I can't stress this enough: don't use search ads for anything but laser targeted direct response marketing. It's somewhere between useless and actively harmful for anything else.
The only things I do anymore are 1. talk to actual sales prospects and 2. content marketing. Everything else is a handout to Google and Facebook shareholders.
But Google Search Ads is highly competitive and lots of bot traffic. IMO, it's best for retargeting during pre-launch.
One thing that stands out is that OP wasn't bidding on "intent" keywords, sounded more like people were searching for info on Lightroom API than a product they would pay for. That's much harder traffic to convert.
https://www.spamhero.com/support/125230/I_am_being_attacked_...
I use to work on a newsletter service and we had to combat this constantly.
> 2. Verify if it’s a problem from search volume.
It contextually depends, but correlating a problem-to-be-solved with search analytics can be really tenuous. I'd suggest a different phrasing:
Verify it it's a problem by speaking with customers.
Do it better the next time!
This sounds to me like a thing people might pay for.
But I would (strongly) guess most photographers don’t know what an “API” is or why they’d want to pay monthly for one, or how to wire up “curl” to it somehow. People who know that stuff will cobble this together in a script.
As a simple desktop app I could see a utility like this doing well in that audience though. $29-49 one time payment, apply all the presets you want, save lots of time.
1: https://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-lightroom/batch-edi...
On the other point though, there's a case to be made for building products to make things easier/better/more discoverable/etc even if when they already exist. One example: there are is ton of screen recorder software out there despite the fact that QuickTime on Mac can record the screen.
I think a few things helped with that, but one difference that stands out is where the subscribers came from. Mine were mainly from Twitter or people already reading my blog, so they already knew who I was to some degree and had some reason to believe I could help them. It’s a much harder job to sell to random people who came from an ad, who start off with a lot less trust. Any missteps in the copy/problem you solve/etc are magnified because random people are just looking for any reason to hit the back button.
But if it's really promising and ready and I care enough then I'll notice anyway.
My criticism (seems everyone has one!) is that building your own billing, and spending two weeks on the first version before you have any customers, is a massive overkill. Really all you need is to track usage. Don’t even bother trying to automate on your own at this stage…
> When the waitlist reached 100 people
$500/month for every person on the waitlist?
How many hours would this tool save per day? One at most? Even generously valuing the customer's time, the ability to recoup the cost of the subscription at $500/mo is essentially impossible for everyone except a tiny fraction of a percent of potential customers—and I'd suspect those folks don't know they would want or care about the tool.
The author was—at every step—more concerned with making a profit than solving a problem. You'll simply never build a compelling product (and turn a profit) if you don't even know who the people who are supposed to buy the product are.
For actual photographers, they’re probably manipulating all of the photos on their own computers with Desktop software.
Photoshop’s pricing for this is 15 cents per image which is prohibitively expensive for nearly any image generation use case.
That’s actually the type of tool I was playing around with implementing when I came across this as an issue I wanted to solve for myself.
$5000/mo for 10% of the list. Unless he factored in the list growing further.
The website has pricing and it does say $500/mo for the pro version. So maybe 100 was a typo and he had 1000 on the waitlist.
Possibly the sign-ups were generic bots, trying unsophisticated contact-form spam. I can see how a wait-list and contact form look similar to a bot, especially one which is optimized to treat basically anything with an email address and a text field as a contact form.
So yeah, buildin inside someone's moat might give you a cap on how big you will be able to become and will make you a tenant, but it could still be worth your while.
Is Google Ads just completely broken or did I do something wrong?
I'm not sure it's an *or* type of situation here
Small businesses are outgunned, the money is best spent elsewhere.