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A comment on Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned. Parent comment

Re:Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've lea... by Buttons840 on Friday September 29, 2023 @10:52AM (#37705162)
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.

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Re:Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've lea... by vageli on Friday September 29, 2023 @11:01AM (#37705287)
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).
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Re:Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've lea... by duxup on Friday September 29, 2023 @11:10AM (#37705402)
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>".

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Re:Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've lea... by tayo42 on Friday September 29, 2023 @12:00PM (#37706157)
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.
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