Comment by 3a0e8ff4e557 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3a0e8ff4e557 | Hacker News Reader

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Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-home crowd, if you will.

Certainly, there are many aspects of our SaaS platform that can be improved, but we have been constantly learning from our customers who are still continuing their subscriptions with us. So hopefully we are indeed improving our platform over time and tackling some core problems (sample bias, of course, but better than nothing).

P.S. Out of 39 people whom we surveyed over a few months (mostly people who continue to upgrade after the trial), 26 said that they will be "very disappointed" if they could not use our platform again, so hopefully this says something about our product/market fit.

"Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected."

You need to ask 5 Whys here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys):

1. Why are your customers abandoning your product?

.. because it's taking up much more time and money than they expected.

2. Why is it taking up much more time and money than they expected?

and so on.

You can certainly increase the price, but it's a dangerous proposition, that can be counter-productive without knowing what's causing your customers to abandon the product and how can you improve the overall user experience first & foremost.

What is taking up most of their time? What can you do to help reduce that, if anything?

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

I think you have answered your question. If your customers are telling you "adding content is time-consuming" you should ONLY be focusing on solving THIS particular problem.

"Should I increase my prices?" is a "vanity question" ( just like "vanity metrics" (E Ries Lean startup philosophy) >> They do not help you build a better business, they take you away from what is REALLY important) Finding why your customer do not want to spend more time adding content and/or why they consider spending more time adding content is not worth it definitely help.

Good luck.

Not sure if you've tried this because you didn't mention it...

How about letting them schedule and set future publish times for the items? As a small biz owner, if I'm in the groove of adding products, I would love to just spend 4 hours straight on a Sunday night adding all the products for the week and have the system publish them on a schedule I set. It's much harder (and more annoying) to do this fresh every day for 15 minutes than doing so in a large block of time.

If freshness of the content is a real concern, I'd pay for something like that to make my site appear more fresh.

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