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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?

#71

Post by ezekg »

yazr wrote: post #66
ezekg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, may…

I keep wondering about adwords buying for a small SAAS. At $1/click, and then maybe 1%-5% conversion for a paying user, and even if this is a generous 100$ annual subscription .. its just terrible. Does this really work long term ? (disclosure : i worked in a big B2C that spent 8 digit sums on incoming traffic so obviously it works..)

For B2B (what I do), I think you should raise your prices if you average $100/yr per-customer. Then ads will be a lot more feasible. :)

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

#72

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

paulcole wrote: post #68
matt_the_bass wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect only making 1 post on HN is not in my opinion effective marketing.

He paid no money and got a few dozen signups in just a few hours. If that's a failed campaign then I wish I can fail like that.

They were just trial signups, though. None of them resulting in making money.

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

#73

Post by gmiller123456 »

harianus wrote: post #27

Link to project: https://qeys.io/ Link to Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737 Ask for credit card data while signing up for the trail period. People that are possible customers don't really mind entering their CC. I did a test with my project Simple Analytics when number one on HN and free people did signup like 50 an hour. Than I cancelled those and paid people came in. Guess how many of those 50…

Just trying to be honest, sorry it's negative. Assuming I understand the way your product works, it's just JavaScript sending a key to a 3rd party server to check if the domain name is valid for that key. I think most programmers could write that themselves into their own project in a matter of minutes. Yes, the front end is nice and would take some effort, but your target consumers are programmers and don't necessarily need a nice front end to get stuff like that done. Additionally, it's easily defeated, and in your FAQ you're actually recommending that they do additional programming to disguise your code into theirs. So I honestly think the effort of using your service is more than it would take someone to write it themselves.

It looks like you wrote this project mainly for yourself, and are just trying to market it for additional revenue. So it's hard to call it a failure altogether because it seems it's provided the necessary value to you. But I can't imagine something like this being commercially viable.

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

#74

Post by gmiller123456 »

msiggy wrote: post #20
murukesh_s wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately this is exactly what he recommends in his FAQ:

"Besides, we strongly recommend to let our JavaScript file blend in with the rest of your application's JavaScript. Webpack, compress and uglify the best you can, to make the code responsible for validation as difficult as possible to find and break."

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

#75

Post by paulcole »

mindcrime wrote: post #70
paulcole wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was on the frontpage of Hacker News. That's not a marketing failure.

There's a lot more to marketing than getting on the front page of HN. OP, I suggest you read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg, and The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank, and consider if you've successfully identified who your customers are, and a valid channel for reaching them. Further ask if you've correctly identified a problem that those customers will pay to have solved, and whether or not your product actua…

> There's a lot more to marketing than getting on the front page of HN.

I'm aware but getting on the front page of HN is still good marketing.

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

#76

Post by stunt »

Besides all good suggestions that you received here already.

You are also missing some plug-and-play features.

Make it effortless for a client to pick your product. Also make it easier for him to reason about it. If I'm interested to your product, I should be able to defend against my co-worker who believe we can built it our selves.

Add integration/plugin/component/package built for popular web frameworks and CMSs and put their logos there.

Yes, your JS snippet works everywhere, but you need something more elegant. Your marketer is going to approach a dumb manager that believes his developers are only trained to use Wordpress plugins.

Use something like user-voice to collect user feedbacks. Don't make assumptions.

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

#79

Post by paulcole »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #72
paulcole wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He paid no money and got a few dozen signups in just a few hours. If that's a failed campaign then I wish I can fail like that.

They were just trial signups, though. None of them resulting in making money.

That's not a marketing failure that's a product/support failure.

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

#80

Post by brogrammer2019 »

markab21 wrote: post #43

If you built out a project to the level of maturity I'm seeing, with 0 customers, you absolutely are doing it wrong. 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…

Very accurate, I agree with markab21
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