84 views, 0 sign ups. Should I be worried?
So I did my rounds on Twitter, IH, Reddit for my MVP (www.applimiter.com) and netted a grand total of 84 pairs of eyeballs and absolutely 0 sign ups, not even for free tier. 12% navigated to the pricing page. I know it's too early to concede but I can't help but wonder if it's my copy that's not convincing or if I've stumbled on a problem that doesn't need solving.
I had a look at your landing page. I have on idea what your tool does.
You mean 'no' idea? Haha, I guess I need to relook at the copy then
I'm a UIUX Designer (specialized in landing pages). I can help you to make your landing page better and converting. You can check my portfolio on https://dribbble.com/bypratikraj/
Cool, will definitely check it out.
Hi @Sssslyz,
I consider myself a tech savvy person. I am also a developer, and entrepreneur for many years.
It is very complicated to understand:
If I understand correctly. You are saying: If you have a SAAS or wants to build a new SAAS, I have an embeddable license management platform
Then, my next question would probably be. Wait just a minute, you want me to give access to a non-brand to my precious customers? Is it an open source with just a management layer that have no access to my customers? What kind of SLA should I expect from a new comer? I am kinda stressed by this offer. Why not use an existing launch darkly etc... company? Really, why shouldn't i launch my own license management internally, sounds easy enough.
Does it earn me new money? does it save me bucketful of cash? should I take the risk?
I don't have answers for you, only questions. You can read some thoughts I have on my site about the subject of initiating a bootstrap. http://tzahifadida.com
Hope I helped.
-Tzahi
Good question!
This also got me thinking a bit. I wouldn't mind open sourcing the management layer too, the managed solution will be for those who don't want to self host.
Thanks, this is useful feedback. I guess I was not clear enough, still have lots to improve on. These are my thoughts on some of the above points.
Limiter is an on-platform management layer with open source SDKs, and the data is stored on your end. Hence the SLA's are based on your choice of storage, in this case, S3's.
The difference between Limiter and LaunchDarkly, besides data ownership, is that Limiter plans to support usage tracking and gating based on quotas. I may be wrong but LaunchDarkly is mainly for experimentation and A/B testing. If you want to do something like ensure a user does not consume more than X times of a feature in a given month, you can't. I elaborated a little on this in my FAQ, but since it's an important question, I should probably bring it up front.
As to why not roll out your own, I suppose you could and many people indeed do so. It's pretty peripheral code that you gotta write and maintain which takes time off what you really ought to be doing: iterating on your core product.
I get that trust takes time (and being a dev product, GitHub stars) to build up. I'm only just getting started :)
I would add that i do see a use for such a product. A client of mine has built it in house with a huge set of conditions. The problem is that i wouldn't be able to recommend it if it wasn't completely open source and an almost industry standard like opa elastic hashicorp stuff etc...
One idea for you is maybe build peripheral services around a core open source product. Maybe like usage analytics etc...
Trust is difficult believe me. I had a few CEO friends which we demo a product. They actually trusted me to deliver but said they could not take the risk with being an incorporated and heavily invested company. That it was their policy.
The only way to win against this kind of things (without getting invested) is to get to the employees without going thru the guards. Once it is in they will usually just prefer to buy than to cut it out. E.g. slack or zoom etc...
Good luck!
Do not worry too much about views & conversion in this stage with low traffic.
I recommend these steps:
Tip: read the MOM-test
Do not try to quick-fix your way to the conversion. Do not react to those prople “I can help you build more conversions bla bla bla…”…
A startup is about learning about your customer segment and serving them well. Not about doing some tricks to increase some vanity metrics (#of views)/numbers.
The signUp rate is a good metric though, but I recommend you to focus on what I told you above. Not on “quick-hacks”.
For me, the landing page is pretty text heavy. If I see a wall of text, I’m probably not going to commit to reading it and learning what the product does.
The Here’s how it works section was nice though. I liked how I got the details for a feature after I click to reveal it. That feels less overwhelming to me.
Best of luck!
Thanks for the feedback. I've just updated my landing page. Does it look more palatable now?
I think you nailed it! The images and large headings are enough to make me interested. The supporting copy helps me understand the details.
Hey, I checked your landing page but I don't understand what your product does, but that's probably because I'm not your target market.
What I would recommend is to reach out to people who are your target market. If there is no community that fits your target market then reach out to individuals that seem to need your product then check if they actually need your product.
That's cool. I built this for myself as it was bugging me everytime I had to do something like that at work or for my personal projects. Just not sure if I would pay for it at this price point and feature set. Will continue to look for my target audience and improve the product meanwhile
I see. Good luck with your product! I'm currently doing idea validation for my product too, so I know how you feel (more or less).
Registration walls before a user can use the platform is a hard sell, fix that problem if you can.
Also launch on PH and see how you do.
Gotcha. Regarding PH, would it be advisable to launch that early? Wanted to build up my following a bit more and release some blog posts first. I'm also in the midst of a pivot to be fully open source
It is true that you wont get much up votes without an audience, but do you think you will have a larger audience after a few blog post? Most likely no.
Just don't think a launch is some big thing you should spend a lot of time on. You will relaunch multiple times.
I saw your Dotling launch on PH, how much of the buzz there translated into new sign ups for you? Or were you looking to meet some other objective from the launch?
I'm not sure, I didn't set up google analytics when I launched. I did make it to top 10 which gets me into the daily newsletter. PH also mentioned Dotling on twitter.
I honestly don't think nor expected a lot of buzz. Dotling is just an MVP that isn't solving a problem that is being solved right now.
When it comes to sign ups. It got around 40 signups a week since launch. I'm not sure where people are coming from.
Keep in mind that Dotling targets a larger audience, and it also allows users to use the platform without having to give away their information.
Cool, this was insightful, thanks for sharing!
Not at all, as long as your views are going up - things will be just fine...
It has since gone up to 176. Nothing huge, though I've been getting some useful, actionable feedback from IH that I'm going to iterate on.
Did you validate demand for your product? I don't want to discourage you, but I implemented plan-based limiting in a product manually and I can't imagine it being much less work with an SDK. In my case it was basically "if (!hasProAccount && xxCount > MAX_NON_PRO_TRIES) {showNeedProPopup(); return;}". How would that be easier with your SDK? An example on the website would help, e.g. a todo app that is limitied to 5 or 10 entries, depending on the user's plan.
It's not much work at all when you are working with boolean or absolute limit features as you mentioned. So much so that I went ahead and built the marketing site plus the MVP containing these two features, with Limiter dogfooding itself. What you are seeing now is me validating demand :)
The harder part comes in when you want to implement time-based quotas (daily / monthly limits), want to set up notifications (to your user / yourself) when limits are breached, when you want to analyze usage of these features. These are some of the 'premium' features that I have yet to build.
Good call on the minimal example, I guess that is needed as not many people will even make it to the SDK's readme.
The devil is in the details though even for your basic example:
With Limiter as a framework, it's arguably simpler, but it's consistent across your codebase(s):
I'd guess the audience that you pitched to doesn't need this product. Imo, you need to hand sell a product like this, one at a time to companies that need it.
My company doesn't need this as we're likely to have one plan for the foreseeable future. I'm trying to find product market fit and get my product to be useful. I'd guess that's a lot of folks on IH. Twitter and Reddit.
Once you have the correct customer avatar and have sold it enough times to know who your customer is, your posts will be in more targeted communities.
I posted on HackerNews and got around 1400 or so visitors on leansence
Over 10% went to the pricing page and 5% went to the login page.
0 sign-ups. Not one started a free trial.
In my case, I kind of understand why this may have happened.
Most traffic was from mobile and my mobile site had a stupid bug(YouTube causing overflow on the X-axis). Moreover, the login page probably didn't convince as many people as I thought it would.
No reason for you to give up this early.
Appreciate the words of encouragement. I think we posted around the same day on HN too. Hope you managed to turn things around. Let's press on!
Well to be honest, I think that the problem your SaaS intends to fix isn't really much of a problem to begin with. You're targeting developers, and adding a few more objects to a user's data to control limits isn't very difficult for most developers to implement.
I think a better idea would be to rebrand it into an API limiter (which I've personally been looking for). Target companies who want to expose public APIs but don't want to deal with setting up an entire system to manage keys, rate limits, hard/soft usage limits, limits for various endpoints, etc.
Cool, this did come across my mind. There are existing tools that help to ease the problem though, such as AWS APIG, but having used it myself, it's not exactly seamless
I'm interested why you've used an s3 bucket to store data instead of a db?
Pasting this from my FAQs:
Essentially it boils down to cheap, performant, and it meets our simple access patterns
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I've just updated my landing page. Would you mind having a second look please? Cheers!
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Thanks! This is the kind of feedback I was looking for, will work on improving the copy.