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

Did you learn something from this that could be relevant to a future endeavour? If so, then you can at least call that a win.

Let it provide a certain reasonable (enough to license a humble number of themes, not enough for a big business to run for a long time) amount of service free forever, not for a 7-day trial period, 7-day trial periods are almost useless.

And/or add a killer-feature everybody would quickly realize they can't live without and spread the word.

I was just trying to help the author. Sorry if it hurt you.

I went nearly a year without a paying customer, even though I had an email list of over 300 people and a beta user pool of ~400 people, got on the front page of HN twice, and was #3 product of the day on PH. Still, nobody stuck around, much less offered me feedback. It was tough, and I considered giving up many times. But to call it a failure because of that would've been premature.

If your product isn't selling, maybe you're not doing something right (likely!), or maybe it's just not a good product. I think you can figure out which of the 2 your product is by putting some real effort into discovering why nobody is interested in giving you money for it.

The "why" may be your sources of traffic, it may be your messaging, it may be that your product doesn't actually solve a problem, or it may be any number of small things that build up and turn into a gigantic roadblock that nobody can pass without their hand being held.

I didn't start seeing "good" traffic until I started spending money to experiment with Google Adwords. Through that experimentation, I discovered that the traffic sources I was relying on so much were in reality total garbage. They were users from PH, HN and Reddit; "tire-kickers" as a lot of us call them. They just want to try out the hot new thing, then rinse (i.e. churn) and repeat with the new hotness. They aren't prepared, or willing, to open their wallet.

The Adwords traffic was actually converting, so I quit focusing on the bad traffic channels and starting adjusting my ads, finding better keywords, and talking to the "good" traffic (yeah, they actually talk back!). Since I was getting quality traffic now (albeit, low numbers), that helped me find the next roadblock, which was my, at the time, terrible onboarding flow.

The root problem wasn't that my product was bad, it was that I was sending bad traffic to my product and I didn't want to change that. The second problem was that onboarding sucked. I'm still not where I ultimately want to be with Keygen, but now I'm working on other problems (hint: scaling) because the root problems I was having have been fixed.

Stop guessing, and figure out the why.

This is an awesome product, but you are going to have to spend a lot of advertising money to reach the right customers. Reason being, most companies either go the PaaS/SaaS route, or go full open source with paid support. My guess is most of your potential customers have already had to pivot to one or the other. Your only shot is people who are still in the early stages of developing their product and people who are looking to pivot to a different monetization model. You have to sell to your users the idea that in 2018 it is possible to police and track license keys and go with that sort of business model (obviously it is possible, but it's still a sell). Remember, most of your customers were pirating software left and right and using keygens 10 years ago when they were in high school / college, which creates a subconscious bias against license keys in general among the current generation of techies. That's why almost no products use them these days.

I would also suggest offering the product completely for free, and then charging over a certain number of keys. Maybe for 100-1000 installs you charge $5/month, then $25/month for 1000-10000, $50/month for 10000-100000, etc. You could also go with the $5/month gets you 0-1000 keys model, and then scale from there. That option will cash in more on the (large number) of people launching failed apps that get under 1000 users.