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Ask HN: I have a product that makes tens of $ a month. What should I do?

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Ask HN: I have a product that makes tens of $ a month. What should I do?

#1
I built a CRM for Petsitters after my sister complained about how her $99 per month solution was bought by a competitor and decommissioned. I didn't know much about programming but knew enough to know she was paying too much. So I learned (more) about RoR, and built a product for $10 per month. I launched it with my brother-in-law handling marketing and me handling new features.

Since the launch we've had at most 8 monthly active clients. After many months of no growth, we stopped marketing, and I stopped building new features.

We just had a bug pop up where the free heroku postgres maxed out and our users couldn't add new clients. I removed all of our churned clients, but the question remains, after 10 months of not working on this at all, what should I do with it?

Re: Ask HN: I have a product that makes tens of $ a month. What should I do?

#2
Find a home for it that keeps the lights on for $80 a month or less, and with any extra, purchase some Google AdWords or Facebook ads. Let it roll on its own for a couple of years till either all of the users are off, or it makes more money. Use it as a learning platform in web design and back end coding. It will look great on a resume if it is still active.

Re: Ask HN: I have a product that makes tens of $ a month. What should I do?

#6
Congratulations on executing, launching and getting customers.

I expect you have a list of emails of previous signups(in a backup of your db), send out a personal email to each one thanking them for giving you guys a try, what did you like/not like about the app. What feature could we add or change that would get you to sign up again. Get some feedback and see if there is a killer feature you're missing that would gain/keep customers.

Try sending emails to pet sitters inviting them to join.

Is there a feature you could add that would benefit the pet owner, maybe a live chat, photo uploads, live updates on a status page that the pet sitter could add to and the owner could check periodically. Maybe drop brochures at vet offices and try to get pet owners to require their sitter uses your app.

You're probably charging too little . . . although Petsitters might have a lower comfort zone that most b2b apps but your sister was paying $99 so maybe $49 is a better price point.

I would second going with digital ocean. $5 to $10/mo plan would probably work easily for 8 total users.

Definitely think about it as a learning experience. Learn more about marketing, A/B testing, user engagement.

Track how often users are logging in, track users that visit the cancellation page and don't cancel (follow up with users who aren't engaged or thinking about canceling send them a personal email and offer a tutorial/on-boarding session so they are getting value out of your app.

Email each user that cancels and try to get some feedback on why they left, ways you can improve.

Listen to Startupsfortherestofus, lots of good info there.

Patio11 also has lots of great gems in his articles, HN posts and podcasts.

Good luck.

Re: Ask HN: I have a product that makes tens of $ a month. What should I do?

#7
Fire your brother in law - your business has failed to grow and that failure rests with the person responsible for driving growth through marketing.

Also, consider marketing your product at > $10/month. If a previous (inferior?) product was $99/month, then match that price and market the features your product has, otherwise you marginalise what you've created. Being cheaper is a play that works at scale, but shouldn't necessarily be the reason people choose you.

Does your sister think your offering is awesome, or could you do something to delight her and market this feature/capability as widely as possible?

I could have sworn that you posted a while back here on HN, talking about your start-up.. there can't be that many people who start pet-sitting CRMs... do let us know how you go :)

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