4 months, 15k visitors, no customers: what I did wrong and how to know when to stop?

It has been 4 months since I launched, and I don't have any customers yet.

Let's break down the numbers:

• 1 time on the front page of Hacker News
• 15.8k unique visitors to the site (3k to the home page)
• 22 signups
• 1 prospective customer (who I turned away because he lives in Russia)

My site, Code Code Ship, which aims to help developers sell pro versions of their software libraries, is in a very small niche. Additionally, building a pro version of a library takes time. Add to that that nobody wants to be your biggest customer, which prevents anyone who has already solved this problem for themselves from coming on board.

The videos on YT from YC are illuminating, and helped me realize that I the problem I chose is difficult on a number of different axes:

• Can you identify your customers? it's a small percentage of open source maintainers who might want this, so unless I spam everyone who has a reasonable number of stars on GitHub, I can not simply pick up the phone and call my prospective users. They are needles in a large haystack.

• How often do people have this problem? Not very often. One time.

Now I have one theory left to test: patience. If someone has this problem in the future, that person will find me, and then I will have a customer.

I need to get money flowing into the business now anyways, so I will be putting this on the backburner for now and finding a new freelance client.

When do you decide that you have given something a good shot (including decent marketing) and it isn't taking off? Should I wait a year, making sure the site looks like it's alive, and see what happens?