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points by lq9AJ8yrfs 2 days ago | 0 comments
The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.

A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.

I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.

I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.

[–] JoshTriplett 2 days ago
What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?
[–] lq9AJ8yrfs 2 days ago
Music lessons. There were multiple factors they shared, customer acquisition wasn't the only thing not working but that they brought it up at all is why it stood out. Indeed it is the kind of thing where referrals you would have thought would help, but also macro factors against. Competing against apps whether these guys are digital or not, anyone can start up a rival business at home esp if they have instruments already, and so forth.

I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.