Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

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

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.

Link to project: https://qeys.io/

Link to Show HN: 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 ;-)

"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...

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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 ?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

Check this out - 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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