Should I kill this SaaS product?
I spent a good 6 months working a convert my site to a WordPress product ( http://importintoblog.com ). It is for non technical users who have an old site built using custom code or just some static pages.
It lets you export the site design as a WordPress theme. I built an online interface to select the pieces of the design you want to keep/discard. The resulting theme is quiet simple (one space is for the content, another is for the side menu if you need it). The theme does not include a customizable menu for example.
You can also export the site content. First you specify where the content is (there's a visual interface to pick the area of the page you want). Then a crawler explores your site and extracts the content of all your pages (it'll rewrite links if necessary). Finally it lets you download a WordPress compatible file with all the content as WordPress posts.
On the technology side the product is not super solid as it only works great with simple sites (basically if the design is simple and not of lot of dynamically generated pages).
I did most of the work 1.5 years ago and never managed to get significant traffic (I spent some time doing SEO but never tried to sell it directly to people). On average I have 20 visitors per day and each month 2 people buy the product. I have lost interest and stopped caring about it.
Do you guys think it could be a useful product with more work or should I just move on and pull the plug?
I can upgrade your account if you want to fully test the product ( http://importintoblog.com )
Listen to the podcast here with the founder of ConvertKit (https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/008-nathan-barry-of-convertkit), there's nice advice about making such a decision. Spoiler alert: double down or quit.
That said, if you really really lost interest, I think it's best to move on. Although the fact that you're even asking the question here may suppose that you're still interested in growing the business? ;-)
Thanks, it's a great episode. Now I'm going to "[do] what anyone does when they hear really good advice, and that's that I waited six months to act on it, at all" :)
Haha good luck!
As the previous poster already said: I think asking the community here if it could be useful product is the not the right move. Go find potential customers and ask them. If they are to hard to find initially I would suggest to start with hypotheticals: You could search for blogs that wrote blog posts on "Why I moved my blog to Wordpress" or something similar in the last few years and ask them if your product would have been helpful to them. I am sure there are other ways to find people who recently moved their blog. And SEO is a big concern with these moves so maybe interviewing in that crowd is helpful, too. If you can hammer that aspect of it you might find some power users in SEO consultants.
My personal take on the product so far: the content part seems useful but I am skeptical about the design part. If I am moving to WP I might as well change my design to something more modern by using a WP theme that I like. But I am a web guy and always biased to use lastest tech and design if possible.
Thanks for you suggestion. I will try to find blogs that deal with the issue of moving a blog to WordPress.
I personally think your main focus should be figuring out if there is a need for your product in the market, reach out to some of your site visitors and try and strike up a conversation with them. Ask on your mailing list, you do have a mailing list don't you? If you don't start capturing emails of those that use your product and also via a email capture form on your site. You need to find out if you have potential to grow into a market before you decide if it's worth while to pull the plug.
That's just my opinion anyway :) good luck