
About the goodwill of people: 4,500 users and 0 donations - pretzelhands
https://pretzelhands.com/goodwill-of-people.html
======
bastih
Having looked at the tool, I'm wondering what OP expected. I "used" it for 10
seconds, and am still wondering why I'd need it or what the provided value is
over "extract colors and order them in a list". Color scheming shouldn't start
in your editor IMHO.

Paid use is based on perceived utility, and donations (to me) go to a
perceived need (and if there's utility on top, that's great). This app doesn't
cry "I need money to do X", so I'm not sure why the author even expected
donations, and "boatloads of traffic" isn't a reason that gets me to donate,
really.

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yAnonymous
The about starts with:

>This tool was created to solve my own problem.

You create a very simple tool for yourself that can do exactly one thing and
expect people to pay for it? And 4500 site accesses is absolutely nothing, by
the way.

The main problem here are your unrealistic expectations.

I contribute to OSS that is used by millions of people. Certainly I should be
a millionaire? No, that's not how it works.

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franciscop
I have released dozens of packages reaching hundreds of thousands of people
and, according to SO, helped devs millions of times in different ways. In
total I have been donated the amount of $10 (lifetime). I am considering
different ways of making revenue now from my side projects since it is not
sustainable.

I even had a horrifying experience when someone pretended he was donating only
to get me to use his cryptocrap. What a f __* waste of time that was.

Probably the only ones who can make it out of donations are the best known
devs in their fields like Sindre Sorhus [1]. Others, while also really well
known, have gone the open-source-but-pay-for-pro route like TJ [2] and John
O'Nolan [3]. Thinking you can live purely of _passive_ donations is, at best,
naive.

Here are the statistics of 30k users and 80k page views on my latest project
that netted those $10:
[https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/955782847230431232](https://twitter.com/FPresencia/status/955782847230431232)

[1]
[https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus](https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus)

[2] [https://github.com/apex/up#pro-features](https://github.com/apex/up#pro-
features)

[3] [https://ghost.org/pricing/](https://ghost.org/pricing/)

------
onion2k
People on ProductHunt are interested in products _in general_. The cross over
between ProductHunt users to _< your product>_ users can, and often is, zero.
Getting a ton of traffic from there only means your product is new to people
who are interested in seeing new products; there is no reason to believe
they're ever going to be customers even if they come and see what you've made.

Not getting any customers from DesignerNews is more of a problem, and probably
indicates something is wrong with your call(s) to action. They're obviously
not working, or your product isn't useful. Ideally you should have set it up
to capture user information before launching, because then you'd be in a
position to ask the people who visited why they didn't buy. It's a little late
for that now.

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nippples
.colors() isn't exactly groundbreaking and there are plenty of free color
scheme apps/sites out there that are more full-featured.

~~~
rabyss
That was my thinking too: slick looking and all, but you can actually pretty
easily do it yourself if you are a web dev. Most people use truly amazing
frameworks for free, I don't think they would donate for this.

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imron
This reflects my experience too. Several years back I made an input method for
typing pinyin with tones [0] and released it for free with a donation button.

In 5 years and tens of thousands of downloads I could count on two hands the
number of people who had made a donation. Then I put the download link behind
a 'pay what you want, including zero' button, and I made more in one month of
that than the previous 5 years of donations.

Asking for donations is a poor way to monetize your product.

0: [https://www.pinyinput.net/](https://www.pinyinput.net/)

------
bittermang
There still persists this idea that all you have to do is "built it, and they
will come", a la Field of Dreams (1989).

First off, that's not the right quote. It's "If you build it, HE will come."
He being "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, a baseball playing ghost. And if you're
basing your marketing strategy on baseball playing ghosts, you need to go back
to school. Ghosts don't have any money, they can't buy your product. Baseball
playing ghosts didn't even fund the REAL field of dreams, just down the road
from me where they filmed the movie. The movie itself brought popularity and
prosperity to the field, and since the movie was almost 30 years ago, the
field is fallen on hard times.

But lastly, and this bit of insight came from my grandmother: It never amazes
me when people offer something for free, and then get mad when people take
them up on that offer. You did it. You chose to make it free to use. You put a
tip jar out on the counter, sure, but ultimately the thing is free with no
strings attached.

------
ggambetta
visitors != users. With an average visit time of 24 sec, I guess most of the
4500 "users" are people who, like me, found a link, clicked out of curiosity,
spent a few seconds figuring out what it was and playing around a bit, and
then moved on.

------
pretzelhands
Hey HackerNews! Thanks for all the.. uh. Tough love. Your message has been
received loud and clear and I will definitely try to do better next time
before being whiny.

You'll hear from me again!

~~~
eitland
> You'll hear from me again!

I'm glad to hear that!

And good luck, I'm one of those who love smaller projects submitted on show
HN.

------
cyberferret
There are utility site where I _do_ pay a small donation almost immediately,
when I see how useful it is to me in an immediate sense, and there are other
where I will kick the tyres, and leave thinking that no, this really doesn't
save me time/energy/frustration etc.

Not to disparage your work and your site. It looks great, and your call to
action to donate is quite clear, but to me, at first glance, looks like about
a half dozen other sites that I have in my bookmarks bar.

Perhaps if you differentiated your site a little more from the others, so that
I could see an immediate benefit, then you might be more successful.

Here is a use case that would be an instant hit with me. We are in the process
of redesigning our logo for our SaaS app, and along with the
redesign/rebranding, I would like to ensure that all the design elements on
our web app conform to a similar colour palette.

If I could upload my new logo to your site, and it would magically give me the
Bootstrap CSS files for a few alternative colour layouts that take into
consideration the Bootstrap .success, .warning, .danger etc. qualifiers, then
it would be an instant $10 to $20 pinged across to you from me.

Maybe your site does that? I don't know - a cursory look didn't tell me how it
could be of value to me...

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omtose
Is this a joke? There are about a thousand projects / things I would rather
donate to before a trivial color visualizer.

------
Naouak
If you make a product based on donations then you should never expect any
revenue from it. If you want some revenue from it, then charge your customers.

Also, getting no donation from 4500 visitors is not really bad nor good.
People do not donate often (because you can't donate every time someone ask
for a donation).

------
Quarrelsome
I think its a bit of a misconception to think that such a volume in traffic
_should_ result in a donation. If one was of the mindset that getting 4k
traffic is cool then this would be time for excite but as the expectation has
been to make a little off this the outcome is sad.

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JepZ
Before we flame him too much, just read where he comes from:

[https://pretzelhands.com/introduction-to-
pretzel2018.html](https://pretzelhands.com/introduction-to-pretzel2018.html)

Nevertheless, that type of 'tool' is too trivial for me to even think about
donating. Actually, I still don't know what it is supposed to do. I mean, okay
if you don't know how to read hex-colors you can use the normal dev-tools
color pickers or some color picker which suggests other fitting colors, but
just a tool to visualize and let you change the order of an array of color
codes?!? Sounds like something you would write in jsfiddle.

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CPLX
You can get 5,000 visitors from an unusually clever tweet, it's a literal
nothingness in the context of tens of billions of web visits a day. This guy
needs to try a little harder before looking to cash out.

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thatswrong0
If you really want people to donate, (this is on mobile) make it way way way
more obvious than the third of four icons on the side. And I get the beer mug
concept, but that still doesn’t scream “donate” to me.

Also anyone with a lick of JS experience could make this in less than an hour.

Also 4500 isn’t a lot.

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bittermang
4,500 is larger than a lot of cities in the Midwest, and Census data shows
that in many of those communities, everyone is under the poverty line.

You seem to be running under the assumption that all or any of those 4,500
users even have any money to give you.

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mdekkers
If you are looking for donations, make something worth paying for. Personally,
I spent 15 seconds on your site, and couldn't find anything of value to me.

The act of making it doesn't entitle you to turnover....

~~~
dingaling
And even if someone does find a tool of value there's the 'many small cuts'
problem; I can't afford to give every creator $5 or even $1.

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brador
Don't mix charity and business.

If you want to give something away, then do just that, give it away expecting
nothing in return.

If you want to profit, then build and monetize for that.

Don't expect a middle ground between the two.

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oligopoly
How about offering something extra for people supporting. It amazes me that
people slap some PayPal logo and expect people to contribute. Create an
emotional appeal and call to action.

~~~
yAnonymous
Donate 50k or I'll eat this rabbit?

