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> 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 use

> 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.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  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.
  - zarzavat 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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 3y ago
        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.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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/ 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 3y ago
    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.
Retr0id 3y ago
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 3y ago
> 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.
swyx 3y ago
also check if it's just alphabetically sorted - "a" comes before the other options, and people being lazy just pick that
sfink 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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/ftc-sues-intuit-its-deceptive-turbotax-free-filing-campaign https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
  - gascoigne 3y ago
    What do you use to do your taxes then?
    - matthewowen 3y ago
      Most people who are able to use a calculator could do their taxes using https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... I think that TurboTax is a winner in the “TurboTax lobbies to make the tax code so complex that you have to use TurboTax” narrative because it makes people more afraid of doing their taxes through the tools the IRS provides than they should be.
kouru225 3y ago
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.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
Metacelsus 3y ago
>For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word "proprietary". You may enjoy this: https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-to-proprietary https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-t...
AussieWog93 3y ago
>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.
kromem 3y ago
Paths to conversion are typically rather complex and have multiple touch points. Awareness is a big deal and a necessary step before it's possible to even be in a consideration set. For example, TV ads typically rank very low in any self-reported market research on influencing purchase intent. And yet if you run a test in a DMA pulling TV ads you'll see sales decrease dramatically. While the industry likes to pretend it has come a long way, in many cases marketing and advertising is still just as much "I know half of my ads work and half don't, I just don't know which half is which."

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.

dale_glass 3y ago
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.
- zarzavat 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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 3y ago
      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 3y ago
        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.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

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 3y ago
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/ 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 3y ago
  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.

Retr0id 3y ago

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 3y ago

> 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.

swyx 3y ago

also check if it's just alphabetically sorted - "a" comes before the other options, and people being lazy just pick that

sfink 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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/ftc-sues-intuit-its-deceptive-turbotax-free-filing-campaign https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/03/...
- gascoigne 3y ago
  What do you use to do your taxes then?
  - matthewowen 3y ago
    Most people who are able to use a calculator could do their taxes using https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-forms https://www.irs.gov/e-file-providers/free-file-fillable-form... I think that TurboTax is a winner in the “TurboTax lobbies to make the tax code so complex that you have to use TurboTax” narrative because it makes people more afraid of doing their taxes through the tools the IRS provides than they should be.

kouru225 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

Metacelsus 3y ago

>For instance, I'm extremely allergic to the word "proprietary". You may enjoy this: https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-to-proprietary https://denovo.substack.com/p/help-doctor-ive-been-exposed-t...

AussieWog93 3y ago

>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.

kromem 3y ago

Paths to conversion are typically rather complex and have multiple touch points. Awareness is a big deal and a necessary step before it's possible to even be in a consideration set. For example, TV ads typically rank very low in any self-reported market research on influencing purchase intent. And yet if you run a test in a DMA pulling TV ads you'll see sales decrease dramatically. While the industry likes to pretend it has come a long way, in many cases marketing and advertising is still just as much "I know half of my ads work and half don't, I just don't know which half is which."