I think this would most appeal to paranoid managerial types. Probably should identify products you think might be wanting to use it and then contact them directly.
Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
21–30 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#22There is likely a sizable number of your trial users from HN who signed up merely to better understand it and see if it actually works. It crossed my mind to do it, so presumably others too. The initial spike could be largely driven by technical curiosity instead of real need.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#23Let's be honest with ourselves. 0 users after 4 months is a failure.
Can you turn it around? Sure, it's definitely a possibility. But all your effort so far is not the way to do it. You need to do things completely differently, because whatever tactics you have used so far haven't even gotten you a single user.
You would have to invest more money and time into it, and it might get more users. You need help, and brand strategist isn't what you need. You need a sales strategy. You need to find customers and sales. You have to call people up and demonstrate it in person, you can't rely on Facebook or Google ads to make a difference.
But bluntly, this isn't such a hot idea like Dropbox or Airbnb that is going to get viral. Even Airbnb needed a lot of hustle to get it off the ground, and you need to figure out your target audience and get sales the old-fashioned way. If you're able to get good sales, then it could possibly be the service that you want it to be, eventually.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#24Since your domain is very niche, you have to do marketing as well as targeted sales. Have you reached out to potential customers and asking them to use your service? Also please consider making this a B2B enterprise product. To do that the main thing you need to do is hide the price or put insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above. If you are hiding prices, put a button to contact the sales team,…
I hate you, I was working for large corporations and we needed to buy some software and all solution that had done exactly what you described got ignored because we don’t want to pay $999 or sign lot of NDA and play negotiation game with sales people just to see if the solution could work for us.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Overall the idea looks good, but the product looks too cheap, javascript validation? oh perhaps I could do it on my own. Just hide the details and put some jargons (AI/ML to detect behaviour etc :) and give an enterprise look and feel.
Obfuscating what your product does is a terrible idea. Don't do this.
I agree if you need to hide what value it really bring people will stop using it as soon as they understand.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#26I think you need to make the starter pack to free or create a very tiny pack for free starting. If the project really valuable to customer trust it they will buy more. But if it is not it didn't money anyway, no need to be sad. This will happen to anybody.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#27Link to project: https://qeys.io/
Link to Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737
Ask for credit card data while signing up for the trail period. People that are possible customers don't really mind entering their CC. I did a test with my project Simple Analytics when number one on HN and free people did signup like 50 an hour. Than I cancelled those and paid people came in. Guess how many of those 50 did convert? Zero.
So ask for credit card info first, give a trail for x days and charge monthly automatically.
Your design is awesome ;-)
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#28I think this looks like a great tool. But I think the HN community is way to broad to be your target market. I would start by brainstorming who out there is losing money from people using their product outside of their intended use. Then you need to contact them one on one and talk to them about the problem. Is it really that big of a deal, why haven't they solved it themselves already, would they be interested in yo…
Good observation. Paid plugins for cart software like Magento, OpenCart, and Prestashop might be good candidates as well. Well, at least the ones with a UI. Similar for Wordpress plugins.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#29Since your domain is very niche, you have to do marketing as well as targeted sales. Have you reached out to potential customers and asking them to use your service? Also please consider making this a B2B enterprise product. To do that the main thing you need to do is hide the price or put insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above. If you are hiding prices, put a button to contact the sales team,…
I hate you, I was working for large corporations and we needed to buy some software and all solution that had done exactly what you described got ignored because we don’t want to pay $999 or sign lot of NDA and play negotiation game with sales people just to see if the solution could work for us.
I agree. I understand that many enterprise customers have specific “bespoke” needs and in turn specific pricing. But I’d like to know order of magnitude cost that I’m looking at without needing to contact anyone. You could give $999 example enterprise cost with example features and offer a contact us for additional options/pricing.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#30Let's be honest with ourselves. 0 users after 4 months is a failure. Can you turn it around? Sure, it's definitely a possibility. But all your effort so far is not the way to do it. You need to do things completely differently, because whatever tactics you have used so far haven't even gotten you a single user. You would have to invest more money and time into it, and it might get more users. You need help, and brand…
I don’t think generally calling it “failure” is fair. I think you could call it “marketing failure”.