
Ask HN: Should we shut down our SAAS? - eibrahim
My partners and I built www.hyperlogs.com and we put a lot of money, time and effort.<p>We think that we built a pretty polished &quot;beta&quot; for our web app.  We know we are still missing a bunch of features.<p>The issue is that my partners and I are not sure if we should continue or shut it down.  We have very few paying customers, almost all feedback we get is POSITIVE.<p>We have not done any marketing though, so part of us feels that we might be killing it too soon.  On the flip side, it&#x27;s been several months why don&#x27;t we have more paid subscribers (i.e. more validation)?<p>Should we invest more money&#x2F;time&#x2F;effort into marketing? Product development?  Or call it quits?<p>How do we know if it&#x27;s time to pull the plug?
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deepthought42
Starting a company takes time. Customers aren't just going to flock to you
because you put a product out. I can't tell you if you should quit or not, but
if you want to know why you don't have more paying subscribers, you should try
asking your existing subscribers what made them want to pay for your service,
what they love about it, and what they would do if it no longer existed. I'm
sure somewhere in there you will get some interesting answers that will guide
your decision on how to move forward.

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maxiomtech
I like this idea. Thanks!

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chupa-chups
We work on a SaaS app (company has market leadership in our specific business
which is payroll calculation of a western european country), which would
strongly benefit from integrating a time-tracking app of some sort. Currently
we are in a limited customer trial phase, doing market research and finishing
our planned feature set for initial public release.

As a part of the MVP and customer research phase, and mostly because it is
quite relevant to our intended customer base, we did some market research by
talking to potential customers regarding the use of time tracking software.

We got feedback that most potential customers looked at using time-tracking
software but almost all of them did not find suitable tools because of lacking
integration to other software.

Time tracking itself appears to be quite worthless as long as it does not have
export functionality (in a commonly used format) or integration.

Just my humble opinion based on our research, may or may not be of any
interest for you :)

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maxiomtech
Good feedback here. Chupa-Chups, which country did you target in your market
research? Also, Emad's product is no just a time tracker, it has expenses and
invoicing built in, so it may not having integrations with third party but it
has a way to complete the loop (tracking and finally billing for the tracked
time)? Thoughts?

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chupa-chups
Germany. And while I agree that the feature set is well rounded, it is not all
what you would want to do with that data. That at least is what we perceived
as the gist of the received feedback.

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jwho82
I've been working on my own Time Tracking tool since 2015 as a side project.
I've managed to break 1k MMR. The competition is just insane. Every day I
discover a couple new time tracking tools, and every one of them looks better
than the last one. I've actually started exploring other SaaS ideas on the
side (nothing too serious yet though).

Ads really suck at our pricing point. Google & Bing are $5+ CPC for most of
the main time tracking keywords. Facebook ads were horrible from my experience
(and none of the other major time tracking tools are running them).

I don't really have any advice, but do want to wish you the best of luck!

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eibrahim
thanks and i would love to see your time tracking tool and congrats on $1k MMR
- I know it's not a huge success but it's something :)

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jwho82
logmyhours.com - I'm happy with it so far though, it's something I've built
for myself (I log all my hours working on it) and 100% on my own and has been
a great learning experience. But it is getting harder and harder to work after
work.

I love that I get to chat with customers and see what really are their pain
points (something devs rarely ever get to do).

If I can double the MRR and relocate outside of Vancouver, I can most likely
go full-time.

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jpincheira
Hope you are able to do that. I guess at your point it's getting a few more
clients via different scrappy ways (cold outreach, etc), and keep using their
feedback/behavior to improve the product.

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dyeje
How can you pull the plug before you try marketing it? People won't just
magically find your app, you need to put it out there.

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tnolet
Not trying to be a smart ass here. I'm in a very similar boat as you, but have
had / worked for other startups too.

\- $300 negative a month is very, very little cost for running a SaaS. You
have fixed cost up front.

\- No marketing means you have not really started yet "for real".

\- Any real traction takes at least 3 years.

\- Having a product is step 1 in the 100 step SaaS trajectory.

You just need to take a break. Get some perspective. Then you will see you
have just started out and it is waaaaay to early to give in.

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luckylion
Product development won't help if people don't know about it. Do more
marketing (or start doing it at all). Talk to people that have done comparison
articles on your topic in the past and explain your product and its' unique
advantage to them (but don't expect them to include you immediately, takes
time). Add videos that showcase your product (I'm lazy, I probably won't sign
up and figure out how it works and if it works for me). Start blogging more,
and offer solutions to specific cases ("I'm a XXX and here's how I used YYY to
solve my problem with ZZZ").

From my experience: don't build anything for profit/public unless you have a
marketing/sales plan/person. I've seen quite a few ideas fizzle out because
all involved were working on the product and none were able/willing to work on
getting people/companies to use the product.

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sierdolij
Push it _hard_ on social media for 2-3 years.. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat,
YouTube, etc. Lots of useful, practical demos showing solving read-world
realistic use-cases. Any time there's a release or press mention, add a hand-
crafted Tweet that brings some infotainment value (just like any good public
presentation).

If after that time, traction isn't happening: adjust prices or make the
offering clearer. If that doesn't work, then pivot/try something else. When/if
it gets to $1-2k+/month, then it's probably worth selling to someone for
$20-25k and not just apoptosisizing it. It can take as long as 10 years or
never for something really good and ahead of its time to catch on with
insufficient hustling. _HUSTLE!_ :)

And for heaven's sake, don't throw away a good team if it vibes and flows just
because one project doesn't work out immediately.

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hactually
How many partners and how big is your team? What are your costs that drive you
to -$300 a month? Have you approached anyone to trial it for you and do a
write up? Have you got SEO sorted (or is that part of the "no marketing")? Are
you talking to the customers you do have, are they recommending?

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streetcat1
Specifically for your product:

1) Try to add voice interface (e.g. alexa). 2) Try to sell it specifically to
professional users who care about time tracking (e.g. lawyers). I.e. in a non
scalable way. 3) Increase the price.

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maxiomtech
Interesting. So, you think that increasing the price gives the product a sense
of elevated value, albeit completely fictitious? Also, what do you mean by
"non-scalable"?

Thanks!

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aviv
How can you think of calling quits without ever doing marketing?

Stop developing and start selling.

Also your price is too low.

Advertise on Facebook. Target business professionals.

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maxiomtech
Thanks for the feedback!

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icedchai
How long have you been working on it? What marketing efforts have you done?
Building the product is necessary but not sufficient...

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eibrahim
We launched about a year ago. We put a bunch of time in the beginning but then
we slowed down to a trickle since we are all working and doing this on the
side.

Marketing has been very minimal. A couple of blog posts, a few tweets/fb
posts/linked in posts/etc, a Show HN post - i think that's about it.

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icedchai
ok. That is not really enough time. I'd try some more targeted marketing, such
as Google Adwords... maybe engage an SEM firm to help...

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maxiomtech
Agreed.

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Gigablah
Somewhat off topic but your hyperlogs logo is non-retina, it looks slightly
pixelated on my phone. Just a heads up.

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sharemywin
Are you ramen profitable?

if not how much are you bleeding?

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eibrahim
We are about negative $300 a month

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juliancox
Based on that and your pricing page you need roughly 50 paying business
customers to get to break even. Make that your goal for the next three months.
Focus completely on that (no comfort zone adding just one more feature)
actually get out market and sell. If you can't add the 50 customers in three
months then pull the pin. If you do at least you're at break even and you can
coast for a while deciding what to do next.

I'm ignoring for the moment that there is a cost to servicing each customer -
you might need to factor that in to you breakeven calcs.

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eibrahim
that's actually a great goal to have. We just need to figure out how to market
- we both suck at marketing plus we don't really enjoy it.

