This is fascinating. Is your product b2b? How fast did you discard the 25 ideas? It sounde like you needed 3 month at least, so 8 years? What did you live on during that time? So in short:please tell me more
Many users would use the product and then file chargebacks. Many users will go to any extend to get out of paying coming up with either sad stories, lies or threats. When it's a low cost, high volume product (5m+ paying customers over time) - you deal with too many of these and sometimes it's very demoralizing.
I used to work for someone else in Saas and this wasn't such a big issue there. Next thing I do won't be in consumer.
Some ideas where tried end to end in a week, some were run for 2 years. Did a lot of mistakes along the way.
What distinguished the successful attempts from the unsuccessful ones?
How did you know when it was time to move on?
Knowing this, how do you create and market your product to get people to buy?
I feel like with B2B it's easier to convince people to buy purely by showing them value, whereas B2C seems more impulse driven.
Today's consumer doesn't like to pay for anything, especially if it is a digital product. They will do whatever they can to get out of paying either by pirating or trying to get a refund/chargeback after using it.
Sometimes they will do an impulse buy. Which is what we were able to work for us, but then bad actors try to make your life as miserable as possible.
B2B is not rosy and has its own set of issues. But I would rather kick 50 ungrateful users from the platform to their face, rather than deal with 10k ungrateful consumers.
And as you said: loathe customer support for B2C.
Solution to both of them is making a simple product which provides incredible value which is self serve. Word of mouth will take care of the rest. Eventually build a community driven forum which will help with support.
I don't live in US.
We do have outsourced customer service. But still I have to be aware of what the customers are complaining about. In some cases people are filing frivolous complaints to government agencies which you have to respond to. With Saas, I would go after the bad actors. With consumers the number of bad actors is endless.