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Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

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Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#91

Post by iamwithnail »

rticesterp wrote: post #83
cod3boy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I never thought about it that way, I thought it like we help freelancers appear more professional like a company. Many freelancers don't have a clear process in place like a company do, to onboard clients, collect requirements etc. I'll work on the copy real soon.

Also, not to nit pick, but the grammar in your second to last sentence doesn’t give me confidence in the quality of material on your site. I understand you are receiving a large amount of feedback in a short amount of time. However, the attention to detail needs to be there in all of your communication.

Yep - I found lots of the grammar on the site jarring, and little things like 10$/month - the convention is $10/month, and it looks really odd. You should get a couple of hours of a copywriter's time to go over it, there's lots of little quirks.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#92

Post by cod3boy »

detaro wrote: post #89
vfulco wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the beef with Typeform? It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. With Zapier it integrates to over 500+ apps downstream including Invoice Ninja (another amazing service integrated with 40 payment vendors). A happy customer for one year. Would appreciate your take on it.

As a user, if I see typeform I expect a long questionnaire (e.g. from someone explicitly asking me to give them some time to help them research something) or it to be an e-mail list signup. Neither are things I want when trying to sign up to a service - it looks like you are just fishing to collect user data and don't actually have anything yet. I have no idea if they are prepared to actually handle financial data pr…

We actually had many more questions, we were asking all the questions that required to make their personal website like this https://bighead.sievehq.com/, then scrapped all the questions when users started dropping off.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#93

Post by herbst »

vfulco wrote: post #67
arjunvpaul wrote: post #32

Emperor Akbar, on a whim, once asked his minister Birbal to find him ten fools. You can get the gist here (Source: http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=24202 ). Birbal stumbled across the third fool while the latter was looking for something at night. The guy was looking under a streetlamp and couldn't seem to find whatever he was looking for. Birbal asked him what he was looking for so frantically. He explained that he lost h…

What's the beef with Typeform? It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. With Zapier it integrates to over 500+ apps downstream including Invoice Ninja (another amazing service integrated with 40 payment vendors). A happy customer for one year. Would appreciate your take on it.

Sounds like frankensteining third party tools together.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#94

Post by ploggingdev »

vfulco wrote: post #67
arjunvpaul wrote: post #32

Emperor Akbar, on a whim, once asked his minister Birbal to find him ten fools. You can get the gist here (Source: http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=24202 ). Birbal stumbled across the third fool while the latter was looking for something at night. The guy was looking under a streetlamp and couldn't seem to find whatever he was looking for. Birbal asked him what he was looking for so frantically. He explained that he lost h…

What's the beef with Typeform? It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. With Zapier it integrates to over 500+ apps downstream including Invoice Ninja (another amazing service integrated with 40 payment vendors). A happy customer for one year. Would appreciate your take on it.

1) It should not be used to collect credit card details.

2) If you claim to cater to professionals, you should not be using typeform for the signup process.

3) I am clearly not in the target audience, but I'll share my concerns : I would never use a service that hacks together a bunch of third party tools. It's great from the founders point of view (MVP, fail fast, early validation, hustle and whatever else), but it does not inspire confidence. Why? Security and privacy. God knows what poorly configured database, webserver or access control mechanism will leak user data since the product was built with the aim of getting something out of the door without much thought given to security and privacy.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#95

Post by go_prodev »

Your site could be improved...

1) the separator icons to me looked like carousel dots so I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to see the other slides.

2) on my mobile I wasn't able to get your menu to open. That left me hopelessly loking at the front page.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#96

Post by chrismorgan »

cod3boy wrote: post #63
erikb wrote: post #60

I'm a possible customer for this. And wouldn't give you a cent because I don't believe you can do what you promise after looking at your landing page. I need to see demos, I need to see real customers with quotes of praise and links to their websites. Give it away for free for 5 people, while building a clickable demo account that doesn't require a login, and make a youtube video to show more about your team and how…

Noted, we are working on this as we speak. Here is a quick video (raw) if you are intrigued https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7wAeenBe-c

Do not, not, not autoplay the video (as the site currently does). Especially not with sound enabled. That will get the site closed with prejudice by many people, and upset most of the rest. Especially when they can’t even see the video because it’s below the fold.

For user engagement, having a video available is good, but playing it contrary to user expectations is really bad.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#97

Post by herbst »

cod3boy wrote: post #88
comstock wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a freelancer, this also just doesn’t fit with my personal experience. When a client wants an NDA, they send one. I rarely/never care. I’ll check over the language, but they don’t want to use my NDA in general. Invoicing, time tracking is done through my accounting system. Scheduling meeting is pretty easy. Setting up a personal website is pretty easy, and if you’re a Webdev you probably already have one. In my exp…

This could be the case somewhere, I am yet to do the complete validation, but we had over 150 people subscribe to upcoming and 400/600 people click signup. So I was assuming the problem was somewhere in the onboarding. https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/sieve-pro

Don't get me wrong but these numbers are not really a lot either. Especially as Product Hunt is not exactly the best traffic for buying customers they love to click and test free stuff assuming the process is fast and painless (which according to this thread it isn't)

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#98

Post by JumpCrisscross »

comstock wrote: post #80
cod3boy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. All of the things you explained below takes at least a week in real life to complete. To and fro emails to get the requirement right, using DocuSign to sign NDAs, then setting up a call. While with Sieve PRO all of this happens right away. About equity, we've already raised an angel round, so I think it creates some value, but now I think we need to convey this better to the audience.

As a freelancer, this also just doesn’t fit with my personal experience. When a client wants an NDA, they send one. I rarely/never care. I’ll check over the language, but they don’t want to use my NDA in general. Invoicing, time tracking is done through my accounting system. Scheduling meeting is pretty easy. Setting up a personal website is pretty easy, and if you’re a Webdev you probably already have one. In my exp…

> When a client wants an NDA, they send one

Flip side: if I’m hiring, I want to use my NDA.

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#99

Post by cod3boy »

ploggingdev wrote: post #94
vfulco wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the beef with Typeform? It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. With Zapier it integrates to over 500+ apps downstream including Invoice Ninja (another amazing service integrated with 40 payment vendors). A happy customer for one year. Would appreciate your take on it.

1) It should not be used to collect credit card details. 2) If you claim to cater to professionals, you should not be using typeform for the signup process. 3) I am clearly not in the target audience, but I'll share my concerns : I would never use a service that hacks together a bunch of third party tools. It's great from the founders point of view (MVP, fail fast, early validation, hustle and whatever else), but it…

Got this feedback about the onboarding process. Working on this :) While we are hacking together a bunch of tools to onboard and a home page, we really had worked on the product. Here is a quick video if you are intrigued https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7wAeenBe-c

Re: Ask HN: We didn't get a single person to pay for our SAAS – what could be wrong?

#100

Post by macspoofing »

cod3boy wrote: post #16
wnm wrote: post #9

I also clicked on signup, but then didn't. Here is why: I wanted to sign up to test the product, but after clicking on signup I get a Typeform modal. Typeform as a signup form makes me suspicious that the product doesn't really exists, and the startup is doing some sort of landing page -> signup validation. You also ask that I enter my credit card and you want to charge me 10$ upfront, without having established any…

Thanks, Makes sense. Before we were asking $348 ;-) but then our program was that we'd giveaway shares for the first 100 people. The whole thought process behind that was, We are a small team of hustlers wanting to build the best experience for freelancers to work with their clients. Soon in our journey, we realized building a startup is a lot of work, and it’s hard to focus on multiple areas. This is why we’ve launc…

Honestly, just don't bother with the share grants. There are massive legal landmines as securities are highly regulated. There's no benefit to you nor to the random people you want to give shares to. Plus the incentive is all wrong. You want your customers to choose your product on its own basis, not because you're giving out chachkis.

> By giving away 100,000 shares of our company we stand by that, and says when we are successful everyone who were with us will be benefited too.

That's not what it says to me. What it says is that you are naive and your shares are worthless. If your company ever makes it you'll just dilute those shares to nothing.

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