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Comment by revorad | Hacker News Reader

My last company (who did environmental modelling) would have paid for this. We and other people in our work network always needed something like this. I imagine university and government departments, mining companies, environmental consultancies would find this useful.

How did you do your initial market research? Unless this is the only tool you are thinking of selling, I wouldn't give up so easily as GIS is a huge market and the most popular software (ArcGIS and MapInfo) sucks in so many ways.

Have you spent any time on the ESRI forums? You might find some leads there, but more importantly will learn about people's pain points.

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I got the initial idea from a customer I was doing some geocoding work for. The initial market research was figuring out if people were searching for such conversions (keyword tool), checking out current competition, reading forums and posts about how converting was a painful activity. I decided to just go for it and get an mvp up and running (I have had paralysis through analysis before).

This is the only GIS tool that I have as of now. I have spent time on the ESRI forums (since the shape file conversion is what most people search for). I probably should not give up on GIS as a market though. Thanks for that.

If you're looking for ideas and are into Open Source GIS, I may have a good one. I worked as GIS consultant for abiyt a year and there was one tool missing from the open source ecology that would have made work a LOT smoother. I'm still embarassed I didn't build it at some point, actually. Email me if you're interested and I will elaborate. Not sure there's much money in there though, since it's part of the whole open source thinking, but there's definitely utility in it.

Do you lurk on the ESRI forums or have you been posting. It seems like it would be great marketing to post links to your website when people ask questions about converting, if done in a low key non spammy sort of way.

Regarding your adwords strategy, you should talk to HN user zackattack. He's really good and recently helped me test some ideas.

Have you thought of making add-on tools for the big GIS software? For example, we used to use this one a lot - http://www.spatialecology.com/htools/tooldesc.php. You could possibly start with selling small scripts which fix problems people mention on the ESRI forums and build up a toolbox over time, which you could then sell as a package.

That way, you have a readymade market.

Earning karma by helping people on forums is probably your equivalent for an SEO strategy here.

EDIT: Oh and $10 is wayyy too low. Don't charger per conversion. If someone needs this tool, they are going to use it a lot, not just once. Charge at least $100 for unlimited conversions. Then charge more when your product is better. Even if your adwords CTR is low, at least make it count.

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