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Comment by dan_sim | Hacker News Reader

That's how I begin to feel about the community here. When I wrote about selling our product for 25K$ (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1212966), some people wrote that it couldn't work and things like that. If I would have been new in business, it would have hurt me a lot. Now, I just say to myself that these people are just bitter. They don't seem to care how much they can hurt others.

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That thread has skepticism, but I didn't think any of it was rude or anything close to a personal attack. That's quite different from what the author of this post described.

The other side of the author's point is that you have to be careful not to take criticism of your work as criticism of you as a person.

The HN community is often trying to be blunt and frank to give you the advice that they think you need. This is a community with many high-end programmers who probably look at your project and think that they could easily recreate it in less than $10k worth of time (probably not true, but whatever).

My immediate reaction is that you need to ditch your eternal beta and immediately offer a paid plan. Make the trial really limited. Talk (in person) to potential clients and really try to really sell this thing.

As long as it is in eternal free beta you have no real discernment between casual and paying customers. You have no money to make it worthwhile to you, you have no advertising budget and no credibility. Sure, turning off "free beta mode" is hard, but better to do it now than to work for years (has it been since 2007?) under the assumption that all you need is more features to make a profitable business.

It is a pity that you want to drop this product in its entirety. If I were you I'd either walk away from it to get a break or spend all your effort on the static sales pages, a billing system and advertising until you have some paying customers.

On the website front:

You really do have to get people to try out the dashboard for Timmy. You should have a really easy demo dashboard. If you want to do more coding you could add a Javascript test box where you can talk to Timmy on-line. Getting people to talk to Timmy using MSN is your first hurdle.

None of the features sound compelling. You need to isolate the one call to action that works for most of the potential customers you have personally talked with and put that on the front page. Right now it feels weak - no feature there calls to me. I can already track my time, so why use your solution (tell me). Instant communication and notifications sound like the features of MSN itself - come up with something that really is difficult to solve that Timmy can solve.

Thanks a lot. This is a really great comment that I should have had years before. We had our share of problems with that project but the main reason we want to drop it is not because it's not paying, it's because our hearts are not in it anymore. We don't have passion for time-tracking (and even if it's hard to believe, some people have it). We learned a lot but now it's time to let it go.

But thanks fo the great comment...

If you chalk everyone up who critiques something you're doing as "bitter", you're liable to miss a whole lot of useful information.

I'm sorry, I inadvertently downvoted you.

I actually agree completely with what you said, especially after reading the thread he cited.

Out of interest, did you sell it? Also since your asking for CAD, I assume you are Canadian, do you mind me asking where in Canada you are from?

Didn't sell it yet but we had people interested in. We are from near Montreal.

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