Startup Paid Advertising

Discussions focus on the effectiveness, costs, strategies, and ROI of paid ads on platforms like Google and Facebook for promoting startups and products, including debates on targeting, acquisition costs, and alternatives to advertising.

📉 Falling 0.4x Startups & Business
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#5815
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Keywords

FB US IMO HN TBH PPC google.com URL i.e ycombinator.com ads advertising google ads fb campaign ad spending spend money spent

Sample Comments

rawtx Apr 11, 2019 View on HN

Why don't you just spend that money on marketing/ads ? Setup campaigns on Google Search/FB, etc.

mtmail Aug 17, 2015 View on HN

Sure. Paying $100 for Adsense/FB/Twitter ads to get semi-random users to your website might be a better investment than submitting the URL to various producthunt, betalist or other startup directories. Unless your target audience is other startup folks.

sp332 Jul 2, 2014 View on HN

Sure, if they spent the first million on advertising :)

amanjaincorp Jul 24, 2020 View on HN

Poll of "fellow FB employees" could be replaced with spending ~$100 on Google Ads and using a certain targeting criteria.

agentifysh Dec 30, 2025 View on HN

just a mobile app i been working on figured i might try my luck with metawhat is the source for that uphill curve is that because its not clear what your user wants or optimizing ad copies ?im definitely not looking to spend thousands of dollars, figured starting out small hmmmgetting hired by ad agency seems interesting reminds me of trading desks a bit

aninteger Aug 19, 2023 View on HN

"We Spent $1,500,000 on Ads Without Getting a Single Customer" but they did get the top #1 spot on Hacker News so maybe that's all they wanted? Just wine about spending all this money (poorly) and make a post about it and get free advertising with a trip to the front page of Hacker News.

sshturma May 16, 2020 View on HN

Run FB and Google ads if you have a budget for that. Even little goes a long way if you can find the right target audience. I've had some pretty interesting conversions and comments from running FB ads. It's enough to spend $5-10/day on FB to experiment and find the right campaign type and audience. You can analyze how people interact with your landing page with Google Analytics. I had less success with Google Ads, but I know many founders who got good results out of it.

tppiotrowski Aug 24, 2022 View on HN

I used Adsense. Only spent $200 or so but could only get a single signup or two. TBH I haven't used ads since and prefer word of mouth.

joelresnicow Oct 13, 2011 View on HN

It's a two step click thru, and effective cost of acquisition can be high! Think $5+. And volume will be low...not enough to "chart" or grow sustainably.

DenisM Jan 20, 2009 View on HN

offtopic:you were going to post about spending $1000 for advertising http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=420300How is it coming along? :-)