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

I've had a couple of market successes, mostly in the B2B2C/LeadGen space and every time it has been built with a primary customer who is basically getting the product at reduced cost with the caveat that I understand the business impact I'm making with my software to be able to derive true value. They have the benefit of the product growing up around their needs before their competitors get their hands on it.

You built a solution to a problem without an anchor customer using it from prototype stage on up. This is really risky, in that you don't have a solid insight into the intrinsic business value of your product.

It seems too that you didn't take distribution into account and assumed that word of mouth would carry your cost of acquisition. For me the formula would be something roughly like:

Estimated LifeTimeValue (LTV) over 1 year * .3 == Avail Cost Per Aquisition in Marketing / Bizdev / TradeBooth / Etc.

(this formula will create an initial deficit, but most products are fighting against media buys of entrenched companies so you have to expect this)

So if you make $300/yr per customer, you might expect to spend $120 in marketing expenses to acquire a single customer. If you have a 10% signup rate for a free trial, with a 15% stick rate from that (For every 100 people you buy targeted media on, you might expect 1.5 paying customers)... that means if you're spending $1/CPC on google, you would be spending $75 per new customer (beating your $150 budget). Organic reach and word of mouth might help this formula reduce in cost, but what you're wanting to build is a sustainable machine that can be driven by marketing expense, not by gimmicky front-page listings on HN You optimize on those metrics as your marketing continues to spend more and you have more data to work with.

Obviously, the above example is hyper-simplistic, but you have an advantage of not needing to hire devs. Now take the time to figure out the digital marketing piece or find a partner who knows it and can help you with it in exchange for equity if you're trying to bootstrap this.

You'd have to play with your pricing structure to make that work, as you increase your price, Cost Per Aquisition possibly goes up but you hopefully can find a balance that works in your market. This is why most people for their first product need investors to pony up spends to discover this, but in my experience, you can hit very low cost-per-acquisition numbers if you're careful, just not at scale. (Last part is important)

Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any questions or want any advice, you're getting a LOT of great input from people here but this is my $.02 :)

I think you need a product that you can license to enterprise customers because they have plenty of money and often don't have a clue whether your product really is worth all the money or not.

1. $10 for GET request and ten license-domain pairs. For one project. $50 for ten projects and 100 licenses per project. Too pricey for small amount.

2. Nothing stops user from simply removing qeys.js from a page.

3. Functions in your js file are called "v" for validation, "iv" for invalid license error and "vv" for setting validation cookie. They can conflict with other similarly name functions from other parts of your customers's JS.

4. You set validation cookies on the client side. You literally have a code to bypass your system in your system.

5. User interface may be much better. There's too much hassle in setting up multiple keys. I need to switch between pages to do it.

Conclusion: your software isn't good, your prices are high. Something like that can be accomplished in one day with a couple PHP scripts tied to MySQL database with lifetime control over it. Everybody who needs it most likely are able to implement it themselves. You need to put more effort in it and polish it more to make it really attractive for others. It's a nice job for "Intro to Webdev" course project, but not for actual product someone will pay for. I don't want to offend you, but that's what I actually think as a guy with some teaching experience.

Shameless plug: I can develop similar (or better) webapps and now looking for projects. You can hire me. You may find me in Telegram with the same username I use on HN.