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Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

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Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#11

Since 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,…

Great feedback, thanks for that!

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#12
Looking over it, I think you may be chasing the wrong market. The only companies I know selling on prem software are large enterprises to other enterprises. It's fine to have a self serve product, but the people who are going to actually want this have a completely different sales pipeline.

Some other notes:

- Name makes sense after you think about it, but is hard to read at first glance.

- Your FAQ's answer on removing the validation code didn't inspire confidence. Give me an out of the box solution to obfuscating the tracking code.

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#13

Since 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,…

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.

I agree, after looking over the project the first thing I thought was "I bet I could do this myself". +1 for hiding the details and adding a little jargon.

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#15

If it has 0 users, who did you make it for?

It was something I built for myself in the first place (and I do still actively use it). Showed it to one of my dev-friends, he said it looked cool so I thought: "why not work a little bit more on it and share it with the world?".

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#16
I looked up the project from your submission history. It seems like you're marketing it to developers who are making single page apps as freelancers? It seems like that person would be ideally positioned to just hack their own thing together (or at least think that they could) and not need your product. And since it's cheap, it kind of signals that it won't be hard to do.

The comment on "go for enterprise" is a great one IMO. A big company wouldn't mind spending $thousands plus $250/mo to "make sure they aren't stealing our IP" even if that's an extremely low-probability event.

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#17
I 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 your product? Why or why not? If yes, who else in the industry could they connect you with?

What immediately came to mind for me was design templates. You are supposed to buy one for $20 and only use it for one site. I will say I have bought those templates for clients, but on small personal projects, I will just load their demo page and save it to my computer and voila. I have their design template. And I'm sure I've used one more than once after it enters my template library. Plus, those designers probably don't have a way to protect themselves. So in this case, I would go to themeforest or something similar. Look up 50 or so designers. Message them and see if you can get a phone call or if they would be willing to talk over email. Figure out what it's worth to them and go from there.

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#18
"Handful dozen of trial users... 0 paying users"

Don't forget that, for many successful SaaS:

-Landing page to trial conversion is in 5-10% range, and

-Trial to paying customer is 3-10%!

Also don't forget the statistical variance.

Source: https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early-stage...

Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

#20

Since 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,…

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.
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