Ask HN: Scratched my own itch. Is one week too soon to pivot?

Hi everyone,

I've written a bit of software that I needed. I have packaged it and attempted to market it. http://www.virtsync.com

With a few hundred dollars spent on LinkedIn and Google Adwords, there have still been no downloads of the evaluation version.

Is the site broken, or did I just have a unique need? (I would have happily spent the $49 that I'm charging, if the software had already existed.)

Is there a way to turn this software into a profitable service, perhaps like rsync.net? Or should I just forget it and get on with the next project?

Any comments on the site, software or future direction would be very welcome.

Thanks,

Chris.

Thanks, do you think the price is a problem? Is everyone conditioned to not realise that $10/mo for ever is more than $50 one-off.

Yes, sysadmins are the target market.

Split test and try some new pricing models. This seems like something that should have the core free, with paid upgrades and paid support for large clients.

You've conducted a single experiment and found out that the LinkedIn and AdWords adverts you ran put nobody in your funnel. This is useful data. Come up with some more ideas for experiments to run and run those. Pivoting after a single marketing experiment though? Too soon.

$49 per machine is a pretty high cost, particularly for something which is new and untested.

I'm no expert, but my gut feeling is that for this kind of tool - you need to offer a more 'enterprisey' offering. The way budgets for the kind of places that this tool would be useful are allocated, $49 for a single utility for every machine it might need to be run on is something that sysadmins might have difficulty explaining.

Bear in mind that the idea of syncing is not novel, and most sysadmins have built their servers around the current tools and constraints available. They are likely to look at your utility and think 'that's cool, but it's not worth the cost: what I have now works even if it takes longer, and I'm not paying anything for it'.

If you asked me to pay $49 for a faster version of rsync, which I then had to incorporate into my tool-chain, I'd probably just forget it. The cost of changing to a new utility is more than just the cost of the utility itself.