Tips for acquiring customers in the "developer tools" space?

Frankly, complete lack of use after ~500 visits from somewhat interested people hints that you don't have product-market fit.

Here's my theory as to why:

1. If I'm technical enough to implement an API, I'm technical enough to write integration tests in code, without using a GUI tool.

2. Number of people who implement APIs is relatively small.

3. As a developer capable of writing code, after looking at your screenshots, I'm not convinced that using GUI and having to click a lot would be easier that writing few lines of code.

4. Let's say I'm starting a new project that provides API. I'm writing tests from the beginning. Once I choose some way of writing tests, I'll stick with it because the more tests I have, the less attractive it is to rewrite them using another method, like your tool.

That means that the only time to acquire me as a customer is the exact moment I'm starting my project.

That might work for tools that have huge presence in developer's minds (like postgres or react) but not for an unknown tool.

I would try to pivot this technology it some other direction.

For example Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest/) is a similar tool but for testing someone else's rest APIs, not your own. There are more people who consume APIs that implement APIs and it doesn't have the timing-of-user-acquisition problem.

I want to see a big link on the homepage where you say "Check out how we use apibot to test apibot!"

I've spent 4.5 years acquiring 100,000 users and 1200 paying companies for this exact problem space, so I can tell you first-hand that it's possible to build a decent business here. Marketing takes practice like any other skill and you need to just try a lot of things until you find some that work.

The cheapest marketing dollar-wise is generating useful content. Guest posts, your own blog, etc. Set a schedule and stick to it. Build an audience. Posts should be relevant to your target audience but don't need to be (and probably shouldn't be) about your product directly. It's time-consuming and it takes a long time to build but it's effective.

There's a ton of other stuff in heavybit.com/library that may be of use.

Good luck! Always glad to see more API tools!

I watched the first "build a test video" and it looked very non-intuitive for me as a developer to use the whole graphical interface to write the tests. What drew me to check the app out was that I was drawn to the idea of dumping some periodical test code online and have it run at an interval.

However, if I'm writing proper tests locally then it should be enough to know that the service is online. That's easily handled by a pinging service.

But as @kenn says; talk to the people who signed up but left. They're better sources of truth than us. ;)

I'd basically repeat what @kjk said, but before anything, why don't you ask the 15 people you already have? Talk to every one of them.

If you sincerely ask, maybe 3-5 people will get back to you with their PoV. Listen to them.

To add my view, I wouldn't depend on an external tool that's not clear about the future. I use CircleCI for CI, but that's because I can still test locally- if CircleCI shuts down tomorrow, I can still run my tests locally, or switch to Wercker. CI is just a hosting platform to run my tests on a regular basis.

You are basically creating a new testing language and framework. The barrier is quite high. Even if it worked locally, it's more than likely to me that it's going to take years to lift off. I would change that.

I have started a similar product two years ago - online-tool to generate whole admin panel for Laravel framework - https://quickadminpanel.com

So I understand exactly what problems you're facing:
(sorry, will be a lot of links below, it's not for promotion, it's for illustrating the points)

1. Hard to use the tool for existing workflows.
   Developers write code in some their preferred way and your proposition has to be really strong to convince them to change it. For us, only time and constant evolution helped to get initial traction which grew over time.

2. Examples, examples, examples
   People need proof of how it actually works, end-to-end. So you need more simple videos, GitHub repos, demo projects, whatever is easy to understand in a minute or so.
   GitHub demo repos worked for us really well, like this one: https://github.com/LaravelDaily/laravel-roles-permissions-manager

3. Be a part of the community with content marketing
   As someone else said in the comment, you need to write content about the problem you're solving. Potential customers need to recognize you as a problem expert, for us my personal presence in Laravel framework community was a huge boost:

• I had started a blog 3 years ago: http://laraveldaily.com/blog/
• Also really active on Twitter. Daily: https://twitter.com/dailylaravel
• Oh, and YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTuplgOBi6tJIlesIboymGA
• And e-book: https://laravelforclients.com/
  So yes, A LOT of content before it actually started working after half-year or so.

Finally, I've written about our story on Medium:
https://medium.com/successful-it-projects/moving-from-services-to-product-7-business-lessons-learned-from-1000-first-customers-83fa1fea2897
https://medium.com/successful-it-projects/how-we-raised-prices-3x-twice-and-got-happy-customers-a12f0b9ec6d6

And - a little teaser - currently in progress of writing an article about marketing to developers for IndieHackers, stay tuned for publishing in upcoming weeks.

You have uncertainties and questions because you haven't spoken to customers yet. Before speaking to your potential customers you made a lot of assumptions about the problem, the solution, your messaging etc. Making assumptions is like playing roulette - sometimes you win, other times you don't. This time you didn't win.

I strongly recommend reaching out to your potential customers and speaking to them. Don't ask them to evaluate your product - they're going to lie due to politeness or shallow consideration. Instead, ask them questions about their real experiences, try to understand what they do, why they do it, what happens when a problem occurs, how they react, how they go about solving it etc. Imagine that you're a film director and you need to write a script, and then produce a movie of how your each customer behaves in the real world. As soon as you have 10-20 movies you'll start seeing patterns that will emerge into customer insights. You'll start deeply understanding your customers and you'll have much stronger clarity about what to build and how to present it. Most importantly, if you're solving an important problem for these people, you can immediately acquire them as customers.

Some ideas on where to find your customers - LinkedIn Premium, GitHub search (e.g. either look for users directly or look for repositories that use a package/badge that is relevant to your customer segment). Also, read about the Mom Test for learning more about how to speak with customers effectively.

Also, I've recently written an extended blog post on this - hope you'll find my thoughts helpful. https://medium.com/customer-centric-startups/customer-focus-is-the-key-to-startup-success-3b1e55272f33

My recommendation to find product-market fit is to crawl stack overflow, identify related or relevant problems and quantify it to determine how many are experiencing that pain.

A little bit too much marketing: http://imgur.com/a/KO8XH

Your https is busted ("Attackers might be trying to steal your information from apibot.co (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID" says Chrome)

A company may have a need, but not have any budget to work with. They may have enough funding, but not enough work to justify hiring an intern. Or they may have funding and enough work, but not want to invest the time to train and manage an intern. They may prefer to hire a full-time, experienced candidate.
https://19216811wiki.com/