50 sign up, 0 paid users!
Guys,
So basically, I did a Instagram listing website for people to connect their Instagram accounts on my website and tag them with categories. I have two kind of categories, one is the normal kind and the other is the premium. So if you want to the premium, you need sign up for a monthly subscription plan. You can take a look here for more details. https://www.inscovery.com/pricing
Now, I have a slight problem. After I launched my product on PH, I manage to get 50 organic users which is not much but its a small start. Well, none of them seems to be interested in paying for the plans.
I have people advising me to change to a 1 time payment to buy a slot on the premium category instead of a monthly subscription.
What do u guys think?
Seems to me like you've built a solution for a non-existing problem. Why would one go to inscovery.com to browse categories, if Instagram already has great ways for discovery? People seeking attention are pretty good with using the right hashtags and Instagrams auto-discovery is also working pretty well. E.g. I am following certain hashtags I am interested in, and I don't even need to leave Instagram for that.
On top of that, the larger part of Instagram users don't monetise their content, or aren't even aware that they could.
So why should users pay for your catalogue?
I might be wrong though, so what I would suggest is to offer statistics to your users: impressions and clicks (profile visits). Then, limit the number of impressions to e.g. 10000 per month and just stop displaying the user in a category after that. Once they see that the platform drives enough traffic to their profiles, but it suddenly stops once the threshold is hit, they should certainly be willing to pay a price. You could even add promotion as an additional paid feature, like jumping to the top of the list or appearing as a featured profile on the landing page.
However, you would need significant traffic for that, which leads back to my initial question.
I wish you the best and I definitely want to see more business models built on top of Instagram, after their disagreeable API shutdown. I just think that the other way around works better: drive users out of Instagram for features they don't offer, like linktr.ee does.
Yes, u r right. Instagram does have mechanisms in place for discovering new Instagram accounts but they more favourable to accounts with huge amount of followings or likes. My would be a target for people who are just starting out and would want more visibility via additional platforms. And my categories are more exhaustive than what Instagram is offering right now. In addition, you can search via medias, likes and no of followers which could be useful or not depending on how u see it.
That said, I could be HEAVILY wrong too :P. But I do like your suggestion of offering statistic, impressions and clicks etc. Its could be attractive to business users and its something I haven't thought about.
Like everybody suggestion, my idea would only work if I have huge traffic. That is something I need to drive it now if I gonna make this idea successful.
Hey Silver, how was your project going? I have similar idea to this, but with important differentiation, that could be a key. Would love to discuss about it more with you. I would love to have a partner. If you are interested to discuss, write me at tomasmaks@gmail.com
Failed, :(. I could not even get 1 person to sign up for any paid plans after 3months. I guess doing marketing is my biggest weakness. Doesn't really matter how good your app is, most important is the marketing
A premium listing is only useful if you are getting a lot of visitors (free visitors). Which you don't have right now. You could start with a lower (or one time) pricing, but I would not bother with that even - at this point in time.
Infact, at this point in time, all those empty categories are not very helpful to me as a site visitor - so I don't even want to visit again.
I think you need to scale down till it is useful for a small group. Once that works, then gradually scale up. What I mean by this, is remove the premium feature and remove any of the categories that don't have even one free user. Then focus on just one of the categories and add yourself a 50-100 people to the site so that it becomes useful. Launch, get feedback, refine features and iterate so that you can get a solid list of visitors keeping on coming back.
(You site will very likely look, feel, and serve a very different pain-point at that point in time.)
Once you are doing that then slowly think about expanding to more categories or bringing the premium feature back - and even then, make sure to do it with a lot of feedback first focusing on where there seems to be the most paint and going on from there.
Hope this helped.
For me personally, when I read pricing I see following:
I'd say you just need to add value for those 8$ and just get more free users
I was thinking of changing the pricing plan to one time payment before spamming on Instagram for more users. Hmm, maybe I should explain more on the premium categories.
It seems like the value any customer would get is if the site can drive traffic to ones instagram, and its only possible if you have many users. So maybe focus on getting more users on the site, and talk to existing users what they think of the site and how it can improve.
Hmm maybe the app is difficult to use so they don't know how to use it? Have you checked activities for these accounts? Just idea.
Hey there, the app is simple to use. Almost all users came onboard and add themselves to the categories without issues. I tested with a few beta users.