Bad marketing or no product-market fit?

I think we'd need more info to make a determination here. I think it's a case by case thing.

However, if people were actually going to your site, they must've had a problem they were trying to solve. If they didn't convert, then you didn't articulate well enough how your product solved their particular problem. If this was due to the product not actually being built to solve their particular problem or the copy not clearly demonstrating that it actually did solve their problem is, I think, irrelevant.

This is a case where finding a way to understand your target market and what their needs are would help.

Does your product work well? Do you have any competitors? If you have competitors and they are making revenue, it's probably bad marketing. Otherwise, maybe there is no market.

Well, the process should be like this:

1. First of all, you need to identify, who exactly you are targeting in a School - who is the decision maker and who drives the interest (who is the one to come up with the idea of using your app). Also, you need to uncover their pain points. You can directly go to schools and ask them. The side effect could be that you will persuade one or two schools and will have a success story 🙂
2. Then you can try the cold emailing once again and if the persona and messaging is right, it could work. If not, then search for the places where these teacher are grouping and communicate there
3. Create lead magnet - something that will talk about their pain points you've already identified and quick win (quick solution to the pain point) and offer that in exchange for their email address
4. Start nurturing them with emails creating added value, talking about the pain point and leading to the solution

And so on... there is quite a lot of stuff you can do but always need to understand your persona 100%. That's alpha and omega 🙂

By the way, you can take a look at the go-to-market strategy we've just written. Most of the steps mentioned here are described there: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/plan-your-growth-7-step-go-to-market-strategy-out-of-spacetime/

Or just drop me a message in case you would like to ask anything.

There are more scenarios but from marketing POV, the reason will be the most likely one of the following two:
the landing page does not talk about the solution to their pain points → this means you don't know the audience visiting your website or simply have a bad copy
the content they clicked to come to your website and landing page itself is not consistent

In other words, if they are coming to the website, you've attracted them somehow. Now you have to understand why they were attracted and how is it consistent to your solution. To find the product market fit, the solution is quite simple (in theory) → just take the perspective of your customer. This means to firstly analyse who exactly you are targeting and what their pain-points are. If the product solves at least one of these pain points, talk about the paint-point and offer a solution to it. If you want us to help you, just drop me a message or schedule a call here: https://spacetime.ooo/free-20-min-consultation/

To close a sale you want to offer the right solution, to the right person, at the right time. It's better to stick to the problem and try few solutions before quitting. If you have your next saas idea in mind, dm me on twitter, can help you get it to traction.

In my opinion, it's bad marketing when you've not publicized your product as effectively as possible, especially to the right people i.e. the people who need your product. That is, you haven't employed the right channels to reach potential customers.

However, there's no product-market fit for your product when there can't be found a market for it. That is, people don't have an existing problem that your product wants to help them solve. A16z says the market must always come first when you are considering building a solution. If the need for this product isn't there, for whatever reason's sake, then there is no PMF.

We're also trying to learn more about why visitors to our site don't take the next actions of trying out our product. We've heard some feedback about users having different action paths they prefer, so we're building more options to resonate with those preferences (e.g. demo video vs. step-by-step guide, etc.).

We're also trying to specifically learn about what is interesting to our audience by posting this survey to relevant groups, focusing on learning about people's challenges and needs.

I feel you. I drove 500 uniques into my landing page through promotion on social but not a single sign up 😭