Ask HN: I built it, nobody came, now what?

Pricing will be somewhat similar to LinqPad.

Finding users to use your product is by far the hardest part in my experience. Just expecting them to come doesn't really work anymore. It did back in the early 2000s. I remember how back then even the average projects I was working on required almost no marketing to attract a significant number of visitors and rank well in Google, but since ~2010 I found this no longer to be the case.

Personally I've found marketing efforts to be largely luck. Sometimes you'll write a couple of blogs that take off, or perhaps you'll share a link to HN, Reddit, Twitter and people will upvote / retweet it. But in general the more you can write and post the better chance you have of something working.

SEO is more predictable, but it's very hard these days as there is always so much competition with established products. Personally I don't even focus on SEO as a way to attract visitors anymore. Although perhaps if you are confident you had a strong niche which you could target in search it might be worth it.

I would strongly recommend against adding more features at this stage. In my experience this never works and is always a waste of time. If you have people coming to your site, using your product and then commenting that they wish it did 'x', then you might want to consider adding new features. I've wasted years of my life adding features to products that literally no one used and now I regret how much of my early twenties I spend working on products no one cared about instead of spending time with friends and family.

Finding a really good co-founder would probably be the way to go. You want someone with a lot of connections who can push your product into businesses and get it shared online by influential people. They're hard to find, but they can be found at local meet ups and you may also know a few people like this from your past / present employment. But this is where I would focus (ideally before you've built something).

Other than that paid ads could be an option, although it would be good to know if you can convert organic users first. If you have the budget in my experience paid ads are the best way to get users in front of your product, but for it to be worthwhile you need to be sure you're converting enough visitors at the right price point.

Not to be too negative, but personally I've given up on bootstrapping startups. I've found out the hard way that if don't have a great co-founder or if I'm not able to put serious cash behind a product it's almost certainly going to fail. It was different twenty years ago, but competition is so high today it's extremely hard to break through all the noise.

There's an interesting post on Indie Hackers which highlights just how hard what you're trying to do is: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/holy-heck-this-is-hard-8eb...

I think a lot of people massively underestimate how hard it is to build a successful software product today if they don't have funding or an amazing team backing it -- although ideally you should have both. So give it your best shot, but also know when to quit. Your time is valuable and what you're trying to do is extremely hard and success is largely a product of luck. If it doesn't work out you can always keep it on the backburner for when you do find a great co-founder or an investor for your project then you can give it another shot.

I definitely see how having access to influencers and/or money could make the process infinitely easier.

I didn't realize it until I read a piece saying a16z was a media company first.

I guess I'll push my luck a little bit with bare sales/marketing tricks.