No sure where to go from here
After a goodish start (100 + upvotes on Product Hunt) and a couple of paid customers, traffic & interest have started to taper off. Not really sure where to go from here: do I build more features or market more (if so how)?
My site is: https://pichance.com/
I don't know how people sustain their business after the initial buzz has died down. Any tips appreciated.
Thanks,
Bilal
Quick question: Are you satisfied with what you've achieved so far? @seattlehacker
You had a good start but that is just the beginning and little step. If you're not sure where to go next. Talk to your customers one by one, identify their needs, figure out how to improve your product.
I'm sure you understand this sort of products is totally in a red ocean, what is your plan to stand out from the crowd? I had the same question when I started my silly project.
Once I started the customer relationship journey, they gave me a lot of feedback to optimize my product. With their support and feedback, my project is now empowering my coffee fund every month.
Don't let your customer sits, make them excited!
I think you should definitely narrow down your value proposition. The examples you show are just for adding pixels to consumer images, even though most cellphones take photos with waaaay more pixels than any moder screen have. So I don't see why I would use your system.
If you narrow down your market, there's potential for a lot of things. As other's mentioned, can you enhance photos to read license plates? Con you enhance document scans? Can you revert your algorithm to compress video feeds?
Thank you! yes - I think you're right I need to really narrow down and find the value proposition here. I am definitely having a hard time thinking about what customers would find this useful on an ongoing basis.
Perhaps if you can give the persona of who you see as your user, it could help. Describe with as much detail as you can how you see someone using your product, why they would use it, how old are they, etc. etc.
That's a helpful way to look a it. Thanks!
Hi Bibal,
I would suggest that you learn more about who your users are. What problem are you solving for them? Are you helping them with photos that they're selling, or are you helping them improve their linkedIn profile pictures? Do what you can to get on a call with some of your early paying customers and try to learn what they were using your site for.
This should help you figure out if you need to change up some of your marketing and who you're targeting - or - it will give you ideas about new features.
All the best
Thanks! So far only got 3 but I definitely want more feedback. Going to implement a feedback form to see if we can collect some data.
Agreed with the person who mentioned commercial applications. The most obvious of which, to me at least, would be photo printers who want to produce great quality prints when their customers upload lower res photos. So maybe a first step would be contacting a few small-to-medium sized print shops to see (1) are they interested in this product, and (2) will they let you add your processing to their image pipeline to see if it makes a big difference. These integrations may require some custom dev work so you could charge for those services in the beginning.
I hadn't thought about this use case. Thanks for bringing it up!
Check out some of the articles under the "find your first customers" section of our new Start Here page. They should be helpful.
Also, read through some of the interviews here. We ask literally everyone how they grow and market their businesses, so you've got 400+ examples to learn from!
Thanks!
If you're interested in turning PicHance into a paid API with basically zero effort, hit me up -- this is exactly what Saasify is meant for. 💪
LOL - this was actually our idea as well! We wanted to build this app as a starter and then iterate a few times before we can generalize. But focus on ML models. The vision being someone can upload their model and boom they have a Saas website with that as a backend ready to go.
Your app looks pretty good! Glad you're going for this. I definitely think the market needs this. :)
Do you notice any common threads between your paid users? (Professions, interests?)
Maybe interacting with those communities.
I didn't try it, but if it works well, doesn't this have more commercial applications rather than consumer? Like enhancing images from low-res security cameras? You actually made what was just science fiction on CSI 15 years ago :-)
That's a good idea! Thanks - I'll see if I can reach out to any. Where do you find low res security footage though haha?
By coincidence this just came up on Hacker News, a guy asking for this type of help.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100083
Yeah low res video footage could be a market but the current model only upscales - doesn't really reduce noise/blurriness in the image. I'm still working on different ways to serve those kinds of models. Thanks for sharing!
Take a pic from a low res webcam and see how your app performs! Or record a video of you walking around, take a low quality image and see if it improves your face/visibility.
Also might be good for fixing low res marketing-type images (eg I have a small product photo/marketing material, and need it at a higher res). But I tried on a really bad old version of my logo and it didn't improve it.
Thanks - yeah it only upscales but doesn't fix any blurriness. I want to improve the model for that.
By the way, I recently read The Mom Test and thought it was a great perspective on how to make useful products.
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/the-mom-test/
Nice! This is good advice. Thanks for sharing!
I'm assuming you would reach out to law enforcement agencies. But first you'd have to have a version that is enterprise ready. As well, can this enhance bad PDF scans? That has a lot of applications too, like being grouped with other document tools. I use SmallPDF for my business, it seems like this could be a good addition to a service like that.
Nice - like the idea about PDFs!
Love the concept!
It's a mix and match of both. Constant marketing while you build more features would give key results.
Reach out to the right influencers to spread the word.
I think this tool will get you better at prospecting the right influencers.
Check it out at http://bit.ly/2sQgtzn