
Ask HN: Should we abandon our product? - dzenos
Hi HN,<p>We&#x27;ve spent the last few months developing a product, but now we&#x27;ve hit a wall and we&#x27;re thinking about abandoning it. We&#x27;d appreciate your brutally honest feedback about what we should do and if our solution makes any sense at all.<p>For context, here is our YC startup school presentation, and our landing page:<p>- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vxpVkonSHJQ<p>- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tuiqo.com<p>Basically, we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues. While trying to find product market fit, we&#x27;ve separately tested it with different target groups, like writers, journalists, lawyers, academics and digital content creators. We kept getting great feedback from these groups, but had a hard time converting any actual users. We had to stop developing because while trying to sell it, everyone kept requesting more and more different features, and it seemed no matter what we would add, still no one was ready to pay for it.<p>Do you think there is any scenario where someone would find this useful enough to actually use it or pay money for it? Or did we just build something that seems interesting to a lot of people but no one is really willing to use it?
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ajeet_dhaliwal
Your website is beautiful, name could be better because I'm not sure how to
pronounce it so hard to tell friends. Unfortunately idea/product itself isn't
something I can give much feedback on, I'm mostly a developer so I didn't
realize this was a problem people had, I guess I can kind of understand some
professions (lawyers, creatives) could really use this though but it's a tough
sell getting people to change their ways unless it dramatically makes things
better for them. It's hard enough making tech people do it in my experience.

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brudgers
_we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues_

Document versioning is orthogonal to text editors and text editors are a
mostly solved problem for most people anyway. Solving people's document
versioning issues means meeting them where they are and providing additional
capabilities not sending them back to ground zero. To put it another way, if a
customer adopts your solution and your company goes out of business, the
customer should be no worse off than if they had not adopted your solution.

The minimum viable product is not a text editor because text editors are
complicated -- never mind Vim or Word or Emacs, the current state of even
Notepad and Nano reflect many years of development.

The great news is that you have people who will talk to you. Ask them what
their current versioning problems are. Become an expert in _actual_ document
versioning problems before deciding on a solution. Solve one organization's
document versioning problems first. Go deep before going broad.

Good luck.

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petervandijck
"We kept getting great feedback from these groups"

If someone says "they love it" and "it looks awesome", or "that's such a great
feature", that's just them being nice. Did they actually ask you for an
account to use? Did they ask when it would go live so they could pay you?

If not perhaps there's no market. For whom isn't basic collaboration (aka
Google docs) enough?

The only group I could reasonably see paying for this are the lawyers, and I
don't see it happening (they're not know for being cutting-edge in tech
adoption). But I've been wrong before :)

Yes I would abandon it.

P.S.: the startup school link doesn't work for me, looks like requires a
login.

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dzenos

      “Did they actually ask you for an account to use? Did they ask when it would go live so they could pay you?”

No, they haven’t. They all missed some features before they’d be willing to
commit. We realise most of these people were probably just trying to be nice
:)

    
    
      “The only group I could reasonably see paying for this are the lawyers, and I don’t see it happening
      (they’re not know for being cutting-edge in tech adoption). But I’ve been wrong before :)”

Exactly, you’re not wrong, we’ve reached the same conclusion. Lawyers really
suffer from this problem and see us as a potentially great solution but as one
of them put it: “It took us 10 years to learn MS Word, we are not changing to
something new.”

Thanks for the honest feedback!

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iamNumber4
No, the problem is your marketing. Time to pivot, your idea is not unique what
you have built is the basics of a document management system. This problem has
been solved by virtually every EMR, and other companies with products such as
OnBase. The good news is that you are not alone, and there are other
succesful/profitable businesses in this market space.

Remember you do not have to be Unique or the best in the market; you just have
to be better than some.

~~~
dzenos
Marketing/sales are definitely one of our biggest issues. We understand that
there are many enterprise document management systems, and that is exactly why
we went to those markets where companies/users cannot afford those expensive
EMS, or they are simply too complex for their needs. We want to pivot, and
that is exactly what this post is all about. Thank you.

~~~
dig247
Consider reaching out to Kan and team at AtriumLTS. Not sure what their
company is all about but before walking away you can try and get it into the
hands of someone who might be able to integrate it into their company.

~~~
dzenos
Actually, we did through our YC SS network. We talked to Kan's co-founder who
confirmed that lawyers do have this problem, but kind of they themselves don't
know how to approach it. The reason: It's hard to make them switch and use new
technology.

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grok2
I think you are right that you should stop development until you get a few
customers for the current version -- otherwise you may spend time not focusing
on the selling aspect! The web-site tells what the product does like it would
be obvious to users, but you probably need to present a specific use-
case/example/workflow where it will help an end-user. And this use-case should
target the specific type of customer you want. Also, probably target a segment
where people will try new stuff (i.e where they don't necessarily love
Microsoft Word, etc) -- it seems like a interesting product for startups to
write up product manuals maybe? Narrow your product's/service's focus
market....

~~~
dzenos
Thank you for the feedback!

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sogen
1.- name is ugly

2.- you don't have a target market

3.- while the Lawyers seem like a great target market, they like to use Word.

4.- there are Word products already in the market, so it's a Proven niche.

5.- I would drop the name and go for a Product that works inside Word with
minimal fuss.

6.- Do you have the time and energy?

7.- why did you make this product?

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1ba9115454
Landing page looks really nice but I couldn't see any pricing.

I couldn't see any reason that this wouldn't sell.

~~~
dzenos
There is no pricing page because we haven't identified the market yet (as we
wrote above). Thanks.

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hasenj
It looks like a wiki to me. Packed with some "interesting" features
(blocks/tabs). Don't see the connection with the headline "document
versioning".

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tmaly
If this supported docx format, you could sell it to law firms

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cickero
You think so? We've talked to a few law firms, and it seems it's a really hard
market to crack. Docx support was our next feature before we decided to halt
new feature development.

~~~
shubhamjain
Maybe sell it as a plugin for MS Word? Querystorm[1] (ThingieQuery,
previously), a plugin that allows SQL queries on Excel spreadsheets, seems to
be doing pretty well.

[1]: [http://www.querystorm.com/](http://www.querystorm.com/)

~~~
dzenos
A plugin could be an interesting option, thanks.

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mrdependable
You might want to narrow the audience if you keep getting feature requests.
Make the product awesome for one of those groups you talked to and then grow
from there.

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harvax
But at what point does it become too many features? You can't just keep
developing for free can you? I assume they are running out of funds...

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billconan
the concept looks cool!

but I can't think of too many cases where we need multiple versions of a same
document.

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Ice_cream_suit
Your presentation needs improvement.

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dzenos
You mean the landing page: how we pitch the product? Or video presentation?

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Ice_cream_suit
The video presentation is particularly bad.

