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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

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johnwheeler

To me, it is the product...

You’ve essentially taken a bunch of things that are already free, bundled them together, and charged a steep price.

* Your NDA could be replaced with a simple Google search

* There are plenty of ways to throw together a quick, pro looking website.

* Scheduling calls is done over email, and gmail and outlook already add appointments to your calendars.

* Chat assistant can be replaced with Tawk.To

Moreover, I think that giving shares away is not a good idea - not because equity in general is so valuable, but specifically because your equity is somewhat worthless at this point. When you position doing that as a value-add, it makes me question your value proposition in its entirety (seems gimmicky)

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This is where I am with this. I already have an efficient onboarding and process procedure in place and it's as automated as I would want it to be since client needs vary so much and the onboarding needs to vary just as much.

I "really" don't need or want yet another website/portal for my business to deal with either. Having the onboarding on someone else's subdomain is not an ideal solution at any time.

This doesn't solve any problems for most freelancers that I know, they already have these processes in place. And it's very expensive IMO for what is essentially form processing.

I don't think so. All of the things you explained below takes at least a week in real life to complete. To and fro emails to get the requirement right, using DocuSign to sign NDAs, then setting up a call. While with Sieve PRO all of this happens right away.

About equity, we've already raised an angel round, so I think it creates some value, but now I think we need to convey this better to the audience.

As a freelancer, this also just doesn’t fit with my personal experience. When a client wants an NDA, they send one. I rarely/never care. I’ll check over the language, but they don’t want to use my NDA in general.

Invoicing, time tracking is done through my accounting system.

Scheduling meeting is pretty easy.

Setting up a personal website is pretty easy, and if you’re a Webdev you probably already have one. In my experience most work comes through personal contacts anyway.

So, it was hard for me to see how this would be useful. Maybe I’m not the audience. Posting a survey might get you more statistics on what’s wrong with the site.

Exactly as my sentiment below. I would try targeting this to non-tech freelancers e.g. healthcare professionals, writers, environmental/civil engineers.

This could be the case somewhere, I am yet to do the complete validation, but we had over 150 people subscribe to upcoming and 400/600 people click signup. So I was assuming the problem was somewhere in the onboarding. https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/sieve-pro

Don't get me wrong but these numbers are not really a lot either. Especially as Product Hunt is not exactly the best traffic for buying customers they love to click and test free stuff assuming the process is fast and painless (which according to this thread it isn't)

> When a client wants an NDA, they send one

Flip side: if I’m hiring, I want to use my NDA.

Is that not the same side?

OP said “as a freelancer, my clients like to use their own NDA.” I’m saying “as a client, you are correct, I prefer to use my own NDA.”

I read OP as the inverse of how you read it (I think).

But, regardless, good! Before coffee (AM, where I am), I like to keep all my noun-verb-object clusters straight.

Happy Sunday!

Same here. I freelance part time. All NDAs have been from clients. Meetings are rare, mostly everything is in emails. For invoices, I use Quickbooks.

Same here. I kick off call scheduling via calendly. Send PDF proposal and bill via freshbooks. All done within minutes with a few days of client delay - fairly typical. Never an NDA unless they want one. Absolutely no need for this service.

> To and fro emails to get the requirement right, using DocuSign to sign NDAs, then setting up a call. While with Sieve PRO all of this happens right away.

How does Sieve PRO make "all of this happen right away"? All of that stuff involves communication with the client; all of that to and fro still has to happen. Neither here nor on your promotional site are you making the case for how you make any of that process faster or easier.

> we've already raised an angel round, so I think it creates some value

I think this statement points to the crux of the problem. Your (future) customers are the only ones that decide if the product creates value. Not you or an angel investor, or HN commenters for that matter.

Listen, you can say "I don't think so" all day long, but the lack of sales says what you think is wrong. The product, as described, is not worth what you are asking for it. You _know_ this to be true because not one person bought it.

_Something_ will have to change in your offering to make it successful, so stop arguing with the people who disagree with you and start working on understanding _why_ they disagree with you. You will want to do this in a way that doesn't start by telling them they're wrong and then listing reasons why they're wrong as you've been doing.

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