I would try to cross sell on the bad PDFs. Ask the user if conversion went well; if they say so, direct them to Fiverr with an affiliate link.
Thank you, I will try it, such a good idea, like the manual conversion idea from above.
Ask HN: How can I save my failing product?
11–13 of 13 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I save my failing product?
#12Sounds like a fairly niche product. Have you given any thought to that aspect? I've build a few too many products that are too niche. When eventually I woke up to that I just abandoned the projects. What's the point of building something for a handful of people.
I always thought that it was more generic tool since it's made for people who wants a tool to extract data from pdf files. But maybe that itself ends up being a niche.
Re: Ask HN: How can I save my failing product?
#13We regularly perform PDF extractions at my startup. For each new client, we'll run batches of several thousand at a time.
A more attractive monetization model for a customer like us would be $0.01-0.03/conversion ($100-$300 per 10,000). A low per-conversion cost would easily allow us to test for a given group of PDFs if the conversion service was a good candidate for that batch, and if not, chose an alternative up-front (but allow us to test again the next batch easily at low cost). Also with a low start-up cost, its much easier to tell customers you won't make any specific fixes (take it or leave it, and test it first). Then you'd have the flexibility to work on broad classes of problems/improvements more at your leisure.