[shostack]

Others have beaten the "marketer on commission" horse to death. I fully agree with their comments, but I want to address something else.

>"Spending money on ads is basically burning money and does not work for me. (tried Google Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook ultra-targeted ads, Quora). This became painfully obvious after I implemented my own conversion tracking, because I did not trust their metrics/analytics."

When I hear about solo founders decry poor results from paid media, lack of trust in tracking and metrics, etc., I often wonder how much time they've actually invested in learning what they are doing.

Managing paid media is a career and industry in and of itself that is highly-technical, rapidly evolving, and requires deep understanding of the specifics of individual platforms, creative, audience, etc. The metrics themselves are INCREDIBLY nuanced, and I've come across more fellow marketing professionals than I would like who aren't familiar with the impact of view through conversions, how they should be viewed in relation to other efforts, where/when/why they will mess up your analytics in different platforms (for example, FB view throughs are counted by default, but will not show up in Google Analytics).

So when you say they are basically burning money and not working for you, my gut tells me that there are decent odds things were not setup, tracked, or optimized according to what many in the paid media industry would consider best practices.

This is NOT a knock against you. This stuff is difficult, but the platforms go out of their way to make it easy to get started and spend large sums quickly with settings that may not actually make sense for what you are trying to accomplish.

Which brings me back to the commission thing again. People who know this stuff work on a variety of models. Many of them value their time quite a bit (myself included) and would not be willing to shoulder all of the risk. That said, paying for an initial flat rate consult to evaluate your previous efforts to validate your approach and gauge how much they reach the same conclusion (ads don't work for you) might well be worth the time and money.

[jwr]

It is entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm doing with ads. I did try to learn and apply all the knowledge I had. My conclusion was not that it doesn't work at all, just that it doesn't work for me and I would not recommend it to other solo founders.

As to commission-based work, I still think that when presented with a SaaS with a good 4-year track record, a confident marketer should at least consider something else than a flat rate. What exactly is the risk here? There is organic growth, there is customer retention, there are MRR numbers. After a customer learns about the service, everything else is known and very clear. What remains to be done is work on what happens before a customer learns about the service, which in my opinion is entirely on the side of the marketing person.

I guess my skepticism is also before I haven't met a marketing person that is convincingly good at what they do.

[shostack]

>"It is entirely possible that I have no idea what I'm doing with ads."

If you've managed the ads with a total time investment that equates to the equivalent of < 1yr full-time work, this is likely the case. Keep in mind that when I've trained dedicated digital ads people of all levels from entry-level to managers, I would never let someone with < 3-4yrs full-time experience run an account on their own.

Again, not a ding at you, but it may be helpful to replace "ads" with "software development" when thinking about how much you might expect out of someone's coding and architecture skills if they had the amount of experience equal to the time you've invested in learning and managing ads, and the projects you've managed them for.

For solo founders who have a substantial amount of hands on digital media management experience, I would absolutely recommend it to them if they felt their market research had shown a potential for them to be successful.

>"a confident marketer should at least consider something else than a flat rate. What exactly is the risk here? There is organic growth, there is customer retention, there are MRR numbers." .... "everything else is known and very clear." ... "what happens before a customer learns about the service, which in my opinion is entirely on the side of the marketing person"

The risk is it not being worth the return. Full/partial commission models for marketing are a question of who is shouldering what risk, and the balance against potential rewards. On the full commission side, depending on what resources you provide, how much control you give said marketer over your site, your in-product funnel, etc., they may demand 100% of first year revenue, up front, or more depending those variables. If they are fronting their own capital, they need to feel it will be worth their while for their target margins after paying media dollars, any creative/content/web production costs, taxes, etc. The premium that carries is often hard for people who are not marketers (particularly technical solo founders) to stomach. It's much the same as the reaction many technical folks have to "idea people" that want them to invest their time and energy into building the entire product for negligible equity. Just isn't worth it.

Partial commission, or performance-based bonuses can be an option. But again, it comes down to the risk balance. Are you supplying the media budget? Will you get them whatever data they need for analytics? Will you make changes to your product and funnel if they find traction with an audience that the product UX doesn't support well or feel your current marketing site sucks?

These days there is so much that happens after someone learns about a service that is mission critical to converting to sale. Unless you are willing to pay them solely to deliver on what happens before someone learns about the service (ex: a CPA for a free trial), you shouldn't expect them to shoulder the risk for what happens after someone learns about the service.

If you're interested in debating further, I'm happy to take this offline (contact in profile, I'm not trying to sell anything). Nothing wrong asking the questions you laid out, but I think solo technical founders are really going to struggle to attract quality marketers with this sort of mindset and assumptions.