Should I sell Pingr?
Currently https://pingr.io doesn't bring revenue: expenses for servers are more than the money users pay.
Recently I got an offer, which is not yet finalized (the team is considering if they want to buy it or not).
On the one hand, as I realize, potential buyers consider MRR/ARR or any other index for calculating the price of SaaS products. And here it costs nothing.
On the other hand, they can buy the codebase + landing + domain and maybe some other assets, and if they have cool ideas of how to boost the startup - why not?
I've spent around ~1000 hours (well, 600 tracked hours, but I guess in total I spent more than 1000) working on it. I cannot disclose the price, but should I, in your opinion, sell it if the price is lower than the (hourly rate * hours)?
Would you buy a product without revenue?
Currently, I think it might give me some fresh air, since I really want to write a book about my passion: UX/UI area.
Sell it and use that money to finance your next project.
If you don't want to run it anymore I would just sell it. The time you've spent on it is gone but you can get some money out of it and put that cash into your book.
If the offer was really low I would recommend just keeping it and raising your prices. Your cheapest plan is $1.01 /month with a $0.50 credit card processing fee. Theres no way to make money with prices like this. Your competitors are all charging $8-$15 / month (when paid annually) as a minimum.
My guess is the buyers are just going to raise the prices on day one anyways. You say it has no revenue but really its just not profitable. How many customers do you have and would it be be worth your while if they were all paying $10/month?
I was looking at updown.io with its pricing.
When I had $10 price plan and then I posted my product on Reddit I got feedback that it's expensive. But I think that it's my mistake.
Even thought my service is a bit tricky, since if you have 5 nodes, you'll need to multiply prices *5. but it's still not that big.
Maybe I should just charge for a monitors number, like $1 + $0.5/monitor?
your pricing page is complex. both bars go left-to-right, left one raises price, right one decreases price. WAT
what I would do instead:
2.1. optionally if you stick with showing monitors, I'd replace the name to something more clear and present it on a 2d graph (and consistency! price increases with either X or Y increases)
I wouldn't give up on it too quick, but I do wonder what you spent 1,000 hours on... marketing?
Nah! You know it seemed easy at first, but gosh!
I have 7 servers. Communicating between each other. Every minute the uptime /response time of monitors are calculated. Lighthouse checks are performing. Flexible notification channels are created, twilio integration, status pages etc etc. Landing page.
It was really a lot of stuff =(
Right now I'm thinking of returning to traditional subscription plans, pay-per-usage brought so many problems and additional code. Like user balances, transactions, hourly calculations etc.. :(
There will always be people who complain about the price. But as many people say, getting into a battle for who is the cheapest is a loser's game. You can only lose, you will lose revenue and you'll lose the battle because there is always someone who is willing to lose more money than you.
I would suggest charging more and being premium. People always wonder what is the deal with the service that is too cheap. I would charge $30 a month and make your support promises stand out.
The problem is it's hard to find against such monsters as uptimerobot, betteruptime and uptimemate. People simple choose other services.
But I agree with you on price.
Now I'm in doubts..
Here's what you can do before selling - RAISE the damn prices - and see if you can make money and sustain the service. Your prices are incredibly low.
This is the way.
I legitimately trust your service less because your prices are so low.
For real, seriously consider raising your prices if you're interested in still running it.
There's nothing wrong with cashing out if you're completely uninterested in continuing, but you are sabotaging yourself with those prices. Raise 'em, and raise' em for CURRENT customers, too. You'll lose some and you'll lose some good will, sure, but you'll keep others, and you'll reduce costs at the same time. (Send an email explaining the situation and the alternatives in a humble fashion and you'll probably keep more than you expect.)
Hi Victor
I'm sad to hear you're thinking of closing or selling Pingr.
I bought the $$$ lifetime deal like 5months ago.
Where does that leave me?
I'm not going to close it!
If I sell it, I'll make sure (put it in contract) that all lifetimdeals should still pay nothing and use all features for free. In an exceptional situation, I'll make a chargeback.
However, I'm not 100% sure I'll sell it, it depends on the offer and maybe I'll just make another attempt to work on it: change pricing plans, add features and launch on PH once again.
But in any case, no way, I value our relationship Mathias, so I'll make sure that whether you'll still use Pingr as you use, or get a chargeback if new owner decides to close it (which is very unlikely)
Thanks. I would advise to keep at it and not give up! A lot of fellow IH here suggest to abondan the project, I think that's not a good idea. Why did you choose this type of business? There must be something that excited you about it.
If you need to discuss which features are needed, I'm available to chat.
In the end Akcium sold the project. For some time the new owners kept the service online, but after suffering 1 day of downtime due to expired SSL certificate, the new owners confirmed to me the service is not running anymore for me, so goodbye my lifetime license.
Not happy they stopped providing the service to me as a life time customer and stopped the service silently without mentioning it.
Goodbye Pingr RIP.
Seems that you already got the answer. It's just difficult to 'give up' a project on which you spend a lot of time.
When I have a dilemma like this while I already know the answer inside me, I play heads and tails like the result of it will determine the choice, I analyse my feelings following the outcome: If like the result I choose the outcome, if not I choose the other choice.
Good luck
Hello
Uptime monitoring is a very crowded market. I guess there are almost 200+ competitors that are doing the same, and only your marketing tactics can make the difference.
If you are feeling that this product doesn't any time, sell it, and write about your passion.
"sell it if the price is lower than the (hourly rate * hours)" --> Well, I'm not sure it's relevant, because except coding , you learn a lot about how to make a product, how to market it,...you save the cost of doing a MBA ;)
About the price, if you have few k of users, you can sell the product to a competitor maybe.
Hey Victor,
Seeing you were the number one product on Producthunt, I would hire a freelance growth hacker and try one more time.
Like others said, I would increase the prices and would run a B2B qualified leads strategy.
You can easily write a sales script, connect with leads on LinkedIn and then go for the kill.
If it was in my hands, I would do this myself for one month, when it works, I would outsource the sales. Most salespeople are paid minimum wages and are incentivized by number conventions which will give them bonuses.
If you dislike the marketing part. You can always go to clickbank.com, and let affiliate marketers do all the heavy lifting. Just checked, the sign-up is still FREE.
But if you don't want to spend any more time and money on the project, letting go is fine. You can sell on https://microacquire.com
If you're thinking the project is more of a burden to work on than a joy then it might be best to sell it, and get some money from it and move on to the next project.
If you are still happy working on it though and you see a future in a project like this then it might be worthwhile persevering. You mentioned the server costs are higher than what you get from users, so you have users so there is a market for it, maybe just need to push the marketing a bit more (easier said than done I know). I'd also say you're prices are extremely low for a service that you are offering, so it may be worthwhile looking at increasing your prices.
I think it depends on what you want with your site/app. If you want to and like to keep working on it, then that is also for sure worth keeping in mind.
On the flip side, if the though of getting a "burden" of a project off your plate and getting a chunk of change for it sounds great, then go for it!
Sad to hear that, Victor.
It seems like you are unable to grow Pingr.
I know that there is a demand for products like Pingr, so the problem is in marketing (maybe you are not good at marketing like me).
Sell it, better than shut it down.
There are Tons of other very good uptime Monitoring tools in the market. I would Take
the Money and Start Working on something more creative
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Umm.. What? 🤔
He/she means dedicated server
This comment was deleted 6 years ago