Congratulation you made it to first page of HN which would be enough to gain traction to get useful feedback on your product.
Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
111–120 of 166 posts
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#112Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for this helpful and encouraging post. As I was right this the main question I had was how do I know the difference between "Nobody wants what your selling" and "You need to do a better job marketing"? Retention is a great answer to the question.
Indeed, that's exactly right! I think for us, as soon as we saw that people were sticking around we knew we had to switch to "do a better job marketing". With retention, that was validation that there must be many more people out there who would find Buffer super useful, just like the people who were staying active. In essence, we needed to make more people aware of the value we were providing.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pricing is tough. Part of setting a price is getting feedback from potential customers. Can I ask why it seems way off to you?
I'm not really a potential customer, but I'll jump in: $199 and $499 per month shocked me, and the range $29 to $499 completely confused me about your target customer. You should have an option marked "FREE" and in the same text as the paid options, and not just "free beta" but "free trial". It seems like your target customer is someone who's not going to set up PhantomJS on their own, right? For 500 dollars I'll fig…
A few tutorials on how to do various tasks with your service would help a lot too (beyond the one-liners).
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's back up now. Useful service, I would use it assuming availability is good (I have jerryrigged something similar myself in the past and it was a real pain in the ass to get working smoothly). Suggested pricing seems way off though (I know it's free right now) - how did you figure out what was reasonable?
Pricing is tough. Part of setting a price is getting feedback from potential customers. Can I ask why it seems way off to you?
I'm a developer, which I think everyone in your target market is, so let's assume I could probably roll my own version if I could dedicate a couple of days to it (that would be consistent with my previous experience). I'd expect you to set your pricing low enough that I should never even consider trying to roll my own, so low I never even bother to lookup the docs to see how hard it might be. As pseut says, the upper tiers are so expensive that you just motivated anyone considering that volume to go off and do the build/buy analysis.
I hope this is constructive feedback. There are lots of other good suggestions here on how to make your landing page convert better. If you take all the feedback on board, I do think you have a service that can provide value.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#116Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#117Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#118I think 4 different prices is too much. 3 is good or do something like "user, team, company", and then if we need to have more options we can contact you.
Your website is your biggest investment in Marketing. You should polish it. You also need to understand what your customers need. Their needs are certainly different than what you think.
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#119I know how hard this can be. I've been doing startup stuff for 7 years. And it's still awfully painful. I'd encourage teaching to find an audience. I've been blogging and blogging and blogging. I ended up giving that up at one point. I thought I had more important things to do. I thought it wasn't growing enough. But that was foolish. The biggest thing that's changed a lot of things for me in the last year is simply…
Seven years is a long time. I am pretty on the same timeframe as well. I took a chance to redo everything over and this time with 5 months I have already launched my new product. My HN launch is kinda depressing as it just gave me 6 visits LOL. That traffic graph is my new motivation factor. I love to improve my writing to write blog like you but for now I am sticking to similar goal and that is to release an upgrade…
Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users
#120Getting users is great, but getting traction, meaning users who keep coming back is a much better goal to aim for. So out of your 9 users, start looking at the percentage, although small, that are regularly using your app.
I'm up to 83 users with 0 marketing and I'm trying out new ideas, watching the analytic data and responding over and over. It's a great spot to be in. Keep it up.