

Ask HN: Should I pull the plug on my side project? - ahGydUWpKfAgemo

Built holding page and mailing list. Posted to BetaList and received positive response. Collected 100s of emails. Some influential industry people mentioned it on social media.<p>Built an MVP. Posted about it on all of the industry sites (Hacker News, Product Hunt, etc.) and social media. Received very little response. Managed to convert single digit paying customers. Zero success from cold emailing.<p>Six months later and essentially no growth. Operating slightly below break even. Some very laborious but fairly successful marketing campaigns (100s to 1000s of daily visitors) did not result in the conversions I hoped for.<p>On one hand, it&#x27;s possible the product is good and I suck at marketing and should continue learning and grinding. On the other hand, it&#x27;s possible nobody wants the product and I should work on something else. Is it time to classify this project as a failure and move on?
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davismwfl
In general Marketing is a series of experiments to find what works and doesn't
work. So marketing is always about learning and failing quickly to find the
successful campaigns and channels.

As for your specific circumstances, it doesn't sound like your marketing
outright blows as you are getting traffic, so I'd look more to one of the
following:

1\. You don't have a good product market fit. Your product value proposition
might even be spot on, but the product itself may fail to fulfill the need.

2\. You are marketing to the wrong group of people, so while you get traffic
your conversions are horrid. I have seen this when people are using terms or a
value proposition that a broad group cares about but only a small sub-group
actually purchases or controls the funds.

Have you followed up with visitors and figured out why they aren't converting?
Have you done trails to get feedback? Have you done 1 or more surveys to get
feedback? Have you talked to people, called them? Offered them something small
in return for honest feedback? Have you gone and sat with a potential client
and walked them through the product to get feedback? etc

Not sure what your goals are, but I think you have to earn the right to quit
so you can learn from the situation. If you haven't found out why it is
failing then you haven't earned that right, as you haven't learned what not to
do the next time.

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nmcfarl
When to pull the plug is feels the hardest thing to figure out.

My feeling from the story is that you almost have the product the people want
to buy – or your marketing wouldn't of worked as well as it did. You're just a
little bit off of product market fit.

But you also sound a bit worn down and tired which is not a good place for a
side project.

So that sounds like a hard place to be.

I can't really offer advice – but I will tell you that the thing that has paid
my (and several other peoples) wage for the last decade spent the first year
completely in the red sucking cash and paying zero while I worked full-time on
it and my partner did it as a side gig. Completely self funded. Sometimes it
takes quite a while to find your fit as a company.

But sometimes it's never going to happen and pulling the plug on doomed
projects is the only way to get to the project that's actually going to work.

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eschutte2
What's the project? It's tough to guess whether it's worth putting more effort
into without knowing anything about the project itself.

My gut feeling is that if it's been this hard to make even a tiny spark with
the traction you've gotten so far, it might be smart to look for an easier
hill to climb. I think the question to ask is, have enough people who would be
ideal customers seen the product and understood how it could help them? If
not, how could you get it in front of enough of those people to gauge whether
there's some intrinsic attraction in your offering?

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smt88
> it's possible the product is good and I suck at marketing

You probably suck at marketing this product, but that's ok. No one is "good"
at marketing something on the first try -- they're good at using trial-and-
error and user data to improve their marketing. You weren't going to nail it
on the first try, and neither would a veteran marketer.

You're going to need time and money before you can be sure that this has
failed. You could try raising money, but investors will generally look for 1)
a great team or 2) great access to a (niche) market.

"Slightly below break even" sounds like it might be worth continuing for a
while. Use things like Lucky Orange to see how users are behaving and try to
tweak your marketing.

Do you mind describing your product for us a little bit?

