il

67 ms·

631.
by il 16y ago
This is absolutely brilliant marketing by Apple. First, they increase the perceived value of the case by selling it for $30(even though it costs them about $1), and then decide to give it away for free. The result is that if you don't have
632.
by il 16y ago
I would consider $55 an hour a pretty good wage- that's beyond ramen profitable. You also forgot to add the $1000-$2000 a month in subscriptions you receive before selling. Also, development time is a sunk cost, because I had already built
633.
by il 16y ago
Basically the goal was to scale revenue rapidly and show solid growth month over month. Usually it takes about 6-9 months to demonstrate that degree of traction. Once I have it running for that long, I just post the site on Flippa- they lov
634.
by il 16y ago
They were tools to make marketing and SEO easier. Think keyword research, ad submission, etc/
635.
by il 16y ago
Traditional marketing theory, at least as I learned it states that the best product name should mention or at least derive from the product's biggest benefit. This is obviously a lot less important when you have millions to build a brand, b
636.
by il 16y ago
The biggest advice I can give you is to forget the consumer market and create a B2B product. You only need 20 customers paying $50 a month to get $1000 a month revenue and be able to easily get a 20-50k exit. If you figure out a way to save
637.
by il 16y ago
I can't believe that a Techcrunch writer, who I assume considers himself a serious journalist, would actually come out and say that he didn't cover a startup because the name doesn't have a Web 2.0 flourish like "ly" or "ckr". Visual Websit
638.
by il 16y ago
I'm planning on moving to SF(probably Mission) to work on my startup in about a month or so. It would be great to connect with others doing something similar, send me an email ilya -at- unviral.com .
639.
by il 16y ago
Your school email address should still be valid.
640.
by il 16y ago
You don't think throwing up a 300x250 banner on the front page from somewhere like RightMedia could get a premium site like reddit $2 CPM? I bet even low traffic quality sites like icanhazcheesburger or cracked are getting more than $2 CPM.
641.
by il 16y ago
I've had experience successfully monetizing all sorts of low-quality traffic, and I can tell you that it's possible to get decent CPM from any type of users, even users like redditors who don't click on ads as much. You should be able to ea
642.
by il 16y ago
Get a merchant account and take payments yourself. PayPal isn't worth it for anything more than selling your junk on eBay.
643.
by il 16y ago
Outsourcing marketing and copywriting is very inefficient for a startup. The first thing any decent copywriter/marketer will do is an extensive amount of research about your product,market,customers,competition,etc. Research is probably 50%
644.
by il 16y ago
As a coder and a marketer, I would disagree. You can get by with sloppy code and even some bugs, but messing up an ad campaign could have drastic financial consequences. No disrespect, but I think the nuances/details of marketing successful
645.
by il 16y ago
This comment, and the corresponding "if you build it they will come" mentality is exactly why so many startups fail. How exactly would you have a viable product with lots of users without marketing? I have seen bad products become phenomena
646.
by il 16y ago
Congrats Jessica and Andy! I remember testing the site many months ago, it looks like it's matured and grown quite a bit since then, I'll have to give it another try. Best of luck!
647.
by il 16y ago
+1 for this. If you're contracting our work online, don't pay inflated Bay Area wages. Go somewhere like Odesk, you can easily get a very competent overseas developer for no more than $20 an hour.
648.
by il 16y ago
It would be great to see more networking-type stuff like this on HN. There's a lot of brilliant people on this site, and it's not always that easy to connect with them.
649.
by il 16y ago
It's the old battle between measurable performance marketing and vague branding/artsy advertising, I guess everyone picks a side. Since you used a beer example however, I will point out that Claude Hopkins famously made Schlitz beer #1 by u
650.
by il 16y ago
They are absolutely broken. Most (digital) agencies spend large amounts of their clients' money without delivering measurable, trackable results, or anything beyond a vague sense of "branding". In fact, in my work, I've found that most of t
651.
by il 16y ago
Based on several years experience optimizing Internet ad campaigns, here are a few banner advertising tips: 1. Test and track EVERYTHING. Every variation, headline,layout, domain ad is on, etc should have a unique ID, so you can see not j
652.
by il 16y ago
Read copywriting books: -David Ogilvy -John Caples -Claude Hopkins -Eugene Schwartz Many of these have large sections devoted exclusively to writing headlines.
653.
by il 16y ago
I was hoping someone made a ChatRoulette app using the iPhone front camera...
654.
by il 16y ago
A combination of several cold emails + a couple forum posts on relevant forums, it didnt take more than a couple hours. This was really a very minor side project.
655.
by il 16y ago
It's a web service that only marketers running certain ads on a single ad platform would need, I know there's not that many people doing things this way. At the same time, since my target audience was so well defined, I could quickly build
656.
by il 16y ago
Can't you use credit cards?
657.
by il 16y ago
It's actually very easy to make a web service that makes a couple thousand dollars a month, if you stay away from 2 startup pitfalls: 1) Don't rely on advertising to monetize 2) Don't target it to consumers/end-users (if you're selling a we
658.
by il 17y ago
So obviously nobody else clicks on Facebook ads either, right?
659.
by il 17y ago
This looks like a sock puppet account astroturfing for duckduckgo. I wouldn't expect them to resort to tactics like that.
660.
by il 17y ago
You're not getting a statistically significant volume of clicks to make any decisions. Don't raise CPC too much until you know your exact CPA/conversion rate for that traffic source, you'll be burning money. It seems that your campaign is p

More ›