Early adoption can be very slow. Sometimes you have to physically visit your customers office and manually install the software on their computer, then show them how to use, it, then come back a week later, and show them again, until they actually start to use it. The feedback you get from these sessions can be very valuable, as a self user, you know everything there is to know about the software, but for someone who has never used it, even simple stuff can be overwhelming, or has enough friction that they won't bother as they have one thousand other things to do.
Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
31–40 of 91 posts
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#32"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...
this is a great comment, do you have more links about other metrics relevant to SAAS ?
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#33Since 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,…
"insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above"
That's not insanely high - that's pretty common for B2B SaaS apps.
The most I've been quoted for SaaS was more like $100K per user per year...
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#34When I google “web app licensing” I don’t see you at all. I would look at this and other methods of slowly accumulating traffic and let organic growth happen while you mostly work on other things.
And don’t hire more consultants, just commit yourself to learning what you need to learn.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#35Have you consider removing the trial and replace it with FREE plan ?
After you get a high volume of users you could find something very specific they would be willing to pay for.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#36"What happens when I use your service?
When you use your project specific Javascript file and add the license key meta tag to your project's HTML, we'll validate the use of your product on pageload with a GET request to our server. We'll check our records to see if a valid license is used and that the license is used on an allowed domain. If not, we'll show the user an Access Denied page (which you can customize) and notify you about the breach."
I don't know what problem you are solving.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#37Lovely design. I feel this could provide value for a lot of indie developers. However, the copy could use some work..
For example, the following tag line could be much more concise.. "The instant solution to worrying less about your work being copied by the clients you developed them for."
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#38There are two reasons why you may have 0 users:
1. Users don't want the product you are offering
2. Users don't know about the product you are offering
Your first job should be to distinguish which issue you have. You can probably Duckduckgo some basic benchmarks to figure out what the conversion is if you are talking to the right people.
For instance, if you are advertising in first class lounges to pay off student loans, that is just a waste. You have to look at your where you are placing the ads, or how you are reaching customers first.
If you know that is right, then you should talk to a few customers to see if you are offering the right thing.
The second is fixable, the first might be. It is only a failure if the first point (can you iterate the product to something people actually want in a reasonable time at a reasonable cost) is not fixable.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#39Since 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,…
"insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above" That's not insanely high - that's pretty common for B2B SaaS apps. The most I've been quoted for SaaS was more like $100K per user per year...
Depends on what "per license" means. It's a license-managing software, that can have multiple project licenses, and... It gets confusing which license a "license" refers to.
All in all, it's not unusual to pay 10k, 30k or even 100k USD a year for a core technology like that. For example, self-hosted JIRA costs 8.3k USD per year (if you want updates) for 100+ users, and you usually have several services just from Atlassian in this price range.
Re: Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?
#40Let'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”.
At what point does it become a failure, if 0 users after 4 months of effort is NOT a failure?
Coddling people, especially in business, is very counterproductive. People could waste years of their lives following bad paths because of bad advice like yours.
Not a single person has decided that the product is worth paying money for. If the purpose of the effort was to get some people to pay money for this, and the outcome is 0, how could you honestly say this isn't a failure?