be interesting.
| dangus wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to underestimate the amount of tech
| people on social media. A lot of people who have privacy
| awareness and say that Meta and ByteDance are evil
| surveillance capitalism companies still use their services. I
| might even go as far as arguing that it's hard not to without
| feeling left out of the cultural zeitgeist.
|
| 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.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| > My social feeds are filled with ads for enterprise
| software products.
|
| 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?
| cm2012 wrote:
| I've targeted developers on FB/IG at high budgets
| successfully with good ROI attributed to it.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Could you provide some more info? Like for what for
| instance? Desktop apps, mobile apps, saas, job openings,
| certification, courses, ...?
| qingcharles wrote:
| I don't use IG enough to fully understand their ads, but I
| think the ads are well integrated on Facebook and TikTok, and
| also well-targeted. I regularly click on ads and buy products
| from TikTok. There are tons of offers I get to test out
| advertising at a huge discount on both platforms which would be
| worth someone taking advantage of to see if it fits your niche.
| On Facebook you only need some text and an image, but on TikTok
| you would have to go to the trouble of creating a video, but
| you could pay someone from Fiverr if you didn't care too much
| about the quality (which isn't a huge issue on TikTok as lower
| quality can often come across as more authentic).
| cm2012 wrote:
| I've spent about $100m on B2B ads in the last 12 years, including
| to developers. Overall the article is not bad but it's missing
| some things:
|
| 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.
| nico wrote:
| What's your secret for LinkedIn?
|
| 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!)
| cm2012 wrote:
| Have a great offer (get a demo is not enough), try
| conversation and newsfeed ads, work with a contractor who
| knows it. Expect to spend 10 to 20k testing though. Not for
| low budgets.
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| PostHog is a fantastic product and I really feel like they are
| becoming the company that is looking to broadly share their
| learnings/experience with others.
| n_ary wrote:
| > we ask all users where they heard about PostHog whenever they
| sign up or book a demo - it's a simple (optional) free text
| field. Enough of our users say 'ad on Google' or similar that we
| know paid ads do actually reach a large chunk of them.
|
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "I don't remember" needs to be an option for this question.
| 22289d wrote:
| You don't have to give the url, you can just say 'found it
| online' 'saw it an article'. anything like that will be much
| more helpful than giving them false information.
|
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| I think the point is that most people have extremely-low-to-
| zero motivation to spend time actually thinking about that
| question, so they pick whatever makes the request go away. I
| know I'm like that, exemplified by the fact that if the
| question is mandatory, and I pick something which triggers an
| extra text field for more information, I am much more like to
| try and change the intial option to something that doesn't
| require the extra input rather than having to think about
| what to write.
| 22289d wrote:
| one day i will figure out how to respond to a minor detail,
| without making people think i'm addressing the main point.
| fluoridation wrote:
| Have you tried prepending "just a minor note to add to
| what you said:"?
| bee_rider wrote:
| I wonder if this is a problem with the branching
| structure of these sorts of discussion boards? Every
| comment is in some sense the start of a new
| conversation... it sometimes feels like there's a
| tendency to want to grow a thread to meet that "whole
| conversation" measure. Maybe the issue is that little
| details don't make it, so context gets pulled from the
| main thread?
|
| 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.
| digitcatphd wrote:
| IMHO anything B2B it's best to start with email and cold
| outreach. This tends to get feedback quickly and is very cheap.
| swores wrote:
| Disclaimer: I run a small European marketing agency (though our
| minimum monthly budget for clients is a few times bigger than
| discussed & recommended in the article).
|
| 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.
| niknikson wrote:
| Really appreciate this article and wanted to add a few of my
| thoughts. I've been an inhouse marketer in the Dev Tool space for
| 2 different SDK companies over the last 5 years. The majority of
| my focus has been on paid / organic search channels (primarily
| google) because these two channels had the largest impact in the
| number of leads we generate.
|
| 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.
| rjakobsson wrote:
| PostHog is my favourite startup as of lately. Their company
| culture seems to really be pushing things to the next level. Very
| inspiring!
| ransom1538 wrote:
| Take a lawn sign. Paint it white and black. In it, just put your
| domain and your uri. iamaretardbuyingads.com/test1 <- just put
| this in your lawn sign. Test a lawn sign vs 2k a month google
| budget. WELL, I have tried this. The lawn sign wins.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| I've had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I don't
| know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid ads.
|
| 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.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > I've had my own startups and worked with tens of others. I
| don't know anybody who has had good experience or ROI with paid
| ads.
|
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I see a comment like this on every discussion about ads for
| businesses, despite the fact that incrementality is easy to
| measure and quite good for a lot of businesses.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I'll share a small secret. I don't know how replicable this is
| but I'm curious. Ad sets work really well for a while and then
| the numbers start getting faker and faker. So what I do is
| duplicate sets and everyday pause one and start another. This
| has given me better numbers although never 100% reliable
| numbers. All ad platforms fake some data and charge you for it.
| imadj wrote:
| > we all play the game but nobody admits they just aren't very
| good
|
| 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.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I started using Google Ads in the early days and could get
| loads of well targetted clicks for PS0.05 to PS0.10 each. Those
| days are over. The "law of shitty clickthrus" says that every
| advertising channel gets less profitable over time.
| danjc wrote:
| The house of Google always wins.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| What is 'not really good'? We had spectacular ROI on adwords
| ads. BUT, and the article mentions this somewhat, _not_ for
| tech /freemium saas products. Developers avoid ads like the
| plague. For consumer stuff that are just immediately paid
| (there is no free; you pay or you leave the landing page) it
| works incredibly well in our experience.
| morning-coffee wrote:
| > Developers avoid ads like the plague.
|
| 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.
| benjaminwootton wrote:
| This is the one situation where it does work better. Many
| years ago I was interested in affiliate marketing, where
| there was a relatively immediate purchase. The aim then was
| to optimise spend and conversion rate and a profit could be
| eeked out.
|
| 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.
| k__ wrote:
| _" Developers avoid ads like the plague."_
|
| If they can.
|
| They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
| intrasight wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| No, I guess that's where my age or echo chamber shines
| through; I don't know any developers using those platforms.
| My colleagues don't; most are > 40, but the 20somethings we
| work with also don't. That's just my experience, so it says
| very little. Like I say somewhere else, I'm curious what
| the conversion for tech products on those forced ad
| platforms is. Actual numbers.
| k__ wrote:
| I don't use them for dev stuff either.
|
| But I was surprised when I syndicated my content there,
| that so many devs where engaging there.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| I would assume most devs are smart enough to stay away from
| those places.
| ferrantim wrote:
| Just wanted to say thanks for the article. Very well-written and
| actionable.
| troyvit wrote:
| > We spend 80%+ on writing.
|
| 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.
| hannofcart wrote:
| The article has some helpful points. But as a programmer-SAAS-
| founder-who-took-over-ads operation, I have some tips on some
| insights we gleaned doing paid ads (and getting it to be
| profitable for us):
|
| 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
|
| 2. The quality of your ad is important, but your on-boarding
| flows are way more important still. - 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.
|
| 3. As a founder, learn the basics - 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.
|
| 4. Targeting Awareness/Consideration/Conversion -
| 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!
|
| 5. Plug the leaks, set tight spend limits -
| 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
|
| 6. Read up `r/PPC` on Reddit - 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.
| alice-i-cecile wrote:
| This is super valuable. I see the same things helping game devs
| with marketing: they're often too keen to put energy and money
| into marketing when they haven't identified a niche or reached
| acceptable levels of polish.
|
| If the consumer can't quickly tell what your product does and
| why it's great, stop wasting your time and fix _those_
| problems!
| tylergetsay wrote:
| This is super insightful, thanks for outlining this!
| iamben wrote:
| The Twitter 'thick skin' part made me laugh.
|
| 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.
| collyw wrote:
| Redditors are a cancer on society. Terrible people.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| The first rule in enterprise sales is that the first human
| reaction will always be "No."
|
| 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.
| ncallaway wrote:
| Wow, that would piss me the fuck off.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I hope they're counting each individual instance of a "no",
| so that if I say "no" three times during the same cold
| call, they'll GTFO and never call again.
| INGSOCIALITE wrote:
| People are going to hate it just because it's an ad that they
| don't want to see while scrolling their feeds. You could have
| the greatest product on earth and simply because it's an
| advertisement it will receive negative feedback, and snarky
| replies.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one
| wants to see an ad, ever, //
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| One could say you're doing the exact same thing to Redditors
| that you say they do. Being negative for the sake of being
| negative. Just love to hate when there is no human face - or
| even someone to reply. But oops, here one is ;)
|
| 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.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| > That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit
| and bad actors and getting to the facts.
|
| 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.
| ..
| 22289d wrote:
| I think you just set the World Record for most strawmen in
| one comment. Congratulations.
|
| If you took what I said to be some type of blanket 'Reddit
| is a perfect and wonderful place' you misunderstood.
| duxup wrote:
| > That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit
| and bad actors and getting to the facts.
|
| That's not my experience at all. I'm curious what makes you
| think that?
| 22289d wrote:
| > 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.
| duxup wrote:
| That link didn't really explain anything.
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| > Are you talking about specific subreddits or topics?
|
| 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.
| bnralt wrote:
| Same, in my experience it's the opposite. The downvoting
| and moderation creates an echo chamber where there are
| certain things get accepted as obvious facts that don't
| have much (or any) basis. Once that happens, almost
| everyone seems to uncritically repeat that without
| bothering to see if it's actually true, and anyone who
| questions it is downvoted off the page (or in more extreme
| cases, the posts are removed/the user is blocked).
|
| 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.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| >That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit
| and bad actors and getting to the facts.
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| I guess it depends at what point you buy. A lot of people
| on Reddit got generational fuck you money betting on GME,
| Bitcoin and a lot of other stuff. But if you're getting
| your Reddit tips from CNN then ya you're probably too late.
| romafirst3 wrote:
| Have you seen the receipts or are you just parroting what
| they are saying on social media?
| 22289d wrote:
| lol parroting what they say on social media.
|
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Just for context, your responses read here as full of
| sarcasm and self assurance. I think your ideas might be
| more well received if you communicated them with a kinder
| and more accepting tone. For what it's worth it does
| sound like you spend a lot of time in toxic online
| communities, and i believe you have an expertise in those
| areas.
| 22289d wrote:
| Man, HN has sure changed. Clearly I'm not among fellow
| hackers if people are worried about tone rather than
| truth.
|
| If someone needs their ass kissed to recognize I'm right,
| that's on them. Not me.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm suspecting this other user has some naive /
| ideological-ish belief in the reddit community or
| something.
| 22289d wrote:
| Probably what's happening is I'm doing a poor job of
| communicating what I mean. To me if I say 'they aren't
| always right' that's enough and I have clearly
| articulated that Reddit can be and is on a regular basis,
| completely idiotic, absurdly wrong and all flavor of
| other bad things. But evidently not as people keep saying
| things like you just did.
| kortilla wrote:
| > That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit
| and bad actors and getting to the facts.
|
| 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.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _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._
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| > There is no "Reddit culture"; on Reddit, culture is
| scoped to a subreddit.
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the
| community, I'm sorry.
|
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| bigbillheck wrote:
| I've been a reddit user for a number of years, and while
| there are indeed some good subreddits, by and large my
| experience lines up with kortilla's.
| kortilla wrote:
| You have way too much faith in reddit and it's given you
| a huge blind spot.
|
| 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.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| > I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the
| community, I'm sorry.
|
| Dude doesn't seem hurt, they're just spitting facts.
| 22289d wrote:
| That was an extremely biased and jaded characterization
| that focuses only on a narrow set of negatives.
|
| 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.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I think the problem is that we're talking about "reddit"
| like it's one group of people who have the same
| characteristic responses to things across time. But the
| whole point of reddit is for there to be disparate
| communities who may or may not communicate with each
| other and may or may not share or hold diametrically
| opposing views on any topic that can be written in words.
|
| 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
| 22289d wrote:
| > These subreddit can be as varied in response as humans
| can
|
| 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.
| romphl wrote:
| One example that came to mind was Apollo app where their
| users came to bat for them during that whole third-party apps
| fiasco.
| callalex wrote:
| Also keep in mind that people tend to be in a bad mood when you
| do the digital equivalent of tapping them on the shoulder while
| they are wearing headphones and concentrating.
| kioleanu wrote:
| That's super ideal as opposed to what I've got on Reddit, which
| is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product
| designed for parents for their children. The comments were
| basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I've
| reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said
| "yeah, we're not going to be removing that as it doesn't
| violate our community guidelines". I closed the account then
| and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users
| per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something
| like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.
| [deleted]
| mft_ wrote:
| Not dissimilar to HN then :)
|
| '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!
| hzzhdev wrote:
| A buddy of mine actually shared his product on Show HN and I
| was worried he would more or less get dumped on because I
| know how the HN crowd can be so negative towards stuff. To my
| surprise the feedback was actually very supportive and any
| criticism he received was constructive and not hateful.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Truth is, you're more likely to get positive feedback if
| you're posting something genuine or at least useful.
| Negativity is often a (justified) response to ads,
| marketing fluff, and lazy attempts at "growth hacking".
| j45 wrote:
| Unless the HN crowd is the customer base the feedback can
| be relative anyways.
|
| 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.
| waynesonfire wrote:
| I like the mixed reviews. A lot of times there is truth in
| the non-positive feedback. It's the authors ego that gets
| hurt and to that I say, deal with it.
| mft_ wrote:
| Totally with you - feedback is a gift. The challenge (in
| all fora, not just HN!) is parsing out the well-meaning,
| helpful, truthful feedback from the other noise.
| flir wrote:
| I value the alternatives - it gets all the tools of the same
| class on the same page. If I was putting up a "Show HN" post,
| I'd definitely add all the similar tools I'd found in a
| follow-up comment.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > People just love to hate
|
| 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
| konschubert wrote:
| Yea, it's pretty normal - people are rightfully try to poke at
| your solution before they spend money on it.
|
| Sometimes they are simply not the target market (yet) and
| that's okay.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Go a step further, write some company blog posts outlining how
| to do it yourself. Do a good job, honestly show how easy it is
| to host your own alternative, you're making the world a better
| place by doing so.
|
| 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.
| vageli wrote:
| I think this really works. While at Datadog, at one point I
| would write deep dives on monitoring applications like
| HAProxy, OpenStack and others. I would start with what to
| look for, how to monitor those things with off-the-shelf
| tooling, and finally how to do it with Datadog. The response
| from the community was overall very positive, regardless of
| whether or not they ended up converting to users (though many
| did).
| [deleted]
| tayo42 wrote:
| As long as it's tastefully done. I forgot what it was but I
| was reading something like this to learn and they plugged
| their product like every 2 paragraphs. It came off really
| incincere and I wasn't even sure if the content was
| trustworthy at that point.
| duxup wrote:
| That's a really great bridge into "hey here is the fairly
| functional / maybe naive path" that lets the dev imagine "oh
| but all the exceptions and the ... oh yeah this is more than
| <just logging or something else/>".
|
| 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>".
| draw_down wrote:
| [dead]
| meiraleal wrote:
| > "I could do this 3x cheaper myself"
|
| There is always someone that think they can do it faster and
| better but happens to never do anything that anybody buys.
| randomdata wrote:
| That is how they can do it 3x cheaper. When you do not spend
| your time dealing with the business, marketing, etc. that
| frees up a lot of time and thus cost.
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| >"I could do this 3x cheaper myself"
|
| 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| "I could do this 3x cheaper myself if I set my hourly rate at
| 0$/hour" is a more accurate description of reality.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Such an easy thing to say.
|
| Everything is easy for the people who don't have to do it!
| hermitcrab wrote:
| "We do these things, not because they are easy, but because
| we think they are easy"
| devmor wrote:
| I'm fairly sure the Twitter portion is because they named their
| product synonymous to a common social media expression for
| "share a picture of your (male) genitalia".
|
| It's an unfortunate scenario for anyone who had to look at
| those tweets, I'm sure.
| aeonik wrote:
| I'm confused, do you mean "PostHog"? I've never heard of this
| being used that way.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I assume they are converted Muslims who observe the Quran.
| rideontime wrote:
| If you search twitter for "post hog," the very first result
| is a person sharing a photograph of their erect penis.
| devmor wrote:
| Yes, "hog" is slang for penis. Telling someone to "post
| hog" is a particularly common expression among more...
| online leftists. A degradation of their character,
| basically telling them that their opinions are worthless so
| they had better have a large member to make up for it.
| __jonas wrote:
| It's 100% this, the only place I've heard about this thing
| before seeing it on hn is people making fun of the name.
|
| 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.
| wantsanagent wrote:
| I was surprised youtube channel sponsorships didn't make this
| list, at least for consideration. I have _multiple_ specialized
| adblockers installed (as I 'm sure many here do) and so the only
| ads I encounter are baked into content I'm otherwise interested
| in. Currently vpn products and tutorial sites dominate these
| channels and so I'd almost _welcome_ something else.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I'm the same and I think it's more like _a_ vpn product, _a_
| tutorial site and _a_ certain website builder, where we all
| know which specific companies I mean.
| gbillig wrote:
| Check out SponsorBlock for skipping YouTube ads that are baked
| into the video
| bombcar wrote:
| Watching old videos is always amusing when the sponsor part
| about a company that since died comes up.
| MaKey wrote:
| SponsorBlock (https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock) to the
| rescue!
| pydry wrote:
| I feel more bad about using this than a regular ad blocker.
| With a regular ad blocker it's blocking ads for which the
| lion's share is probably going to
| $facelessabusivecorporation, whereas sponsorships go 100%
| into the pockets of content creators who typically aren't
| exactly rich.
|
| It feels less like downloading pirated music and more like
| sneaking into an indie concert without paying.
| dave7 wrote:
| Nah can't feel bad using Sponsorblock - it tells you when
| it skips a chunk, and makes it very easy (just press
| Enter!) to skip back, check what they're going to talk
| about - and if it's of no interest just tap Enter again to
| resume. That way I can see if my favourite Youtube channels
| are promoting something I might actually be interested in,
| but Raid Shadow Legends, Raycon and Ridge Wallet can be
| skipped every time.
| Liquix wrote:
| I would be happy to pay content creators the money they
| deserve for high quality content. But no matter how good
| the video is, it's not worth sitting through pitches trying
| to convince or manipulate you into spending money. At that
| point I would rather receive lower quality content with no
| ads.
|
| 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.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > I would be happy to pay content creators the money they
| deserve for high quality content.
|
| You can do that with YouTube Premium + Sponsorblock. Or
| pay them in other ways while blocking all ads.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| This is like fast forwarding through an ad, but done
| automatically. I don't feel bad at all, some videos have
| 50%+ or more removed, and with some settings, you can
| remove also all the self-promotion, "like and subcribe" and
| other useless crap from the videos.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's something I'd skip manually via the arrow keys or seek
| bar anyway, so why not automate the process?
|
| 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.
| oldtownroad wrote:
| Sponsorships rarely go 100% into the pockets of creators.
| The share varies but it can be anywhere from 25% to 75%
| because these sponsorships typically come through agencies
| and management takes a cut too.
| kortilla wrote:
| They already made the money, they don't get paid for
| shilling by you watching.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| You can support most of them with Patrion if you want.
|
| Other than that making the video is a sunk cost, the only
| company you cost money is Google.
| Belphemur wrote:
| It really depends on the video, and the brand sponsoring
| for me.
|
| 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.
| corobo wrote:
| > whereas sponsorships go 100% into the pockets of content
| creators
|
| 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)
| lolinder wrote:
| They get paid for the sponsorship based in part on how
| many people watch the sponsorship sections of past
| videos. That can be and is measured, and has a material
| effect on the amount companies will pay.
| corobo wrote:
| Sounds like they're still being paid then. There's zero
| pay when blocking ads.
| lolinder wrote:
| There's zero pay if 100% of their viewers blocked ads.
| There would _also_ be zero pay if 100% of their viewers
| used SponsorBlock.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Are you sure about this? Is this a service that YouTube
| provides? Otherwise they wouldn't know except for the
| usage of promo codes.
| lolinder wrote:
| I know that the content creators have access to this
| information, and anecdotally I've heard that it's part of
| the negotiation process, but to be fair I don't know that
| for sure.
| corobo wrote:
| Aw man, I knew that was bollocks! Haha
|
| 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
| oldtownroad wrote:
| Broad appeal to a casual technical audience is why you see the
| same type of sponsorships. VPNs are very high margin and easy
| to convert. You'll see the same in across other types of
| content, e.g: recipe boxes (Hello Fresh) are very common for
| lifestyle channels, grooming (Manscaped) is very common for
| male audience channels and language learning apps are very
| common in educational circles.
|
| A platform like PostHog would struggle to find the right
| audience on YouTube because it's such a niche product.
| JCharante wrote:
| Fireship, Theo, Primeagen, and the rest of developer-tube is
| the right spot for advertising for developer tools.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| > Each experiment will need ~$500
|
| Woah, do you really need to spend this much on 1 experiment to
| get quality data? That kinda sucks
| tuyenhx wrote:
| 2 weeks and $500. Everyday is around $35. Based on my
| experience, it is quite a reasonable number.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I don't know how you can get data with such a tiny spend, to be
| honest.
|
| 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.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| geez. I've been thinking of doing some fake door tests but
| wanted to launch something like 10-20 experiments. Even at
| $500 that's 5-10k, which is not feasible. How can any startup
| afford these tests?
|
| If I ran 10 experiments/week, with the $2k measure, you're
| looking at 80k/month, just to get some validation.
| qingcharles wrote:
| It depends on your cost-per-click, or cost-per-action. If
| you were in a niche that was pennies per action then you
| could do it on a smaller budget. It's just that you require
| a lot of data to get any meaningful results. My PPC traffic
| wavers up and down and it would be hard to know if it was
| the weather or some other factor unless you had enough
| traffic to average things out.
| bongobingo1 wrote:
| > Quora
|
| >
|
| > 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.
| diarrhea wrote:
| To this day I'm still confused about where questions and
| answers start and stop, respectively.
| AlpineIvyPhD wrote:
| this works with your username a little too well...
| mhh__ wrote:
| Quora used to be amazing...
| glitchalumni wrote:
| I was quite convinced that Quora only consists of SEO spam
| nowadays - kind of a surprise reading that there are real
| people using it.
| 2rsf wrote:
| And surprisingly there are real people giving more than
| decent answers in Quora on things ranging from relationships
| through electric cars to software engineering.
|
| 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.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| A few years back I used to love browsing Quora, I had tamed
| my feed in such a way that it showed mostly relevant (to
| me) content that I enjoyed.
|
| 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.
| klempner wrote:
| The flip side here: the ads I get on Quora are just terrible --
| about 1/3 of it is some "stud briefs" underwear and about 1/3
| is promoted CCP propaganda.
|
| 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".
| joshstrange wrote:
| Quora being a good option is incredibly surprising to me. I never
| click on Quora links as 90% of the time the "answers" are just
| ads or people who want to pretend they are a bigger deal than
| they are and know more than they do.
|
| 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.
| ryder9 wrote:
| [dead]
| two_handfuls wrote:
| Same. The Quora website feels actively user-hostile, I avoid
| it.
| smithcoin wrote:
| Just like Reddit- it wasn't always that way.
| cushychicken wrote:
| [flagged]
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| "organic"
| pembrook wrote:
| Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but virtually all social
| media sites add "nofollow" to links posted on their platform.
|
| This means the link is worthless for your domain authority
| and tells Google to essentially ignore these links because
| UGC is notorious for spam. So I doubt it's having much affect
| on your organic SEO at all and could in fact be a total waste
| of your time.
|
| Google has known about comment spam for basically 2 decades.
| cushychicken wrote:
| I didn't know that. You learn something new every day.
|
| Still, it's been a great method for getting people to take
| interest in my website.
| [deleted]
| mort96 wrote:
| I hope you recognize that you're everything that's wrong with
| the modern web.
| cushychicken wrote:
| _doffs cap_ And a good day to you as well.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I never consciously click on Quora links. Yet, I very often
| end-up there because I clicked something without checking what
| it is, and their SEO is extremely effective.
|
| 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.
| callalex wrote:
| It's great for advertisers for the same reason people still use
| Nigerian prince scams: the victim has already demonstrated a
| clear lack of judgment and high susceptibility to bullshit.
| nlunbeck wrote:
| Most people I know who actively use Quora are in the 65+
| demographic. I've asked what's keeping them, and it turns out
| they have much more tolerance for things like sponsored posts
| and mandatory signups than most users would
| 22289d wrote:
| a) that isn't what's keeping them. people don't stay
| somewhere because things that bother you, don't bother
| them. you didn't name anything they like about it.
|
| 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.
| 22289d wrote:
| That's my impression of Quora today too.
|
| 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.
| brettermeier wrote:
| While I try reading this, the site loads something and scrolls to
| the top of the page, even on 2. try. Who designed this? This page
| sucks.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| Looks good to me using Firefox for Android, but I tried Chrome
| and there it looks a bit weird.
|
| Perhaps it's time for a "Best viewed on Firefox" button?
| naillo wrote:
| The importance of and consequences of not dogfooding
| robertlagrant wrote:
| MacOS Firefox fine.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| Disable JS & it works lovely. Not the first time I've found
| blocking JS has unborked a borked web page either.
|
| @james_impliu: I like simple text websites. Why do web devs
| love making simple things complex?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Because most new web devs have simply never made a html page
| served on apache before.
|
| 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.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It's not the only way of course, but as someone who's made
| pure HTML pages served on Apache or nginx, React and NextJS
| sure are nice to have.
| LeonM wrote:
| Can confirm this. When scrolling down to about half-way through
| the article it jumps back up. It appears to happen when the
| blog list on the left is loaded (which takes like 5 seconds to
| load).
|
| I can see why the dev didn't notice this when debugging
| locally, as there it probably loads the left menu without
| delay.
| james_impliu wrote:
| Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues
| wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a
| rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let
| other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it
| janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up
| - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)
| cwillu wrote:
| FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed
| position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader.
| When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add
| cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it
| on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab.
|
| 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!
| blast wrote:
| If you're talking about that obnoxious left sidebar, I
| agree. The table of contents widget on the right too. The
| article itself is squeezed between a bunch of shit I don't
| want to look at. It makes the page feel crowded and like
| it's trying to get me. Please just let us read the content!
| If it's any good, it'll speak for itself.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I use a hide sticky extension / web script, works great for
| removing all this sticky header garbage so that I can
| actually read the content.
| jjgreen wrote:
| I didn't see that until I enabled JS on the page. Just
| sayin',
| EspressoGPT wrote:
| Where do you host this site? It's freaking fast.
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Seems to be Vercel / Next.js (I'm not affiliated, only did
| an IP lookup because I was curious)
| daanlo wrote:
| Great article!
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(page generated 2023-09-29 23:00 UTC)