You can start by providing link here. It might help.
Thanks for the suggestion but I don't think it's appropriate right now.
Are you being too nice not posting a link (or maybe you have a technical reason)? I was a little hurt when a friend said I wouldn’t be a good business man as I wasn’t cut throat enough. My friend wasn’t being entirely wise but there was a little truth in there.
I have been selling a subscription service to schools now for 10 years, enough for me to work part-time on the project. Biggest leap in customers I had was through an educational fare. It cost about £6000 to exhibit if I remember.
Thankyou. 1. My target is researchers in psychology, sociology, and similar fields. 2. I've tried to price the product so that the individual could make a discretionary purchase (have discussed the pricing with quite a few people with positive responses). The simplest plan is $480 per year and the next plan up is $780 and comes with a second account for an RA or student. I only need a couple of hundred users to be qu…
One further thought. I am in mathematics, which is not the same as psychology or sociology, so take this with a grain of salt. That said --- I think your pricing plan is wrong. Don't price based on a subscription model. Instead, sell your software outright, perhaps include more licenses (e.g. for all students and postdocs under the PI's direct supervision), and charge closer to $3-5K for it. Here is why. First I reco…
Thankyou. 1. My target is researchers in psychology, sociology, and similar fields. 2. I've tried to price the product so that the individual could make a discretionary purchase (have discussed the pricing with quite a few people with positive responses). The simplest plan is $480 per year and the next plan up is $780 and comes with a second account for an RA or student. I only need a couple of hundred users to be qu…
You might try to contact William Stein. He is a former academic (tenured professor at the University of Washington) that was the lead developer for SageMath, an open source product which he's tried to commercialize along vaguely similar lines. He's now working on a project called CoCalc, which I know less about. Unfortunately, my impression is that he's had some bad luck, despite a fantastic product, and also despite…
Thankyou. 1. My target is researchers in psychology, sociology, and similar fields. 2. I've tried to price the product so that the individual could make a discretionary purchase (have discussed the pricing with quite a few people with positive responses). The simplest plan is $480 per year and the next plan up is $780 and comes with a second account for an RA or student. I only need a couple of hundred users to be qu…
One further thought. I am in mathematics, which is not the same as psychology or sociology, so take this with a grain of salt. That said --- I think your pricing plan is wrong. Don't price based on a subscription model. Instead, sell your software outright, perhaps include more licenses (e.g. for all students and postdocs under the PI's direct supervision), and charge closer to $3-5K for it. Here is why. First I reco…
Thanks (for both replies)! I do have a lab plan as well (6 transferable accounts at $2460 per year) but as you've pointed out, that isn't a one off cost. The problem I have with the one-time purchase is recurring costs for storage, hosting, etc. as it's a web based SaaS. Nevertheless, excellent advice... I'm going to have to start researching my options on one-time pricing. Thankyou!
If you build it, they won't necessarily come; as you're seeing now. I think you need to stop development. Don't put another minute into dev work until you've found someone to pay for this. Sometimes it's helpful and motivating to approach the first few sales in a completely non sustainable way. Don't try to establish a customer acquisition funnel - try to find one single person willing to pay. It sounds like your Dec…
Whatever you do though don't be discouraged. It cost me a $200,000 investment to learn this lesson - the longer you spend building something without convincing someone to open their wallet the more risk that you could be building something nobody wants. Once I emotionally recovered from that failure, my next project started with a very tiny goal: earn $150 within two weeks on a new idea to afford motorcycle Insurance…
If you're saying you launched in July, that's like a couple of months. The three years before doesn't matter, I mean it seems like a mistake, should have launched something after 2-3 months but in any case that time is gone. It took over a year after the launch of my SaaS to get the first paying customer. Need to find a way to market to these academics.
If you're saying you launched in July, that's like a couple of months. The three years before doesn't matter, I mean it seems like a mistake, should have launched something after 2-3 months but in any case that time is gone. It took over a year after the launch of my SaaS to get the first paying customer. Need to find a way to market to these academics.
You quit when the problem is solved where you find you don't care enough about the problem. And if you allow yourself to feel the pain of the problem you remember why you want to keep working.
you mention psychology and sociology researchers but can you be more specific about the the pain point they're dealing with?
Agree with @buboard below that academics likely aren't the right target audience. Before giving up, I recommend testing two paths to validate whether there's real opportunity or not. 1. User Research: if you haven't already, reach out to your user base to get real input and guidance from them on how they use the tool, the value they see in it, how they would promote it and what $ they would pay for it log-term. I rec…
Thankyou. Plenty of good advice there.
Absolutely, happy to help. Feel free to ping me if you have any more questions.