If your product isn't growing, what do you think is your blocker?

I run into founders all the time with this stated problem. They take their revenue sheets, plot their desired growth and get disappointed when it doesn't happen.

I find most of these founders stand in their own company growth. They lose sight of what they can accomplish and offload their success to others (often investors in the web space). Their progress slows and they look for reasons to justify their lack of progress. Janitors care about excuses. Leaders take responsibility.

Some hard truths to accept for founders:

1. The problem they are solving isn't really a problem for anyone.
2. The problem they are solving is so tiny and specific to a few people that there is no market there to get ahold of.
3. They think they are being innovative but aren't (nearly everything crypto atm imo).
4. They don't have the skills or temperament to make it happen. So many SaaS founders start their businesses with no idea of software development. These people get shredded and exploited for their money. Capitalism after all.
5. The founder listens too much to friends and family that tell them their product is "great" when it's not. The founder develops an ego / bubble and ignores reality.
6. Most software products are small companies and not billion-dollar ideas. I've been part of shutting down start-ups generating 1 to 10MM of revenue just because investors wouldn't get their money back even though it could have comfortably supported a few staff and been a real business.

I find it's important to stay objective and focus on tangible numbers. If you hit the state where growth slows, get back to listening to your customers and trying to solve their real problems if possible. Then stay results-focused. But it's hard. The biggest contributor to the situation is usually the founder and not the market or customers. It's not easy to admit one's self is part of the core problem.

Indie Hackers itself isn't growing. Roughly the same number of readers visit every month, which means churn is as high as new user acquisition

I think there's a lack of novelty on the forum. Too many posts get repeated. Even if the posts are good, you don't want to read them again and again for months or years, so eventually you stop coming back. Compare to Twitter, Hacker News, Reddit, etc., where there's always new stuff you've never seen before.

I’m selling a JavaScript image editor SDK, and it’s doing great, great SEO ranking, growing, all those good things.

With a friend I’ve launched a NoCode image cropper [1] (based on the SDK tech) to serve the NoCode market. We’ve launched on a new domain and literally have 10 Google clicks a month.

I feel the blocker is traffic. I’ve seriously underestimated the amount of effort required to rank our domain 😅 Currently working to come up with good articles to improve our ranking so we can grow faster. Also pointing some of my other domains to our new domain. 🤞

1: CropGuide

After doing blogging and building product twtimgs and doendorse.com, I found that there are mainly following two reason why product isn't growing.

1. we build product and emotionally attached with it and don't listen feedback
2. Our product is good but we don't know how to do marketing or create a community around that product niche.

A new and improved product provides a good story (message) for the marketplace. Therefore, a product improvement can form part of the marketing communications campaign for the firm. This gives the company something new and exciting to communicate and may also add to the above benefit of energizing the brand.
you can find business solution here: https://errolallenconsulting.com/

I get tons of signups but no sales. I've spent thousands of dollars in Google Ads over the years mainly on YouTube video ads. I ended up seeing that YouTube is getting less cool and popular and now sure enough TikTok takes over. As much as TikTok is as a platform I use personally, I don't see anyone on there being interested in my products.

So my best bet was to move to Google Search ads right? Yep, now I get tons of signups, but a horrible bounce rate and zero conversions from all the ten signups per day and no one finishes onboarding.

I just contacted @Primer hoping for a response as I see he has four years of experience as well and is in a way better position than me. I hate to bother someone else but I've found nothing that helps me on onboarding via Google or YouTube search.

I am completely stuck and am basically losing hope.

PLEASE Check out https://obeatow.com and see my nemerous failed/shut down projects on this site and on Product Hunt

For me, it's clearly marketing. There are so many free alternatives to my app, that I really have to sell that it's worth it, and most people looking for a flashcard app aren't ever going to encounter mine in their searches.

I also charge a price for my app and don't have a free trial, which turns off a lot of people, so I may have to adjust it to a freemium model. My fear, though, is getting inundated with feature requests or bad reviews from non-paying users who don't like what's been limited in the trial.

form-data.com is growing nice and has steady growth of new users.
However, conversion rate from free to paying users is low.
I think this is due to a combination of a few reasons:

1. A lot of traffic is getting from other free products, such as Webflow free users. These users are looking for free products. I probably need to invest in other traffic sources.
2. I'm not investing in converting free users. There's no follow up emails and on going efforts to convert them.
3. There's no enforcements on the free tier. I'm occasionally asking people that crossed the quota to upgrade, but it's not automated and there is no process around it.
4. The free tier itself should have probably been less generous.

There are some more reasons. Generally speaking it's all about marketing and investing efforts into it.

It's important to define hypotheses about why the product doesn't grow and then validate them using quantitative and qualitative techniques.
By quantitative techniques, I'm referring to data analytics; qualitative - customer interviews, user testing sessions. I believe it'll help to find out.

Its not getting in front of more people who dont yet know it exists, and want it.

Sometimes it happens when you operate in a market where you need to move out of the egg-chicken situation. The same happened for us at Techweirdo also in the initial days. There are broadly two options, either you raise external funding and absorb some losses at the beginning, or you focus on building a strong community at the expense of the speed of growth ( in revenue ).

The product messaging may not be clear or solid. Consider simplifying

most likely marketing

For my iOS app, Neucards, I'm fighting the classic problem of creating a community. No one has my app, so you are unlikely to meet someone with my app to make sharing your contact info a good experience. Plus, people are kind of apathetic about their contacts until they are confronted with the poor state of them, like when they try sending out their holiday cards or have an email bounce on them.

ok, good

I am a newbie in blogging.. so can anyone give some recommendations about my site?
https://thescopes.net/best-night-vision-scope/