10,947 signups, 90 paid, €6,356 — nine years of building a product nobody buys
I built ueCalc — a financial modeling tool for startups. Unit economics, P&L forecasts, metrics trees. I also wrote a book called Unit Economics, with a foreword by Ash Maurya. So I should know how to make the numbers work, right?
Here's how they actually work:
- 10,947 registered users over 9 years
- 90 ever paid anything
- Total revenue: €6,356
- Total I spent on the project: ~€320,000
- Active paying customers today: 3
Let me walk you through how I got here.
2017 — launched with a trial. 600 signups in 2 months. Zero conversions. Killed the trial. Signups dropped to 10-15/month. Three years of silence.
2021 — made it free. Signups exploded — 350/month. 5,000 users in 15 months. I walked around saying "we have 5,000 users." Classic vanity metric. I knew it was vanity. Didn't help.
2023 — new version, real monetization. Did 20 problem interviews, closed a sale at the end of each one. People said they'd pay for financial model templates. Launched with templates (one-time, ~€50) and a subscription option.
Result: 3,133 registrations since launch. 69 bought a template. 21 subscribed. Conversion 3%. Revenue €219/month. My fixed costs are €500/month just to keep the company alive.
What I learned the hard way:
Subscriptions don't work for tools people use 3 times a year. No founder will pay €50/month for something they need before a pitch and then forget about for 6 months. I knew this as a consultant. Ignored it as a founder.
Free attracts the wrong people. 5,000 users came because it was free, not because they needed financial modeling. When I turned on payments, the need wasn't there.
I'm bad at selling. Nine years of proof. I can build tools, I can write about metrics. I can't explain why you should pay me. Never built a proper landing page, never did onboarding, never set up a funnel. I believed the product sells itself. It does not.
The irony
I literally teach startups to calculate whether their business model works. Mine doesn't. Average LTV: €70.62. Median subscription lifetime: 2 months — and some of that is people forgetting to cancel.
What now
I'm not shutting it down. The product works. What's broken is everything around it — how I sell, who I sell to, what I sell.
So I'm running a public experiment. I'm changing the model and publishing every step — real numbers, real decisions, real mistakes. If I fail again, you'll see exactly how.
I'm documenting the whole thing on my blog: khanin.info. First post is already up with the full breakdown.
Would love to hear from anyone who's been in a similar spot — product works, nobody pays. What actually worked for you?
Your story is really relatable and I know a few indie founders who have faced similar monetization struggles. I'd be happy to ask them if they'd answer some of your questions about what worked for them.