Ask HN: Should we shut down our SAAS? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should we shut down our SAAS?

17 pointseibrahim29 comments

My partners and I built www.hyperlogs.com and we put a lot of money, time and effort.

We think that we built a pretty polished "beta" for our web app. We know we are still missing a bunch of features.

The issue is that my partners and I are not sure if we should continue or shut it down. We have very few paying customers, almost all feedback we get is POSITIVE.

We have not done any marketing though, so part of us feels that we might be killing it too soon. On the flip side, it's been several months why don't we have more paid subscribers (i.e. more validation)?

Should we invest more money/time/effort into marketing? Product development? Or call it quits?

How do we know if it's time to pull the plug?

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Starting a company takes time. Customers aren't just going to flock to you because you put a product out. I can't tell you if you should quit or not, but if you want to know why you don't have more paying subscribers, you should try asking your existing subscribers what made them want to pay for your service, what they love about it, and what they would do if it no longer existed. I'm sure somewhere in there you will get some interesting answers that will guide your decision on how to move forward.

I like this idea. Thanks!

thank you.

We work on a SaaS app (company has market leadership in our specific business which is payroll calculation of a western european country), which would strongly benefit from integrating a time-tracking app of some sort. Currently we are in a limited customer trial phase, doing market research and finishing our planned feature set for initial public release.

As a part of the MVP and customer research phase, and mostly because it is quite relevant to our intended customer base, we did some market research by talking to potential customers regarding the use of time tracking software.

We got feedback that most potential customers looked at using time-tracking software but almost all of them did not find suitable tools because of lacking integration to other software.

Time tracking itself appears to be quite worthless as long as it does not have export functionality (in a commonly used format) or integration.

Just my humble opinion based on our research, may or may not be of any interest for you :)

Good feedback here. Chupa-Chups, which country did you target in your market research? Also, Emad's product is no just a time tracker, it has expenses and invoicing built in, so it may not having integrations with third party but it has a way to complete the loop (tracking and finally billing for the tracked time)? Thoughts?

Germany. And while I agree that the feature set is well rounded, it is not all what you would want to do with that data. That at least is what we perceived as the gist of the received feedback.

Great feedback. Thanks

I've been working on my own Time Tracking tool since 2015 as a side project. I've managed to break 1k MMR. The competition is just insane. Every day I discover a couple new time tracking tools, and every one of them looks better than the last one. I've actually started exploring other SaaS ideas on the side (nothing too serious yet though).

Ads really suck at our pricing point. Google & Bing are $5+ CPC for most of the main time tracking keywords. Facebook ads were horrible from my experience (and none of the other major time tracking tools are running them).

I don't really have any advice, but do want to wish you the best of luck!

thanks and i would love to see your time tracking tool and congrats on $1k MMR - I know it's not a huge success but it's something :)

logmyhours.com - I'm happy with it so far though, it's something I've built for myself (I log all my hours working on it) and 100% on my own and has been a great learning experience. But it is getting harder and harder to work after work.

I love that I get to chat with customers and see what really are their pain points (something devs rarely ever get to do).

If I can double the MRR and relocate outside of Vancouver, I can most likely go full-time.

Hope you are able to do that. I guess at your point it's getting a few more clients via different scrappy ways (cold outreach, etc), and keep using their feedback/behavior to improve the product.

How can you pull the plug before you try marketing it? People won't just magically find your app, you need to put it out there.

Not trying to be a smart ass here. I'm in a very similar boat as you, but have had / worked for other startups too.

- $300 negative a month is very, very little cost for running a SaaS. You have fixed cost up front.

- No marketing means you have not really started yet "for real".

- Any real traction takes at least 3 years.

- Having a product is step 1 in the 100 step SaaS trajectory.

You just need to take a break. Get some perspective. Then you will see you have just started out and it is waaaaay to early to give in.

Product development won't help if people don't know about it. Do more marketing (or start doing it at all). Talk to people that have done comparison articles on your topic in the past and explain your product and its' unique advantage to them (but don't expect them to include you immediately, takes time). Add videos that showcase your product (I'm lazy, I probably won't sign up and figure out how it works and if it works for me). Start blogging more, and offer solutions to specific cases ("I'm a XXX and here's how I used YYY to solve my problem with ZZZ").

From my experience: don't build anything for profit/public unless you have a marketing/sales plan/person. I've seen quite a few ideas fizzle out because all involved were working on the product and none were able/willing to work on getting people/companies to use the product.

Push it hard on social media for 2-3 years.. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Lots of useful, practical demos showing solving read-world realistic use-cases. Any time there's a release or press mention, add a hand-crafted Tweet that brings some infotainment value (just like any good public presentation).

If after that time, traction isn't happening: adjust prices or make the offering clearer. If that doesn't work, then pivot/try something else. When/if it gets to $1-2k+/month, then it's probably worth selling to someone for $20-25k and not just apoptosisizing it. It can take as long as 10 years or never for something really good and ahead of its time to catch on with insufficient hustling. HUSTLE! :)

And for heaven's sake, don't throw away a good team if it vibes and flows just because one project doesn't work out immediately.

How many partners and how big is your team? What are your costs that drive you to -$300 a month? Have you approached anyone to trial it for you and do a write up? Have you got SEO sorted (or is that part of the "no marketing")? Are you talking to the customers you do have, are they recommending?

Specifically for your product:

1) Try to add voice interface (e.g. alexa). 2) Try to sell it specifically to professional users who care about time tracking (e.g. lawyers). I.e. in a non scalable way. 3) Increase the price.

Interesting. So, you think that increasing the price gives the product a sense of elevated value, albeit completely fictitious? Also, what do you mean by "non-scalable"?

Thanks!

How can you think of calling quits without ever doing marketing?

Stop developing and start selling.

Also your price is too low.

Advertise on Facebook. Target business professionals.

Thanks for the feedback!

How long have you been working on it? What marketing efforts have you done? Building the product is necessary but not sufficient...

We launched about a year ago. We put a bunch of time in the beginning but then we slowed down to a trickle since we are all working and doing this on the side.

Marketing has been very minimal. A couple of blog posts, a few tweets/fb posts/linked in posts/etc, a Show HN post - i think that's about it.

ok. That is not really enough time. I'd try some more targeted marketing, such as Google Adwords... maybe engage an SEM firm to help...

Agreed.

Somewhat off topic but your hyperlogs logo is non-retina, it looks slightly pixelated on my phone. Just a heads up.

Are you ramen profitable?

if not how much are you bleeding?

We are about negative $300 a month

Based on that and your pricing page you need roughly 50 paying business customers to get to break even. Make that your goal for the next three months. Focus completely on that (no comfort zone adding just one more feature) actually get out market and sell. If you can't add the 50 customers in three months then pull the pin. If you do at least you're at break even and you can coast for a while deciding what to do next.

I'm ignoring for the moment that there is a cost to servicing each customer - you might need to factor that in to you breakeven calcs.

that's actually a great goal to have. We just need to figure out how to market - we both suck at marketing plus we don't really enjoy it.

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