[HN Gopher] We spent $980k on a failed SaaS project
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We spent $980k on a failed SaaS project
Author : zupo
Score : 42 points
Date : 2022-05-23 12:00 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (niteo.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (niteo.co)
| dvt wrote:
| > All of this resulted in revenue being slow. Really slow. It
| took us 16 months after launch to get to $5k MRR. In our
| succesful project, we started with $5k MRR.
|
| I think that early traction is the key indicator of potential
| future success. Unless you're working in an industry where early
| traction is literally impossible to attain (pharmaceuticals,
| medical, VR hardware, R&D, etc.), the market tends to be pretty
| responsive.
|
| If you're working on a piece of software, make a "free tier" open
| source version, give it out for free, get as many people to try
| it out as you can. If people aren't even remotely excited, pivot:
| it's not a good idea.
|
| It's like fishing: if you're getting no nibbles, change the bait.
| zupo wrote:
| The trick is in knowing where to draw the line. We definitely
| felt we had "some" tracking. We had hundreds of people sign up
| to our newsletter. We had a couple of users that absolutely
| raved about the product (or as it turned out later, not about
| the product specifically, but the support we were providing).
|
| We asked ourselves many times: is this "too slow" or are we
| just being impatient?
| zupo wrote:
| Additionally, there is a huge difference in getting free
| users and getting paid users.
|
| We tried with a very low-price plan and got a lot of interest
| & signups. The moment we raised the prices a bit to cover
| hosting costs, the interest went away.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Did you consider trying a debt/capital backed growth
| strategy? Where you take on funding and use it to subsidize
| introductory pricing to gain market share ahead of raising
| prices? cf. Spotify's free 3 month trial, AWS free tier,
| food delivery app shenanigans.
|
| I feel like this strategy is often just delaying and
| magnifying a failure, but if you really believe your
| product is better than similarly priced products, and the
| hurdle was getting customers to switch, then providing
| aggressive price incentives for switching, then ratcheting
| prices to parity would probably work pretty well.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| What was the price difference between the low price and
| increase?
| dvt wrote:
| > We asked ourselves many times: is this "too slow" or are we
| just being impatient?
|
| Yeah, this is extremely tricky to gauge (and I'm no expert),
| but when it "clicks" it's hard to miss.
| zupo wrote:
| Yep, completely agree. We had a project before when it
| "clicked" and we could tell.
| blueberrypi4 wrote:
| You mentioned that you had a decent amount of low-price plan
| signups - how much did you increase the prices that scared away
| your customers? Curious if you tried lowering prices again/used
| other discount pricing strategies.
| Baopab wrote:
| Oh wow, what a roller coaster ride! Thanks for sharing, this is
| just so much more informative than the usual "look how successful
| I am" posts!
|
| And good luck with your future projects, Pareto Security sure
| looks interesting!
| altdataseller wrote:
| How is Pareto Security different from endpoint security solutions
| like CrowdStrike (which our team uses for all the Macs we
| distribute)
| zupo wrote:
| It's "zero trust". I.e. no-one from Pareto Security, nor anyone
| from your company can access or track any of your Macs.
|
| The only thing that the local agent running on a Mac does, is
| sending a list of failing checks every now and then. It does
| not allow any centralized pushing of configuration, no
| tracking, no remote access, nada.
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(page generated 2022-05-23 23:02 UTC)