How to combat slow growth?

A subscription service seems like the wrong business model for this. If I'm looking for a new business idea to pursue, I want one now, and then I'm going to pursue it. I don't need or want to be subscribed to future business ideas (not that your site even suggests there will be future ideas). A one-time payment is more fitting.

But I personally would never pay for this in this form. The market problems you identify and research will be either bad and not worth pursuing or good and being advertised to future competitors and previous customers who have a head start. Your idea adds risk to entrepreneurship. The more popular your service is the less valuable it will be to anyone.

A better idea might be to try to sell ideas that you have done the legwork validating for hundreds of dollars. For example, "this business would be in the beauty and cosmetics market. It'd be a subscription service. It would requires these specialty skills: blah, blah, blah. It should take a small team of programmers a couple months to develop. I estimate the potential to be x per month. I've talked with 100 people in the industry who all want this idea. To be the sole purchaser of this idea and the email list, it will cost $1000."

Before people say "ideas aren't valuable," he's not charging for the idea. He's charging for the legwork to validate the idea.

Firstly, 12 paying customers is awesome - well done!

In terms of what you should probably do next? Try get on some calls with your existing paying customers. Why are they paying? How excited are they about the product? How much would they care if the service died tomorrow? If they love the service, you know it's a marketing problem. You'll need to find more people like them.

If they don't care about it too much, it could be worth tweaking and improving the product before moving onto growth.

I'm actually a sub of OpsDaily, so here's a theory of where there could be more value: Niching down.

For example, a few ops have been from people who teach. They have issues tracking students etc.

These ops are more valuable for people who sell to teachers of any kind. They could use the ops to find better ways to communicate the value of their product, or think of new features. Obviously I have no idea if this will work, it's just a guess of where there could be more value based on the emails I've been reading every day.

Cool idea, but I how you could be running into problems. Realize you're essentially creating a market. These usually take time as you're growing 2 sides at once, dependent on each other. That said, yes get a job if you need some immediate income. This is not going to pay your rent any time soon.

To be more specific, and honest but maybe brutally honest. As a techie visitor, I'm interested in finding about problems I can build solutions for. This landing page gives me a glimpse of what I can expect to find on your site, and sorry to say - it's crap.

What I mean by that is, as I scan the list of Opps you show, it all looks like stuff that could be solved simply for the user with something else that exists, the user just doesn't know what or how.

Examples. Sounds like maybe they just need a spreadsheet and some data entry, or it's from a user who says they "just want something that works" as an all in one solution. My read on that is they're lazy and just tired of logging into multiple systems. It's not a real pain point. Another example is, the "quickbooks plugin for amazon". I have to believe this exists already, some where, some how. They can just download CSVs in 3 clicks and get what they're after, they probably just don't know it, or again lazy. "need encrypted messaging app" this exists, 100x over. Track restaurant inventory and auto order, my guess is this user also doesn't want to do any data entry. So the solution is some crazy sensor based stuff to know how much salt he's using in real time.

Whether I'm right or wrong isn't important. These don't sound like good users or a good problems to go solving. The one exception is the Chemist software, but that sounds super specific and custom; so I would need to talk to that guy and be under contract to develop this.

So from my perspective, you should focus on getting better submissions then maybe I'd pay to subscribe to them. Chicken and egg problem just like all markets.

Always glad to give an opinion (solicited or not)!

• First, I absolutely love the concept of this site. I've seen similar websites that are more general and allow people to list and/or rate ideas, but having a hub for actionable software startup ideas is great.
• IMHO, the site is incredibly confusing to first time visitors (and that's who most visitors are). The home page is confusing, the subscribe page is confusing, and if I'm curious to dig around further, there's still no additional info. OppsList is not a well-known commodity like CraigsList. Listing a bunch of ideas, or using the tag line "Find the inspiration for your next SaaS product" still doesn't make it clear what the site is about, and it unnecessarily limits it to SaaS. Even after skimming this forum post and digging through a few pages on the site, it's not clear how it works. At least add a very visible "About" page so people that are intrigued can know how things work. Explain who the site is for and what that user needs to do to get the most out of it. My experience has been that you can't be too thorough here.
• Your subscriber count is fantastic! Seriously, that's great to launch and immediately have paying customers. It's true that it will take time to grow the business, but exponential growth adds up very quickly, especially if your churn rate is low.
• Have a vision, but listen to your customers as they often have other/better ideas. It's clear from the posts I saw that developers are trying to find leads through your site. As others mentioned, charging for access to leads could be the big money maker here. Or not. Consider all possible options for monetization.
• It's still not clear to me what I get for subscribing. Is it just more of the same opps? Is it opps that have been vetted? Is it more info on each opportunity? I suppose this relates to the confusion I mentioned earlier and the need for better messaging.
• Consider crowdsourcing some of the analysis by letting your visitors thumb up or down ideas. Ones that a quick Google search yield results for will get thumbed down quickly and slide to the bottom of the list. Ones that are thumbed up could merit you going in and researching more thoroughly. Once you've researched an idea, put a badge next to the listing to indicate that premium subscribers can view research information not available to the public.

I see this more as a marketplace connecting problems with problem solvers, rather than as an ongoing subscription. As a problem solver, the barrier isn't just finding an idea. It's finding a subject matter expert who knows what features are important, what is worth paying for, and willing to put the time into helping me. I'd be more likely to pay for access to the person with the idea than the idea itself.

Cory, do you know what channels you acquired your existing customers?

Those might be the best to focus on.

I would setup some form of analytics so you can get a good picture of what new visitors are doing on the site. If you already have analytics, I would recommend setting up goals so you can track each step in your funnel. Once you know where people are dropping off, try working on fixing that part.

Have you conducted any broad surveys with your existing paying customers? Find out what motivated them to sign up. What is their opinion on what works and what needs improvement.

Best regards

Tyson

thanks for just adding the thread - going through the same problem so will make my own HelpMeInternet request :)

Slow growth is beautiful. It's only been a few months. My business was not revenue-neutral for over four years.

Not entierly familiar with how you get the Opps but asked for a connection to one of the projects and your reply was: Will do, but people usually dont respond.

If you could make it more certain that a connection is made you could charge $$$ for this. Kind of on a lead basis:

here is the Opp -> Want connection? -> Pay X$ for intro

Or

Make intros just for subscribers?

Just some ideas...what Fudly said above seem right. The bigger your service get the more competition you have + You want one good idea, not many possible future ideas....