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?
That's a really tough spot to be in, and thanks for sharing so openly. I actually know a few solo or small team indie hackers and founders who have struggled with monetization who'd probably be happy to answer some questions for you.
Respect for the transparency. A lot of founders think they have a product problem when they really have a market-motion problem. Your post reads less like “nobody buys” and more like value exists, but packaging, timing, and buying frequency were misaligned with the model.
Yeah, and I think I'll try again with a different model.
That sounds like the right move. Sometimes the asset isn’t the current business model, it’s everything you’ve learned building the product and understanding the users. A new model with old experience can be much stronger than starting from zero again.
Nine years of data is actually a gift most founders don't have. You know exactly what's broken and it's not the product. The subscription model diagnosis us a spot on: tools with seasonal use patterns need one-time or outcome-based pricing, not recurring. Which specific type of founder, at which specific stage, is in enough pain today? that's the ICP you haven't found yet, and it's probably hiding in those 90 people who did pay.
I wanted to create a product that people would use as a go-to tool. But as it turns out, my expertise is in demand among companies with annual revenue of $1 million or more. And what they need isn’t a product, but answers to their questions.
That's a signification realization and it reframes nine years of 'failure' into nine years of building credibility in a niche that pays for expertise, not software. The product might still have a role, but as a door-opener fo consulting rather than the revenue itself. Some of the best consulting businesses are built that way.
This hit hard, especially the part about knowing the theory but still ending up with a model that doesn't work in practice.
I'm building in a different space (WordPress plugins), but I can already see how easy it is to fall into the same trap - building something useful, but not something people are willing to pay for consistently.
The point about usage frequency vs subscription stood out. Tools used a few times a year almost fight against recurring pricing, no matter how valuable they are.
Also the "free attracts the wrong people" part - that's something I'm trying to be careful about early, because it creates a false sense of traction.
Really curious - from your interviews, did people actually feel the pain strongly enough, or was it more of a "nice to have when needed" situation?
There were two groups at the interview; the key group consisted of those who urgently needed to create a financial model they could understand themselves, as they had to meet with an investor immediately. The pain was directly felt. And they solved the problem, but that’s not what the subscription model is for. On the other hand, the tool offers the option to purchase a template as a one-time purchase, and I expected there to be many such customers, but that didn’t happen.