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Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

679 points by fmerian 3y ago

zegl 3y ago
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.
- james_impliu 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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.
- kylegalbraith 3y ago
  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.
brettermeier 3y ago
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.
- naillo 3y ago
  The importance of and consequences of not dogfooding
- james_impliu 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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!
    - jjgreen 3y ago
      I didn't see that until I enabled JS on the page. Just sayin',
    - satvikpendem 3y ago
      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.
    - blast 3y ago
      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.
daanlo 3y ago
Great article!
asicsp 3y ago
Related: https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-for-startups https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-for-startups Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 (254 points | 7 months ago | 72 comments)
mavhc 3y ago
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
dangus 3y ago
What about Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok? I’m surprised they haven’t been considered.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      > 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?
rjakobsson 3y ago
PostHog is my favourite startup as of lately. Their company culture seems to really be pushing things to the next level. Very inspiring!
hannofcart 3y ago
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.
bongobingo1 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  To this day I’m still confused about where questions and answers start and stop, respectively.
  - AlpineIvyPhD 3y ago
    this works with your username a little too well...
- mhh__ 3y ago
  Quora used to be amazing...
- glitchalumni 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
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dale_glass 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
- Lutger 3y ago
  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.
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mcbrienollie 3y ago
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.
- moneywoes 3y ago
  what are some other pertinent 'guerrilla' techniques
LoganDark 3y ago
Hah, this site was in the filter list for my firewall.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
Off topic but I love the Posthog brand, marketing and tone of voice. A real exemplar of how to market a developer tool.
kyle-rb 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  lol exactly, especially on Twitter. Who's in charge of branding here? dril?
zubairq 3y ago
I would recommend content marketing myself, addressing a pain point that the problem solves in a blog post.
kylegalbraith 3y ago
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.
benjaminwootton 3y ago
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.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  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.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  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.
  - k__ 3y ago
    "Developers avoid ads like the plague." If they can. They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
    - anonzzzies 3y ago
      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__ 3y ago
        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.
iamben 3y ago
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.
- devmor 3y ago
  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.
  - __jonas 3y ago
    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.
  - aeonik 3y ago
    I'm confused, do you mean "PostHog"? I've never heard of this being used that way.
    - birdyrooster 3y ago
      I assume they are converted Muslims who observe the Quran.
wantsanagent 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  Check out SponsorBlock for skipping YouTube ads that are baked into the video
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Watching old videos is always amusing when the sponsor part about a company that since died comes up.
- MaKey 3y ago
  SponsorBlock (https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock) to the rescue!
  - pydry 3y ago
    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.
    - oldtownroad 3y ago
gmanis 3y ago
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.
d--b 3y ago
Ok, so that page itself is an ad for PostHog. Sigh.
sakerbos 3y ago
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.
throwawysn38 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  It seems to be increasingly full of pro-Putin trolls. and ridiculous 'questions' such "Why is <country> such a shithole?".
  - lionkor 3y ago
    You mean people who are of a pro-Putin opinion, or trolls? The Venn diagram for that is certainly far from a circle.
n_ary 3y ago
> 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.
- 22289d 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      one day i will figure out how to respond to a minor detail, without making people think i'm addressing the main point.
jdwyah 3y ago
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 3y ago
  >That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments. Ah, maybe you meant "honest" comments.
joshstrange 3y ago
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.
- cushychicken 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - _Algernon_ 3y ago
    "organic"
  - pembrook 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
  - mort96 3y ago
    I hope you recognize that you're everything that's wrong with the modern web.
aldousd666 3y ago
This page is down, I can't read the article.
- ripdog 3y ago
  It's probably being blocked by your DNS-adblocker.
ferrantim 3y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for the article. Very well-written and actionable.
Octoth0rpe 3y ago
> [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 3y ago
  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).
dielll 3y ago
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.
somedude895 3y ago
> 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?
nico 3y ago
It would be very useful for a lot of people who commented on this previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702) to read this article Starting with the misconceptions: > Paid ads =/= marketing
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cm2012 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    - cpursley 3y ago
      Do you recommend retargeting website visitors on LinkedIn (my audience is very present on LI).
- shantnutiwari 3y ago
  yeah, I find the HN crowd hates FB, but other developers, most of whom arent on HN, dont mind it
willsmith72 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  2 weeks and $500. Everyday is around $35. Based on my experience, it is quite a reasonable number.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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.
vax425 3y ago
Thanks for sharing, mainly because I’ve felt like an idiot for utterly failing at marketing my tool (https://HeadlampTest.com 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.
simonsarris 3y ago
Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net 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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 ;-)
callalex 3y ago
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!
ransom1538 3y ago
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.
rideontime 3y ago
Definitely limit your twitter replies if your company is named something like “post hog.” https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=post%20hog https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=post%20hog (possibly NSFW)
- matteoraso 3y ago
  Yeah, nearly had a heart attack when I opened up the article and saw the company that posted it. I wonder how many people clicked on the ads hoping to see porn?
digitcatphd 3y ago
IMHO anything B2B it’s best to start with email and cold outreach. This tends to get feedback quickly and is very cheap.
troyvit 3y ago
> 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.
datavirtue 3y ago
That mascot/logo is adorable. I just want to feed it!!
swores 3y ago
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.
- conductr 3y ago
  > 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. FWIW This article reminds me of the regular content on the HN front page 10+ years ago, the stuff that a lot of well known saas wrote to gain traction
mdopslevel 3y ago
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niknikson 3y ago
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.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> 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.
WalterBright 3y ago
Back in the 80's, full page ads in computer magazines worked great. The internet utterly destroyed that.
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bolle 3y ago
Off topic: I got distracted by the cookie banner which looks like Nina Brink during the IPO of ISP World Online in 2000, the Netherlands. The brain works in mysterious ways.
lionkor 3y ago
The last time I've seen an ad was probably on the reddit app before I stopped using it. Not sure ads are the way to get tools out to devs at all.
markcollin 3y ago
having someone on the founding team who has a sizable network on social media is an unfair advantage ex: rauchg-nextjs sahil-gumroad and so on.
dnlbtlr 3y ago
Anyone have good experiences advertising with Stackoverflow?

679 points by fmerian 3y ago

zegl 3y ago

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.

james_impliu 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
kylegalbraith 3y ago
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.

brettermeier 3y ago

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.

naillo 3y ago
The importance of and consequences of not dogfooding
james_impliu 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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!
  - jjgreen 3y ago
    I didn't see that until I enabled JS on the page. Just sayin',
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    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.
  - blast 3y ago
    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.

daanlo 3y ago

Great article!

asicsp 3y ago

Related: https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-for-startups https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-for-startups Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34998921 (254 points | 7 months ago | 72 comments)

mavhc 3y ago

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

dangus 3y ago

What about Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok? I’m surprised they haven’t been considered.

anonzzzies 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    > 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?

rjakobsson 3y ago

PostHog is my favourite startup as of lately. Their company culture seems to really be pushing things to the next level. Very inspiring!

hannofcart 3y ago

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.

bongobingo1 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
To this day I’m still confused about where questions and answers start and stop, respectively.
- AlpineIvyPhD 3y ago
  this works with your username a little too well...
mhh__ 3y ago
Quora used to be amazing...
glitchalumni 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.

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dale_glass 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
Lutger 3y ago
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.

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mcbrienollie 3y ago

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.

moneywoes 3y ago
what are some other pertinent 'guerrilla' techniques

LoganDark 3y ago

Hah, this site was in the filter list for my firewall.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

Off topic but I love the Posthog brand, marketing and tone of voice. A real exemplar of how to market a developer tool.

kyle-rb 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
lol exactly, especially on Twitter. Who's in charge of branding here? dril?

zubairq 3y ago

I would recommend content marketing myself, addressing a pain point that the problem solves in a blog post.

kylegalbraith 3y ago

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.

benjaminwootton 3y ago

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.

whimsicalism 3y ago
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.
anonzzzies 3y ago
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.
- k__ 3y ago
  "Developers avoid ads like the plague." If they can. They can't avoid them on Instagram or Tiktok.
  - anonzzzies 3y ago
    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__ 3y ago
      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.

iamben 3y ago

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.

devmor 3y ago
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.
- __jonas 3y ago
  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.
- aeonik 3y ago
  I'm confused, do you mean "PostHog"? I've never heard of this being used that way.
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    I assume they are converted Muslims who observe the Quran.

wantsanagent 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
Check out SponsorBlock for skipping YouTube ads that are baked into the video
- bombcar 3y ago
  Watching old videos is always amusing when the sponsor part about a company that since died comes up.
MaKey 3y ago
SponsorBlock (https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock) to the rescue!
- pydry 3y ago
  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.
  - oldtownroad 3y ago

gmanis 3y ago

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.

d--b 3y ago

Ok, so that page itself is an ad for PostHog. Sigh.

sakerbos 3y ago

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.

throwawysn38 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
It seems to be increasingly full of pro-Putin trolls. and ridiculous 'questions' such "Why is <country> such a shithole?".
- lionkor 3y ago
  You mean people who are of a pro-Putin opinion, or trolls? The Venn diagram for that is certainly far from a circle.

n_ary 3y ago

> 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.

22289d 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    one day i will figure out how to respond to a minor detail, without making people think i'm addressing the main point.

jdwyah 3y ago

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 3y ago
>That said, you can't just post crap ads or you'll get snarky comments. Ah, maybe you meant "honest" comments.

joshstrange 3y ago

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.

cushychicken 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  "organic"
- pembrook 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
- mort96 3y ago
  I hope you recognize that you're everything that's wrong with the modern web.

aldousd666 3y ago

This page is down, I can't read the article.

ripdog 3y ago
It's probably being blocked by your DNS-adblocker.

ferrantim 3y ago

Just wanted to say thanks for the article. Very well-written and actionable.

Octoth0rpe 3y ago

> [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 3y ago
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).

dielll 3y ago

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.

somedude895 3y ago

> 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?

nico 3y ago

It would be very useful for a lot of people who commented on this previous post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37622702) to read this article Starting with the misconceptions: > Paid ads =/= marketing

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cm2012 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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.
  - cpursley 3y ago
    Do you recommend retargeting website visitors on LinkedIn (my audience is very present on LI).
shantnutiwari 3y ago
yeah, I find the HN crowd hates FB, but other developers, most of whom arent on HN, dont mind it

willsmith72 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
2 weeks and $500. Everyday is around $35. Based on my experience, it is quite a reasonable number.
qingcharles 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.

vax425 3y ago

Thanks for sharing, mainly because I’ve felt like an idiot for utterly failing at marketing my tool (https://HeadlampTest.com 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.

simonsarris 3y ago

Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net 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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 ;-)

callalex 3y ago

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!

ransom1538 3y ago

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.

rideontime 3y ago

Definitely limit your twitter replies if your company is named something like “post hog.” https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=post%20hog https://twitter.com/search?src=typed_query&q=post%20hog (possibly NSFW)

matteoraso 3y ago
Yeah, nearly had a heart attack when I opened up the article and saw the company that posted it. I wonder how many people clicked on the ads hoping to see porn?

digitcatphd 3y ago

IMHO anything B2B it’s best to start with email and cold outreach. This tends to get feedback quickly and is very cheap.

troyvit 3y ago

> 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.

datavirtue 3y ago

That mascot/logo is adorable. I just want to feed it!!

swores 3y ago

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.

conductr 3y ago
> 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. FWIW This article reminds me of the regular content on the HN front page 10+ years ago, the stuff that a lot of well known saas wrote to gain traction

mdopslevel 3y ago

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niknikson 3y ago

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.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

> 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.

WalterBright 3y ago

Back in the 80's, full page ads in computer magazines worked great. The internet utterly destroyed that.

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bolle 3y ago

Off topic: I got distracted by the cookie banner which looks like Nina Brink during the IPO of ISP World Online in 2000, the Netherlands. The brain works in mysterious ways.

lionkor 3y ago

The last time I've seen an ad was probably on the reddit app before I stopped using it. Not sure ads are the way to get tools out to devs at all.

markcollin 3y ago

having someone on the founding team who has a sizable network on social media is an unfair advantage ex: rauchg-nextjs sahil-gumroad and so on.

dnlbtlr 3y ago

Anyone have good experiences advertising with Stackoverflow?