Sounds like that was more of great product than a successful advertising campaign, even if it did help.

The product always needs to be good. But targeted ads such as on Google allow entire categories of businesses to exist. My company would have never been started without Google AdWords - there would have simply been no cost effective way to find the users who needed the product.

"The product always needs to be good. But targeted ads such as on Google allow entire categories of businesses to exist."

With regard to niches, my experience has been the opposite.

If your niche is small enough, you can't properly bid on adwords for rare keywords because they are flagged as "low quality" and you are forced to either abandon those keywords or pay 10x for them to show.

This, of course, defies the entire raison d'etre of adwords - the whole purpose of which is (presumably) to bid on a keyword that targets that one rare person that searched for that.

But it can't be done - if only 5 or 10 people search for a phrase or keyword every day, it cannot be bid on properly.

I don’t know about the 5 to 10 search a day volume level - I was quite a bit above this. But I agree that if they don’t serve that volume level well, it’s sad and aggravating. That should be something that can really help people who are out of other options. Might it be a privacy issue? If an ad can be targeted to that level it can be used to address a single individual.

> If an ad can be targeted to that level it can be used to address a single individual.

Alec Brownstein did exactly that by ad targeting his favorite creative directors' names some years back in order to land a job. It worked.

https://mashable.com/2010/05/13/job-google-ad-words/#GvW9atl...

Sure, but you don't need to worry about conversion cost there.

I was faced with keyword combinations that had "natural" costs that were very low (and appropriately so, since I was the only person "bidding" on them). But then a few days later, "low quality score" and they ratcheted up the price 10x.

If you get a job out of it, the penalty doesn't really matter ... I was trying to convert $5/mo IaaS customers.

advertising is about telling people about your product. If you don't have a great product, it won't sell, no matter how much ads you put out there.

This is usually true but sometimes not. For example products like Grey Goose vodka make billions of dollars despite being indistinguishable from other quality vodka even by self-professed experts.

It's probably splitting hair at this point, but Grey Goose isn't bad vodka, it's just no better than other "good" vodkas (whatever "good" means in context of a product whose defining characteristic is the absence of characteristics). If GG was a foul-tasting vodka, no amount of advertising would save it.

this ^ I didn't say you need a better product, or the best product, but you need a great product. If people hear about your product, and they think it's great, then they'll buy it. GG vodka is a great vodka (not a vodka pro but definitely in the high end of consumer vodka I believe), and coupled with their advertising they sell a lot of vodka.

That's anecdotal.

How do you define a great vodka? With blind testing?

If its like beer, then there's a few types of beer and perhaps some spice but its mostly the same.

Wow, that's awesome! I have a product that also solves a problem for a small niche of users [1], but I think my niche is a bit smaller than yours. I recently increased the AdWords budget and I'm trying a lot of different ads to see what works. Anyway, thanks for sharing your story, that's really encouraging.

[1] https://formapi.io

How did you find the niche? Any reading material I should see?

I had a CS degree but was working outside the field in pharmaceuticals. I was having the problem myself and wrote a crazy Excel spreadsheet with tens of thousands of lines of poorly written copy pasted code to do it. I knew that there would be a market for it so I contacted an old classmate of mine who rewrote it much better as a web service.

That is why I think CS and software engineering should be part of every college degree, so that people can see the opportunity for software where it exists. I wasn’t good enough to be a programmer but I had enough knowledge to see an opportunity whereas most people thought “hm, this is just how this is done.”

Reminds me of this AMA answer by @patio11 [1]

> Here's an exercise you can do: do you understand what a life insurance agent does all day every day? Make it your mission for a week to do so, well enough to explain it to a close friend who has no access to your sources. All you have to do to learn this is read and make conversations happen. (People are happy to talk to you!)

I really need to take that seriously, and talk to people in a lot of different industries.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/im-patio11-patrick-mckenz...

Just curious how much the software cost?

Individual contracts around $50,000 per year per customer.

And you were getting these customers from AdWords campaigns, instead of high-touch sales? That's incredible.

Hmm, that’s true. Thanks for your comment, you inspired me to think about creating a platform for independent sales agents, and then I found commissioncrowd.com. I’ve signed up and booked a call with one of their representives. I’ve been putting off sales, but I really need to take that seriously.

My company sells niche high value software in the same value ball park as the OP and the only thing that works is high touch sales.

My advice is stay away from outsourced sales. It is possible that you might find a good one, but you are more likely to find the secret of how to turn lead into gold.

The major problem you will have starting out is good sales people won't work for a business without an established sales process. Of course without good sales people it is hard to establish an effective sales process (nice catch 22). You are probably best grabbing someone new and keen and hitting the road with them until you have an established process that works. Then hire sales people.