Ask HN: Is it finally time to quit?

Agree with @buboard below that academics likely aren't the right target audience.

Before giving up, I recommend testing two paths to validate whether there's real opportunity or not.

1. User Research: if you haven't already, reach out to your user base to get real input and guidance from them on how they use the tool, the value they see in it, how they would promote it and what $ they would pay for it log-term. I recommend doing this a 1:1 conversations on a platform like Zoom so you can chat live and record the conversation for further review. You'll likely uncover some gems on positioning, utility and organic marketing opps. You'll be surprised how much people love to participate in these kinds of sessions as it's a validation for them and stroked the ego a little bit.

I would lead with a personal email invite asking for the time. If that doesn't work you can always default to a survey.

2. Rethink the solution. Take academics out of the picture and strip back to the basic functionality, features and solution you provide. What are other verticals or user audiences that could benefit from it? What are competitive companies doing in that space that you could improve on or offer something totally different?

3. Bonus thought...look back at your competition. What are they doing that's driving their success? Sure, they make have an inferior product from your POV, but they're doing something right to be winning. What are they doing that's winning? Can you emulate that at all as another final validation on the vertical and audience?

Good luck!

Math professor here, at a large public US university. I think that academia presents a large, but challenging, market. My university has recently purchased huge amounts of software, not all of it of high quality.

Two questions for you:

(1) Who are the people whom you hope will buy your product? What positions do they hold? Are they professors? Administrators? Something else?

(2) Of these people, where will the money to buy your product come from?

For example, if it aids research, then it might come from individual professors' NSF or NIH grants. These can be large, and they are at individual faculty members' discretion. But they tend to require a lot of advance planning.

If it aids teaching, then you probably need to sell to an entire university at once. Department budgets tend to be meager, and the money is often spoken for in advance.

In any case, budgets tend to be idiosyncratic. It might be that your target audience is willing in principle to pay for your software, but that there is no suitable pipeline of money.

I recommend this website

https://academia.stackexchange.com/

to get a further sense of how academia "works", to whatever extent you don't already know.

Best of luck to you.

Thankyou. I had forgotten that when I posted. The US is my main target market and it is the quiet time of year.

Thankyou. 1. My target is researchers in psychology, sociology, and similar fields.

2. I've tried to price the product so that the individual could make a discretionary purchase (have discussed the pricing with quite a few people with positive responses). The simplest plan is $480 per year and the next plan up is $780 and comes with a second account for an RA or student. I only need a couple of hundred users to be quite comfortable and successful do from done number crunching at the beginning I was pretty confident that that was a small % of TAM.

So far the software been used for both research and teaching but the teaching part was an unexpected bonus.

Thanks very much for the thoughtful reply. Excuse my terse response as I'm typing on a phone.

You might try to contact William Stein. He is a former academic (tenured professor at the University of Washington) that was the lead developer for SageMath, an open source product which he's tried to commercialize along vaguely similar lines. He's now working on a project called CoCalc, which I know less about.

Unfortunately, my impression is that he's had some bad luck, despite a fantastic product, and also despite being 100% an insider whom many research mathematicians personally know and deeply admire. Last I heard, he found us a difficult market to sell to.

Maybe his luck has turned around, I certainly hope so. I see him participate on HN every once in awhile. His email address is wstein@gmail.com (not private -- I merely saved you two seconds of googling), and perhaps he would be willing to share his advice.