
Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed? - frits1993
Four months ago, one of my projects was ready to be posted on &quot;Show HN&quot;, and so I did. After a couple of hours it reached the frontpage and traffic was through the roof. A handful dozen of trial users signed up, and with feedback of the community, I thought that if I were to spend a bit more time on it, this would be the side project I could continue working on and make some side-money with.<p>Long story short, four months later, I am the only user of my service. I hired a brand strategist who looked at the market, with who I forged a marketing plan, and with who I set goals. Needless to say, none of them were met.<p>What does&#x2F;can this mean? Should I accept that what I built will only be used by myself, or is this a phase each product&#x2F;service goes through? If only there were one extra paid user, I would have enough motivation to continue, but with zero conversion the motivation starts to fade.<p>I think it is irrelevant to re-post a link to the project, but feel free to ask&#x2F;look it up if you think it&#x27;s relevant.
======
docker_up
Let's be honest with ourselves. 0 users after 4 months is a failure.

Can you turn it around? Sure, it's definitely a possibility. But all your
effort so far is not the way to do it. You need to do things completely
differently, because whatever tactics you have used so far haven't even gotten
you a single user.

You would have to invest more money and time into it, and it might get more
users. You need help, and brand strategist isn't what you need. You need a
sales strategy. You need to find customers and sales. You have to call people
up and demonstrate it in person, you can't rely on Facebook or Google ads to
make a difference.

But bluntly, this isn't such a hot idea like Dropbox or Airbnb that is going
to get viral. Even Airbnb needed a lot of hustle to get it off the ground, and
you need to figure out your target audience and get sales the old-fashioned
way. If you're able to get good sales, then it could possibly be the service
that you want it to be, eventually.

~~~
matt_the_bass
I don’t think generally calling it “failure” is fair. I think you could call
it “marketing failure”.

~~~
docker_up
At what point does it become a failure, if 0 users after 4 months of effort is
NOT a failure?

Coddling people, especially in business, is very counterproductive. People
could waste years of their lives following bad paths because of bad advice
like yours.

Not a single person has decided that the product is worth paying money for. If
the purpose of the effort was to get some people to pay money for this, and
the outcome is 0, how could you honestly say this isn't a failure?

~~~
madmulita
Yes, but how would one feel if one had to admit failure. We must put feelings
before data! /s

~~~
marcelluspye
Or maybe, it makes sense to identify _why_ something failed and label it as
such.

------
harianus
Link to project: [https://qeys.io/](https://qeys.io/)

Link to Show HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17254737)

Ask for credit card data while signing up for the trail period. People that
are possible customers don't really mind entering their CC. I did a test with
my project Simple Analytics when number one on HN and free people did signup
like 50 an hour. Than I cancelled those and paid people came in. Guess how
many of those 50 did convert? Zero.

So ask for credit card info first, give a trail for x days and charge monthly
automatically.

Your design is awesome ;-)

~~~
gmiller123456
Just trying to be honest, sorry it's negative. Assuming I understand the way
your product works, it's just JavaScript sending a key to a 3rd party server
to check if the domain name is valid for that key. I think most programmers
could write that themselves into their own project in a matter of minutes.
Yes, the front end is nice and would take some effort, but your target
consumers are programmers and don't necessarily need a nice front end to get
stuff like that done. Additionally, it's easily defeated, and in your FAQ
you're actually recommending that they do additional programming to disguise
your code into theirs. So I honestly think the effort of using your service is
more than it would take someone to write it themselves.

It looks like you wrote this project mainly for yourself, and are just trying
to market it for additional revenue. So it's hard to call it a failure
altogether because it seems it's provided the necessary value to you. But I
can't imagine something like this being commercially viable.

~~~
shoo
I'm not sure rigging copy protection to deny usage is a great strategy. could
instead continue to grant access but notify and then use as trigger for a
sales conversation. "Hey looks like you're running five instances of random
webapp, we're really pleased you are finding more valuable ways to use it then
we initially discussed. Looks like the contract is out of date, you're only
licenced for two instances, let's get that updated..."

I'm pretty bad at this but you get the general idea.

------
murukesh_s
Since your domain is very niche, you have to do marketing as well as targeted
sales. Have you reached out to potential customers and asking them to use your
service?

Also please consider making this a B2B enterprise product. To do that the main
thing you need to do is hide the price or put insanely high prices. like $999
per year per license and above. If you are hiding prices, put a button to
contact the sales team, which could be your phone number to start with.

Also put some white papers and add a lengthy demo with your own voice with an
actual project, like Wordpress being protected and ask them to contact your
sales if they need to enable the protection in their software as well. The
demo could be put behind a sales form to collect contact details.

And hide your technology details. They don't need to know how you do it. Just
give instructions on how to put enable your validation. Since you don't have a
free tier it's very easy for you to validate your project's success. Just
reach out to X potential customers (it's very easy for you to figure out
potential customers too) and ask them to try your product. Give a 6 months
money back. I

p.s. A great sales article I found on HN this week:
[https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-
efti](https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-efti)

~~~
murukesh_s
Overall the idea looks good, but the product looks too cheap, javascript
validation? oh perhaps I could do it on my own.

Just hide the details and put some jargons (AI/ML to detect behaviour etc :)
and give an enterprise look and feel.

~~~
msiggy
Obfuscating what your product does is a terrible idea. Don't do this.

~~~
gmiller123456
Unfortunately this is exactly what he recommends in his FAQ:

"Besides, we strongly recommend to let our JavaScript file blend in with the
rest of your application's JavaScript. Webpack, compress and uglify the best
you can, to make the code responsible for validation as difficult as possible
to find and break."

~~~
msiggy
Wasn't talking about code obfuscation :)

------
ksahin
"Handful dozen of trial users... 0 paying users"

Don't forget that, for many successful SaaS:

-Landing page to trial conversion is in 5-10% range, and

-Trial to paying customer is 3-10%!

Also don't forget the statistical variance.

Source: [https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early-
stage...](https://medium.com/point-nine-news/monitoring-an-early-stage-saas-
business-at-the-b2b-rocks-conference-in-paris-985018d20fdf)

~~~
alfonsodev
this is a great comment, do you have more links about other metrics relevant
to SAAS ?

~~~
ksahin
Well, more and more VCs firms are being transparent and provide reports about
their portfolio startups.

Just look at famous VC blogs :)

You could also look at Saastr blog, it's really interesting.

------
projectramo
There are two reasons why you may have 0 users:

1\. Users don't want the product you are offering

2\. Users don't know about the product you are offering

Your first job should be to distinguish which issue you have. You can probably
Duckduckgo some basic benchmarks to figure out what the conversion is _if you
are talking to the right people_.

For instance, if you are advertising in first class lounges to pay off student
loans, that is just a waste. You have to look at your where you are placing
the ads, or how you are reaching customers first.

If you know that is right, then you should talk to a few customers to see if
you are offering the right thing.

The second is fixable, the first _might_ be. It is only a failure if the first
point (can you iterate the product to something people actually want in a
reasonable time at a reasonable cost) is not fixable.

------
dyeje
Looking over it, I think you may be chasing the wrong market. The only
companies I know selling on prem software are large enterprises to other
enterprises. It's fine to have a self serve product, but the people who are
going to actually want this have a completely different sales pipeline.

Some other notes:

\- Name makes sense after you think about it, but is hard to read at first
glance.

\- Your FAQ's answer on removing the validation code didn't inspire
confidence. Give me an out of the box solution to obfuscating the tracking
code.

------
msandford
I looked up the project from your submission history. It seems like you're
marketing it to developers who are making single page apps as freelancers? It
seems like that person would be ideally positioned to just hack their own
thing together (or at least think that they could) and not need your product.
And since it's cheap, it kind of signals that it won't be hard to do.

The comment on "go for enterprise" is a great one IMO. A big company wouldn't
mind spending $thousands plus $250/mo to "make sure they aren't stealing our
IP" even if that's an extremely low-probability event.

------
fernicolo100
Hey,

I have been working on y own startups since 2013. My first startup failed. The
second one, it was really hard to find how to get users, but after a few
months discover a hack which drove a lot of traffic. 2 years later, I sold it.

Now I am working on a crypto company which we started with a game for the
World Cup which was pretty good in terms of users. But now, launched NFL and
we are fighting again.

It is not easy at all build stuff and then get users. It takes time and work
to find the best alternatives to get them. Actually, Show HN, I was never able
to get a lot of upvotes. So congrats on that and keep the hard work!

~~~
frits1993
You got me interested in the hack as well. Obviously, it will most likely not
be a hack we can all copy, but I'm curious to what methods got you to finding
out about it.

------
madaxe_again
So, this is a perfectly good product, and your pricing isn’t bad, but I’d have
gone for a bigger spread - make the basic tier free, make the top tier $499 or
so.

I’d also consider what would drive agencies and freelancers to do this, and
market accordingly. This is one of those where many (i.e. those who’ve never
experienced an infringement) would regard as an unnecessary cost.

Set up saved searches on twitter for “my work got ripped off!” type posts and
reach out with “that sucks, I’m sorry that happened - I have a product that
might help next time”. Optimise SEO for terms like “website was copied” and
“how can a freelancer enforce IP right?”. Those who have just been stung will
buy this in a heartbeat, and a free tier would capture a large and vocal
market. Most B2B purchases come from distress.

Finally, consider reworking your copy. It’s too much steak, not enough sizzle
(you talk a lot about features and the tech, but not enough about how much
better (trouble free, worry-free, easy, relax, no stress, get paid, boost
revenue through easy licensing) it’ll make their lives).

Also,

“In a very bad scenario where our service is slow, the worst thing that
happens is a user being able to use the web app for a couple of seconds before
it is denied access.”

What? I think I know what you mean, but that reads like “if our servers are
down, you will be too”.

Finally finally, consider a positive sell too - “license your work with ease,
monitor subscriptions”, rather than the purely negative (protect yourself
against infringers!) you have currently.

~~~
frits1993
“if our servers are down, you will be too”: I can definitely see how you
interpreted that. Luckily that's not the case, though. If our servers are
down, all license validation passes. The "very bad scenario" with slow service
is in the case of a invalid copy which may need a couple of seconds before it
is detected as invalid. I am definitely going to change the copy, seems a lot
of work to be done there.

------
encoderer
When I google “web app licensing” I don’t see you at all. I would look at this
and other methods of slowly accumulating traffic and let organic growth happen
while you mostly work on other things.

And don’t hire more consultants, just commit yourself to learning what you
need to learn.

------
tixocloud
Hi,

I'm in a similar situation myself and in the process of figuring out why. I
would recommend reading the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.

I think it is relevant for you to share your project - there could be many
different factors why traffic isn't converting. Trial users from a Show HN are
great but I've multiple websites that had traffic but 0 converted. This tells
me that the traffic audience may not be my target customers.

I'm doing things that don't scale now .. so actually going out to acquire
users manually. What I've found is that the value proposition might actually
be a better fit for folks outside of the HN community.

~~~
frits1993
I definitely think that you're right about that, that the HN community is not
the target audience but more of a board of critics taking a look. That's why
after launch, I spent time (and money) into finding out what the target
audience actually was and where to find them. I thought the brand strategist
had a pretty good idea of the market, but no target users found so far.

What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?

Project: [https://qeys.io](https://qeys.io)

~~~
tixocloud
> What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?

Figure out who my target customer is, where do they work, where do they hang
out (online/offline) and figure out ways to go and interact with them
(phone/coffee/conferences/etc).

------
sam0x17
This is an awesome product, but you are going to have to spend a lot of
advertising money to reach the right customers. Reason being, most companies
either go the PaaS/SaaS route, or go full open source with paid support. My
guess is most of your potential customers have already had to pivot to one or
the other. Your only shot is people who are still in the early stages of
developing their product and people who are looking to pivot to a different
monetization model. You have to sell to your users the idea that in 2018 it is
possible to police and track license keys and go with that sort of business
model (obviously it is possible, but it's still a sell). Remember, most of
your customers were pirating software left and right and using keygens 10
years ago when they were in high school / college, which creates a
subconscious bias against license keys in general among the current generation
of techies. That's why almost no products use them these days.

I would also suggest offering the product completely for free, and then
charging over a certain number of keys. Maybe for 100-1000 installs you charge
$5/month, then $25/month for 1000-10000, $50/month for 10000-100000, etc. You
could also go with the $5/month gets you 0-1000 keys model, and then scale
from there. That option will cash in more on the (large number) of people
launching failed apps that get under 1000 users.

------
kaneua
I see a few issues here.

1\. $10 for GET request and ten license-domain pairs. For one project. $50 for
ten projects and 100 licenses per project. Too pricey for small amount.

2\. Nothing stops user from simply removing qeys.js from a page.

3\. Functions in your js file are called "v" for validation, "iv" for invalid
license error and "vv" for setting validation cookie. They can conflict with
other similarly name functions from other parts of your customers's JS.

4\. You set validation cookies on the client side. You literally have a code
to bypass your system in your system.

5\. User interface may be much better. There's too much hassle in setting up
multiple keys. I need to switch between pages to do it.

Conclusion: your software isn't good, your prices are high. Something like
that can be accomplished in one day with a couple PHP scripts tied to MySQL
database with lifetime control over it. Everybody who needs it most likely are
able to implement it themselves. You need to put more effort in it and polish
it more to make it really attractive for others. It's a nice job for "Intro to
Webdev" course project, but not for actual product someone will pay for. I
don't want to offend you, but that's what I actually think as a guy with some
teaching experience.

Shameless plug: I can develop similar (or better) webapps and now looking for
projects. You can hire me. You may find me in Telegram with the same username
I use on HN.

~~~
Kagerjay
(2) practically invalidates the purpose of this tool. User will spend a small
fee and just hire another developer who removes qeys.js

------
gamerDude
I think this looks like a great tool. But I think the HN community is way to
broad to be your target market. I would start by brainstorming who out there
is losing money from people using their product outside of their intended use.
Then you need to contact them one on one and talk to them about the problem.
Is it really that big of a deal, why haven't they solved it themselves
already, would they be interested in your product? Why or why not? If yes, who
else in the industry could they connect you with?

What immediately came to mind for me was design templates. You are supposed to
buy one for $20 and only use it for one site. I will say I have bought those
templates for clients, but on small personal projects, I will just load their
demo page and save it to my computer and voila. I have their design template.
And I'm sure I've used one more than once after it enters my template library.
Plus, those designers probably don't have a way to protect themselves. So in
this case, I would go to themeforest or something similar. Look up 50 or so
designers. Message them and see if you can get a phone call or if they would
be willing to talk over email. Figure out what it's worth to them and go from
there.

~~~
tyingq
Good observation. Paid plugins for cart software like Magento, OpenCart, and
Prestashop might be good candidates as well. Well, at least the ones with a
UI. Similar for Wordpress plugins.

------
icedchai
You should try to sell it on flippa or similar, at least get something for
your efforts. If you can't, shut it down and move on.

Also, your domain name is terrible.

------
dangerface
> Needless to say, none of them were met.

Why?

What marketing did you do? Did you do enough? Did you target the right people?
Was your marketing message relevant? What did the people you where marketing
too think of it? Did you test it was working? Did you market in multiple
channels? Did you sell the benefits of your product or its features? Did you
ask your customers what they thought?

You have said very little about how you tried to fix the problem, did you even
try?

You didn't bother to post a link to your project and I can't be bothered
finding it. Did you do the work for your customers or did you leave them
guessing like me?

~Edit~ Some one else posted your link for you, and the link to the hacker news
post, its filled with feedback, which I can see hasn't been tried. You are not
doing your work. Their feedback might not make sense to you, but your not
selling to you, and your not selling to them because your not addressing their
concerns. Do the work for the customer.

------
j45
If HN was the only path to find users you may want to look at building a more
robust and realistic sales / user acquisition strategy.

------
ParanoidShroom
Relink it again man, I for example just missed it and never seen your project.

I looked it up, and it seems pretty cool and well made. Kudos on keeping
releasing new products.

Maybe people want a slightly different version of the product ?

I for example just never use such things in my professional/personal life.
Maybe your target crowd isn't on HN ? Maybe submit towards a more subject
related news site ?

------
kazinator
Maybe I don't understand your product accurately, but it seems that the
concept is that you allow people who write server side JS code to protect
their code: lock it down somehow and subject it to software-enforced licensing
of some sort.

Now, I'm going to assume that without your solution or something like it, such
code isn't protected. (Assume, correctly, that I don't know anything about
server-side Javascript.)

The first question is: what is the competition? Is there a way of doing this
that doesn't require your solution? If so, how are you convincing users to
migrate to your way of doing it.

Secondly, suppose there is no competition. In that case, people who write
server-side JS code do not expect to be able to do that kind of licensing,
even before they have written any line of code. They deploy their server-side
JS code in scenarios in which licensing that code isn't the bread and butter
of their business; they lock in their bread and butter in some other way and
take it _for granted_ that people can easily reverse-engineer their server
side JS code, and muck around with it, steal snippets and whatever.

In this scenario is where you are in trouble because you face the prospect of
convincing the people who are doing server-side-JavaScript development world
to do that kind of node-locked deployment model. Only if they are seriously
on-board with developing and deploying something like that do they then become
potential customers for your licensing scheme. By the time they get serious,
they might even roll their own.

You might be better off developing a superior licensing alternative for for
some toolchain whose users already do that kind of licensing, stealing those
users from whatever they are using now. And then work the JavaScript story
into that: "hey, existing users: if you want to branch into JavaScript work,
under your existing licensing model, we have you covered".

Lastly consider that if node-license-locked server side JS development
suddenly became immensely fashionable, how likely would it be for numerous
solutions to appear, many of them FOSS?

------
mcemilg
I think you need to make the starter pack to free or create a very tiny pack
for free starting. If the project really valuable to customer trust it they
will buy more. But if it is not it didn't money anyway, no need to be sad.
This will happen to anybody.

------
antaviana
It is very possible that you are not solving a real problem for the intended
target audiences.

That is, the perception of your target audiences is either that they do not
need the product or that it adds a layer of complexity they are not
comfortable with (trust, potential source of other kind of support issues).

I suggest trying to find other audiences/use cases for this technology.

Sometimes it is the timing of the solution. If I remember well, in the pre-
dotcom burst, Google was pitching Yahoo how efficient their algorithms for
optimizing ad pricing with the idea of licensing technology, but at the time
that optimization was a non-issue for Yahoo because they were essentially
selling ads at any price they wanted.

------
stunt
Besides all good suggestions that you received here already.

You are also missing some plug-and-play features.

Make it effortless for a client to pick your product. Also make it easier for
him to reason about it. If I'm interested to your product, I should be able to
defend against my co-worker who believe we can built it our selves.

Add integration/plugin/component/package built for popular web frameworks and
CMSs and put their logos there.

Yes, your JS snippet works everywhere, but you need something more elegant.
Your marketer is going to approach a dumb manager that believes his developers
are only trained to use Wordpress plugins.

Use something like user-voice to collect user feedbacks. Don't make
assumptions.

------
saluki
You might want to look at targeting Wordpress Plugin developers with this.
That's a good niche where this might be a good fit. There is already some
competition there so you'd need to rework your offering some.

With web applications usually I'm either developing them for the client so it
is their code or I'm licensing them as a SaaS app from my server so I don't
really need anything like this.

This doesn't feel like a good product market fit, I'd keep using it and work
on targeting WordPress developers.

WordPress isn't the greatest ecosystem but there is money to be made there.

------
z3t4
Early adoption can be very slow. Sometimes you have to physically visit your
customers office and manually install the software on their computer, then
show them how to use, it, then come back a week later, and show them again,
until they actually start to use it. The feedback you get from these sessions
can be very valuable, as a self user, you know everything there is to know
about the software, but for someone who has never used it, even simple stuff
can be overwhelming, or has enough friction that they won't bother as they
have one thousand other things to do.

------
sick_of_web_dev
I think the market is simply not there for such a tool. Your target audience
are freelance web developers or rather a small subset of these. Add to that,
that many of them are code monkeys that prefer to cook up something like this
on their own and secondly the average freelance web developer doesn't really
have terribly much money to spend to begin with.

I think you need a product that you can license to enterprise customers
because they have plenty of money and often don't have a clue whether your
product really is worth all the money or not.

------
shearnie
Selling to developers is hard slog. Try another non-technical domain.

------
madeuptempacct
"What happens when I use your service? When you use your project specific
Javascript file and add the license key meta tag to your project's HTML, we'll
validate the use of your product on pageload with a GET request to our server.
We'll check our records to see if a valid license is used and that the license
is used on an allowed domain. If not, we'll show the user an Access Denied
page (which you can customize) and notify you about the breach."

I don't know what problem you are solving.

------
alfonsodev
Have you consider removing the trial and replace it with FREE plan ? After you
get a high volume of users you could find something very specific they would
be willing to pay for.

------
palidanx
If you are a saas product, the thing that really matter is your conversion
ratio. If after 4 months you can convert any inbound traffic, then by saas
definitions, probably has failed.

But if that is the case, use it as an opportunity to tweak and reiterate your
idea until you get a paying customer. Until then, you are working on
assumptions on what the market wants.

------
bryanrasmussen
I think this would most appeal to paranoid managerial types. Probably should
identify products you think might be wanting to use it and then contact them
directly.

------
bunny9
Check this out -
[http://www.licenseengine.com/](http://www.licenseengine.com/)

I'm using this product from last 1 year for my software. You can definitely
make a sell if you try to sell your software to internet marketers. You can
find them on platforms like jvzoo.com

------
t3hprofit
Did you learn something from this that could be relevant to a future
endeavour? If so, then you can at least call that a win.

------
qwerty456127
Let it provide a certain reasonable (enough to license a humble number of
themes, not enough for a big business to run for a long time) amount of
service free forever, not for a 7-day trial period, 7-day trial periods are
almost useless.

And/or add a killer-feature everybody would quickly realize they can't live
without and spread the word.

------
nsarafa
Lovely design. I feel this could provide value for a lot of indie developers.
However, the copy could use some work..

For example, the following tag line could be much more concise.. "The instant
solution to worrying less about your work being copied by the clients you
developed them for."

~~~
frits1993
Interesting (and comforting) to see the different points of views, where some
would target indie developers (just as I did) and others would target massive
enterprises. Good to see this isn't a black and white kind of problem.

------
joebo
There is likely a sizable number of your trial users from HN who signed up
merely to better understand it and see if it actually works. It crossed my
mind to do it, so presumably others too. The initial spike could be largely
driven by technical curiosity instead of real need.

------
tinchox6
Hi, I think you product has not failed just because isn’t on the spot right
now. Maybe you have to try hard to make your product be known. Maybe trying in
other sites like product hunt or indie hackers.

~~~
frits1993
Posted on all of the better known and even the less known platforms. Some of
them did indeed drive some traffic, but somehow none of them even lead to
trial users.

------
tmaly
Have you considered blogging and posting your articles on social media to
drive traffic?

Have posted to ProductHunt? There are a ton of things you can try to get some
eyes in front of your project.

------
rajacombinator
Learn about B2B SAAS, sales, and customer development. As it stands, it is a
failure. But it also seems like your approach has been totally,
stereotypically, incorrect.

------
markab21
If you built out a project to the level of maturity I'm seeing, with 0
customers, you absolutely are doing it wrong.

I've had a couple of market successes, mostly in the B2B2C/LeadGen space and
every time it has been built with a primary customer who is basically getting
the product at reduced cost with the caveat that I understand the business
impact I'm making with my software to be able to derive true value. They have
the benefit of the product growing up around their needs before their
competitors get their hands on it.

You built a solution to a problem without an anchor customer using it from
prototype stage on up. This is really risky, in that you don't have a solid
insight into the intrinsic business value of your product.

It seems too that you didn't take distribution into account and assumed that
word of mouth would carry your cost of acquisition. For me the formula would
be something roughly like:

Estimated LifeTimeValue (LTV) over 1 year * .3 == Avail Cost Per Aquisition in
Marketing / Bizdev / TradeBooth / Etc.

(this formula will create an initial deficit, but most products are fighting
against media buys of entrenched companies so you have to expect this)

So if you make $300/yr per customer, you might expect to spend $120 in
marketing expenses to acquire a single customer. If you have a 10% signup rate
for a free trial, with a 15% stick rate from that (For every 100 people you
buy targeted media on, you might expect 1.5 paying customers)... that means if
you're spending $1/CPC on google, you would be spending $75 per new customer
(beating your $150 budget). Organic reach and word of mouth might help this
formula reduce in cost, but what you're wanting to build is a sustainable
machine that can be driven by marketing expense, not by gimmicky front-page
listings on HN You optimize on those metrics as your marketing continues to
spend more and you have more data to work with.

Obviously, the above example is hyper-simplistic, but you have an advantage of
not needing to hire devs. Now take the time to figure out the digital
marketing piece or find a partner who knows it and can help you with it in
exchange for equity if you're trying to bootstrap this.

You'd have to play with your pricing structure to make that work, as you
increase your price, Cost Per Aquisition possibly goes up but you hopefully
can find a balance that works in your market. This is why most people for
their first product need investors to pony up spends to discover this, but in
my experience, you can hit very low cost-per-acquisition numbers if you're
careful, just not at scale. (Last part is important)

Feel free to shoot me a PM if you have any questions or want any advice,
you're getting a LOT of great input from people here but this is my $.02 :)

~~~
brogrammer2019
Very accurate, I agree with markab21

------
blueprint
If it has 0 users, who did you make it for?

~~~
frits1993
It was something I built for myself in the first place (and I do still
actively use it). Showed it to one of my dev-friends, he said it looked cool
so I thought: "why not work a little bit more on it and share it with the
world?".

~~~
vthallam
I'd say that was the right thought process. Whether it works or not, most
money making side projects start this way.

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petraeus
Adding another request to a 3rd party server that could be down is a very bad
idea

