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The argument OP makes is 'I made $10,000 in one day thanks to Facebook, thus Facebook is a superior platform' which is undeniably faulty. 1. The OP did not ma
by jmduke 14y ago
The argument OP makes is 'I made $10,000 in one day thanks to Facebook, thus Facebook is a superior platform' which is undeniably faulty.
1. The OP did not make $10,000 in one day.
2. We don't know how well this would have done on a non-Facebook platform.
My point is that this is like arguing that Facebook is a wonderful platform because Apple makes a lot of money and Apple uses Facebook to advertise. Apple would be making a lot of money without Facebook ads, too; if a company using Facebook ads generates $X revenue, that doesn't mean those Facebook ads were responsible for a specific amount of the revenue.
In short: congrats to the author! But this doesn't really prove anything.
- dionidium 14y agoThe OP did not make $10,000 in one day. Now you're almost willfully missing the point.
- vavb 14y agoYou're almost wilfully ignoring that the poster is claiming that he's devised a way of making $10000 profit at 3000%+ ROI but decided instead to make a startup aimed solely around facebook ads - which coincidently were the things he took advantage of to achieve this massive product. Surely something with stats as lucrative as this yard sale would mean that he would create a startup based around selling other peoples stuff after advertising through FB events instead??
- brendanib 14y agoIt's actually an idea that I've entertained before, and I think there's tons of businesses that could be built in this space (for example, I'm a huge fan of Yardsale, and this could be an interesting growth strategy for them, to build Facebook Ads directly into their platform). Right now though, I'm having a blast working on Facebook Analytics with my team at PageLever.
- taligent 14y agoAre you so naive as to think that the only reason people do startups is to make money ?
- dlikhten 14y agoYes, but you did not read the title did you. It's an obvious Jab at the fact that FB overcharges. However the point was, the OP made a net profit of < 10k. The OP used it as a facebook EVENT not a click-through link. So this is not an Apples - to - Apples comparison.
- brendanib 14y agoI'm curious - what other ad platform could I have turned to drive local commerce? Always interested to hear how other folks would approach the same problem. I still have some records left over, thinking about doing another sale, would be game to test another means of customer acquisition and report back with results.
- jefflinwood 14y agoReally quickly, the first thing that I would turn to would be Craigslist - is there a reason you chose Facebook ads over Craigslist?
- veyron 14y agoHis business is in facebook ads ...
- jmduke 14y agojeff chimed in before me. if I were in your shoes, I would have probably leaned on Craigslist and the area subreddit (the latter is very hit or miss, but I could see something niche like records doing really well.) I'm not a vinyl guy, but I'm sure there are a TON of niche forums out there worth looking at as well. I really wish you could apply multi-armed bandit approaches to physical problems like these more easily; obviously its hard to do A/B testing when you only have one actual supply.
- brendanib 14y agoYeah, I actually only recently started to understand the impact that area subreddits can have - great channel for certain audiences. My intuition is that most of my target audience for vinyl isn't yet on Reddit, but maybe that's changed and I just haven't realized it yet. There are certainly a lot of forums out there too, but most of them aren't local to one area, so most of the sales are online (I did a lot of business through these forums in the past). In retrospect, it would have been rad to run this as a fully fledged A/B test. I honestly just didn't know that the ads would have quite the impact that they did.