Burning money on paid ads for a dev tool – what we've learned

• Overte

  17 121 9.7 C++

  Overte is an open-source 3D client and server solution that allows for vast social & educational environments to be created and lived in while also being shared in real-time with others.

  

Sure.

High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/

Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.

Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.

Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.

• GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams

  14 7,480 6.3 HTML

  JavaScript diagramming library for interactive flowcharts, org charts, design tools, planning tools, visual languages.

  

Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)

> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks

I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks

I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!

But I disagree on Google Search:

> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.

Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

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