81–90 of 91 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
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…
I don't think this was a good naming choice to begin with.
"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 ?
Just look at famous VC blogs :)
You could also look at Saastr blog, it's really interesting.
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…
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 necessar…
I'm pretty bad at this but you get the general idea.
Why?
What marketing did you do? Did you do enough? Did you target the right people? Was your marketing message relevant? What did the people you where marketing too think of it? Did you test it was working? Did you market in multiple channels? Did you sell the benefits of your product or its features? Did you ask your customers what they thought?
You have said very little about how you tried to fix the problem, did you even try?
You didn't bother to post a link to your project and I can't be bothered finding it. Did you do the work for your customers or did you leave them guessing like me?
~Edit~ Some one else posted your link for you, and the link to the hacker news post, its filled with feedback, which I can see hasn't been tried. You are not doing your work. Their feedback might not make sense to you, but your not selling to you, and your not selling to them because your not addressing their concerns. Do the work for the customer.
With web applications usually I'm either developing them for the client so it is their code or I'm licensing them as a SaaS app from my server so I don't really need anything like this.
This doesn't feel like a good product market fit, I'd keep using it and work on targeting WordPress developers.
WordPress isn't the greatest ecosystem but there is money to be made there.
Now, I'm going to assume that without your solution or something like it, such code isn't protected. (Assume, correctly, that I don't know anything about server-side Javascript.)
The first question is: what is the competition? Is there a way of doing this that doesn't require your solution? If so, how are you convincing users to migrate to your way of doing it.
Secondly, suppose there is no competition. In that case, people who write server-side JS code do not expect to be able to do that kind of licensing, even before they have written any line of code. They deploy their server-side JS code in scenarios in which licensing that code isn't the bread and butter of their business; they lock in their bread and butter in some other way and take it for granted that people can easily reverse-engineer their server side JS code, and muck around with it, steal snippets and whatever.
In this scenario is where you are in trouble because you face the prospect of convincing the people who are doing server-side-JavaScript development world to do that kind of node-locked deployment model. Only if they are seriously on-board with developing and deploying something like that do they then become potential customers for your licensing scheme. By the time they get serious, they might even roll their own.
You might be better off developing a superior licensing alternative for for some toolchain whose users already do that kind of licensing, stealing those users from whatever they are using now. And then work the JavaScript story into that: "hey, existing users: if you want to branch into JavaScript work, under your existing licensing model, we have you covered".
Lastly consider that if node-license-locked server side JS development suddenly became immensely fashionable, how likely would it be for numerous solutions to appear, many of them FOSS?
I'm using this product from last 1 year for my software. You can definitely make a sell if you try to sell your software to internet marketers. You can find them on platforms like jvzoo.com