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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

• 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.
    • rideontime 3y ago
      If you search twitter for “post hog,” the very first result is a person sharing a photograph of their erect penis.
    • devmor 3y ago
      Yes, "hog" is slang for penis. Telling someone to "post hog" is a particularly common expression among more... online leftists. A degradation of their character, basically telling them that their opinions are worthless so they had better have a large member to make up for it.
• draw_down 3y ago
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• 22289d 3y ago
  One could say you're doing the exact same thing to Redditors that you say they do. Being negative for the sake of being negative. Just love to hate when there is no human face - or even someone to reply. But oops, here one is ;) Redditors are entitled and they are demanding and they are quick to jump all over you. And they can be wrong. But it's not for the sake of negativity and it's not because there is no human there. That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. If you want to bring Redditors some overpriced vaporware you are absolutely right they're going to rip you apart. They're just doing what Redditors do - calling out bullshit. Bring them a product worthy of praising and they'll make entire subreddits dedicated to your awesome product.
  • kortilla 3y ago
    > That culture is damned effective at filtering out bullshit and bad actors and getting to the facts. Lol, that’s not at all what the culture is good at. It’s an internet mob with famous examples of false accusations, doxxing and harassment. Any subreddit that isn’t severely moderated is gamed by people who know how to appeal to the local crowd. Being cynical and anti-business is not about “getting to the facts”. It just means they need a different type of marketing.
    • 22289d 3y ago
      I can see that Reddit really hurt you. On behalf of the community, I'm sorry. > It just means they need a different type of marketing. That's correct. And Step #1 is to have a product which will make it past the collective bullshit detector. Step #2 is to provide real and actual value. To have a legitimately good product. So much of marketing is built on deception. If you try to deceive Redditors, you're going to get told to fk urself. People who can't complete step 1 or 2 and want to employ deception-based marketing often tell a tail like yours. It's our fault for not just taking what you tell us at face value and handing over our money. However all of the people appending 'Reddit' to their search queries instead of reading the deception-based marketing pages that fill up Google results, may understand where I'm coming from.
      • 3y ago
• mft_ 3y ago
  Not dissimilar to HN then :) ‘Show HN’ posts often have a mix of different comparatively negative comments: from the (classic) I could do this quicker/cheaper/easily, alternatives being posted, genuine criticisms (+/- misunderstandings) of the offering, criticism of the underlying website due to choices made around design/fonts/contrast/processor utilisation/JS use… It’s such a nice surprise when there’s a ‘Show HN’ and the comments are predominantly supportive and/or positive!
  • hzzhdev 3y ago
    A buddy of mine actually shared his product on Show HN and I was worried he would more or less get dumped on because I know how the HN crowd can be so negative towards stuff. To my surprise the feedback was actually very supportive and any criticism he received was constructive and not hateful.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      Truth is, you're more likely to get positive feedback if you're posting something genuine or at least useful. Negativity is often a (justified) response to ads, marketing fluff, and lazy attempts at "growth hacking".
    • j45 3y ago
      Unless the HN crowd is the customer base the feedback can be relative anyways. Lots of people don’t end up shipping and sometimes the allergic reaction to someone else shipping says more about the commenter than what’s being shared.
  • waynesonfire 3y ago
    I like the mixed reviews. A lot of times there is truth in the non-positive feedback. It's the authors ego that gets hurt and to that I say, deal with it.
    • mft_ 3y ago
      Totally with you - feedback is a gift. The challenge (in all fora, not just HN!) is parsing out the well-meaning, helpful, truthful feedback from the other noise.
• duxup 3y ago
  >"I could do this 3x cheaper myself" Such an easy thing to say. Then when I say it and think "I really just need a little bit of what this does, and this API is kinda complicated for that." and I go and start creating the thing it evolves and changes and "Hey this looks a lot like that complicated API ... ooooooohhhhh I see why that is what it is... this is going to take a long while." It's just so easy to boil down something into something simple and think that's all it is, but do even that thing reliably and all the corner cases and other things you need, suddenly you find it is way more than your initial poo pooing if whatever the thing is.
  • antisthenes 3y ago
    "I could do this 3x cheaper myself if I set my hourly rate at 0$/hour" is a more accurate description of reality.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > Such an easy thing to say. Everything is easy for the people who don't have to do it!
  • hermitcrab 3y ago
    "We do these things, not because they are easy, but because we think they are easy"
• Buttons840 3y ago
  Go a step further, write some company blog posts outlining how to do it yourself. Do a good job, honestly show how easy it is to host your own alternative, you're making the world a better place by doing so. You want readers to think "that would be easy, maybe I'll do it". They start to believe it's important they have what you're offering and they think they'll do it themselves. Well, we know how attention spans are these days, if something takes 30 minutes of work it will probably never get done. Most of the people will give up, and a lot of them will buy your hosted service instead because they've already convinced themselves it's important. If it's important enough to someone that they would spend their time on it, they'll spend money on it too. You want people willing to spend time / money on something to have good will towards your company.
  • vageli 3y ago
    I think this really works. While at Datadog, at one point I would write deep dives on monitoring applications like HAProxy, OpenStack and others. I would start with what to look for, how to monitor those things with off-the-shelf tooling, and finally how to do it with Datadog. The response from the community was overall very positive, regardless of whether or not they ended up converting to users (though many did).
    • deleted 3y ago
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  • duxup 3y ago
    That's a really great bridge into "hey here is the fairly functional / maybe naive path" that lets the dev imagine "oh but all the exceptions and the ... oh yeah this is more than <just logging or something else/>". Now we're on a track where we understand the value more than the front page of a website that "hey we sell <boiled down product description that to a dev doesn't sound like much>".
  • tayo42 3y ago
    As long as it's tastefully done. I forgot what it was but I was reading something like this to learn and they plugged their product like every 2 paragraphs. It came off really incincere and I wasn't even sure if the content was trustworthy at that point.
• meiraleal 3y ago
  > "I could do this 3x cheaper myself" There is always someone that think they can do it faster and better but happens to never do anything that anybody buys.
  • randomdata 3y ago
    That is how they can do it 3x cheaper. When you do not spend your time dealing with the business, marketing, etc. that frees up a lot of time and thus cost. If one was looking to open it up to a wider audience, it would see their costs rise 3x too, but if one is only looking to use something for internal use there isn't much need to incur any of those additional costs.
• jollofricepeas 3y ago
  The first rule in enterprise sales is that the first human reaction will always be “No.” The former CEO of Routeware before he sold it to Vista Equity Partners said that he required his sales team to secure three clear “No’s” for each buyer within an organization before fully disqualifying a lead. So if you’re selling to a “software architect” and the CTO has to provide the final sign off. - three no’s from the architect - three no’s from the CTO It’s funny how easily we give up on potentially successful concepts by not getting to a “No” faster or even at all. It’s completely foreign to software engineers.
  • ncallaway 3y ago
    Wow, that would piss me the fuck off.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      I hope they're counting each individual instance of a "no", so that if I say "no" three times during the same cold call, they'll GTFO and never call again.
• INGSOCIALITE 3y ago
  People are going to hate it just because it’s an ad that they don’t want to see while scrolling their feeds. You could have the greatest product on earth and simply because it’s an advertisement it will receive negative feedback, and snarky replies. Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, for any product or service. You’re already at a disadvantage by being the source of the end user’s ire, so winning them over is extra hard.
  • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    >Advertising on social media platforms is horrendous - no one wants to see an ad, ever, // Something like Instagram is all ads, isn't it. But people do want to see the ads because they're mostly "content". I devour ads for Creality 3D printers which look like "how to make this neat gizmo". Similarly I love ads for outdoor gear that are couched as "how to tie this knot" or "how to make a Swedish candle fire without wire". And the "how to make this pottery" which is really, 'my pots are awesome, buy some'. Just recently I've been into adverts for comedian's tours on Facebook, which are little 2-5 minute excerpts from their routine. So, yeah. I don't think I'm an outlier. I'm with the person suggesting "show them how to do it for themselves" as a pretty good advert, but I've not looked at the OP yet, maybe they'll give away the crown jewels.
• kioleanu 3y ago
  That’s super ideal as opposed to what I’ve got on Reddit, which is extremely graphic porn comments on an Ad for a product designed for parents for their children. The comments were basically phantasies of girls in different circumstances. I’ve reported the comment to Reddit and they came back and said “yeah, we’re not going to be removing that as it doesn’t violate our community guidelines”. I closed the account then and there. Apart from that, I would get about 5 or 6 real users per hundred clicks from them, where the clicks costed something like 20-30 cents. Money out the window.
• collyw 3y ago
  Redditors are a cancer on society. Terrible people.
• callalex 3y ago
  Also keep in mind that people tend to be in a bad mood when you do the digital equivalent of tapping them on the shoulder while they are wearing headphones and concentrating.
• mistrial9 3y ago
  > People just love to hate no, people are suffering themselves, competitive pressures, personal failure and doubt, but more the external F-U response.. drugs like alcohol also play a part.. What is true is that without actual interaction, the social filters change quickly
• konschubert 3y ago
  Yea, it’s pretty normal - people are rightfully try to poke at your solution before they spend money on it. Sometimes they are simply not the target market (yet) and that’s okay.
• deleted 3y ago
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