I guess like many here, I am way more skilled on the software side than on the sales side. Any advice for people like me?
1) Track everything including errors. Know what users are using and what they aren't. Remove or rebuild less used features.
2) Find out who your users are and what they value. Ignore non-payers.
3) Economize, market, and document features. You not only need to develop and deploy features, but also to price them in appetising business model, market them on social media and SEO and describe/show how to use them.
4) Keep it super simple. You only get the users' attention for a few seconds, use them wisely. Nobody will read long documentation or use illogical/complex UI.
Edit: Why not add some AI features for like pdf.ai? Would make your product more attractive and easier to sell.
If you want a taste of what the outbound world looks like Hustle Fund has a nice seminar they did with Pete Kazanjy here (1hr video, sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGU7tiU1nE
My feelings seem validated because the footer is “© 2023 Copyright: FixPDFs”
* "User-friendly interface" - that's the minimum bar! you don't need to mention it.
* "Enhance productivity" - again, I should hope so.
* "Fair usage policy" - oh good, you'll cut me off just when I need you most.
Also:
* How are potential customers finding out about you? Online ads? You being a sales team and reaching out?
* How do I know that your product is worth me paying money for? There's no trial or similar.
* Who's your customer?
1. Individuals? If so, how likely are they to need to constantly scan PDFs that $5/month makes sense each and every month? Consider doing a usage-based pricing model instead.
2. Businesses? Who are you - i.e. what's the legal entity they're dealing with? Do you have APIs that they can use? Why you instead of a proven competitor?I won't lie to you, I totally agree on your critiques of the pricing page. It "feels" like I need to say "you're getting a whole lot of value" in words that sound nice. If I saw this, I would roll my eyes, but a lot of people don't seem to. And, importantly, it doesn't seem to detract (but I'm open to rebuttal here).
Regarding fair usage, this is because I need some way to tell people who sign up that I'm not going to let them abuse it. I could have a different pricing model where you pay per page or something, but, quite frankly, I think I get better margins like this.
The reason for this post is that I'm not sure how to get potential customers to find me :)
My own customer is an individual who started using it when it was free and emailed me that he was looking forward to when it "came out of beta" and was more than willing to pay. So I brought it out of beta and he started paying. I acquired him through twitter (no personal connection). You ask good questions from the perspective of my customers, though. Thanks!
Sales trumps technical quality and you can always hire warm bodies to do technical stuff.
People who aren’t paying you don’t benefit you and you don’t benefit people who don’t hire you.
Don’t use technical ability as an excuse. Accept that half assed is better than nothing. And swallow your ego and grow.
Good luck.
Thanks!
Privately, paying for apps is fairly easy, but I don't because there is enough free stuff to keep me entertained for centuries.
However, professionally it takes just too much effort to transfer actual money. TPS reports, having to convince your boss, and worst of all: the expectation that something will not be supported in a short while.
You can blame my specific company, but this is how it works for most companies. In some cases it is better to charge a lot, because the amount of money is irrelevant, it is the non-zero amount that requires effort.
(A lot of people get to spend some MAX amount freely without having to consult with their manager -- it might be a good idea to account for that.)
For sales, e.g. people who have already landed on your page, you are working on improving your conversion funnel. It could be beneficial to have a high touch process in the beginning for a few to find out what they are looking for, whether they found the info they need on your site, and whether your product satisfies their need or not. (Maybe a survey page? Ask for email and try to talk to them directly?)
For marketing, it's about getting the word out to people who might need your product but don't know about it. Look to creating blogs, engaging in discussion forums of relevance, and creating a web presence where people can find your product easily.
2. Find out when/why are the buying your service. (Maybe because they really want to read a book, but digital copy isn't available)
3. Start imagining the purchase cycle as a funnel. For 1 paid customer you would need something like 50 people using your free/trial features (50 is an example, you can talk to founders in similar niche to get a better sense)
4. Define what the qualitative and quantitative outcome after using your service and double down on it - do this to an extent that your customer becomes an ardent advocate of your offering.
5. Get a sales/marketing person to help. You don't have to do it all yourself.
Hope it helps in some way. Best of luck
Show HN: FixPDFs – Automatic PDF correction for document scans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702373
I'd be willing to send you a repost invite for that if you'd be willing to open it up for people to try out. (Currently it looks like they have to send an email.)
Invited reposts go into in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so they will get a random placement on HN's front page.
Sales only works if you can narrow down who needs the product and the product sells for enough money to warrant direct sales (in my mind, around ~$250/month or ~$3K per-year).
Your product seems more as-needed. You need to market, not sell... figure out where people go when they face that problem and be there when they face the problem.
Just spit balling here but if the product works as well as the demo then it should be easy to start finding a few "Library Access" level customers and start to build some revenue.
The market that is obvious from that starting point is other PhD students in the humanities—sciences tend to read more recent content (so more likely to be digitized), and in the sciences it's more likely to be digitized anyway.
I have a few contacts in libraries, and some interest, but I figure testing out the product on more peers is better to begin with. This discussion is making me think I should pursue library level usage, though.
as for customers, its nice to upload and get scanned pdfs in small real text but is this for people who use this in a workflow? the video is too fast and funky for me, and looks like many steps - how about no music slower and 1 2 3 done? without the signup procedure, just what you get when your onboard. my2c
Good advice on the video! Thanks.
I expected the video explainer to just show how the product works, not the entire sign-up flow (there's a common meme when presenting applications and software, never show the login screen or sing-up flow, people have seen thousands of such flows, no need to see yet one more).
So overall I recommend taking the approach of being there to support and understand your customers 100% to see why the love you and your product. DO NOT try and charge additional money for high touch support - you will benefit more from it at this early stage than your customers will. Later when you have a lot of volume, you can come up with a separate plan. Get your first customers from your personal network - you don't know enough to pour money into paid marketing. You don't even know the right target market yet (I assume).
Learn as much as you can, and build as many 1-1 connections with your actual or potential customers to understand your market and pivot accordingly.
Beyond that - I have some basic stuff for your website that you might want to consider. I don't know your target market but at the very least it will help more quickly show the value of your product. You can then refine later to make it more focused on specific problems that law firms, libraries, students, or whatever it turns out to be have.
Some notes on your website:
1. Change your title from "Tired of reading terribly scanned PDFs?" to "Fix and Transcribe PDFs in Seconds". This will match with your "proof" by showing a demo video that's less than 5s long.
2. Your product is doing a lot of helpful things automatically - but I honestly don't know what they are because they flash as the subheading. Remove this and add as a table on the right 1/2 of the page below the heading.
3. Make your demo video shorter to only show the valuable pieces: show ugly PDF, upload PDF, convert, download PDF, show pretty PDF. Show the user the video before they click on it - or better yet remove the audio and play automatically in the background. Make this the left 1/2 of the page below the heading.
4. Consider shortening time to value when using the product e.g. automatically downloading the fixed PDF after converting so you could make your demo video just "drag PDF into browser, automatically download and open fixed PDF and show I can now copy text".
5. Consider changing the interaction on the before and after comparison to be a mouse over so it is obvious - as otherwise the black arrows on the black text are hard to discern. Or automatically move the slider left and right to make the comparison obvious.
6. Combine your "Features" and Pricing" pages with the home page. Don't make me click to discover the value. Instead of calling this "Awesome Features", try selling the value here. "Transcribes and Fixes 15 Common PDF Problems in Seconds".
7. Put a signup box below at the very bottom of the home page. Rename "My Files" for logged out users to "Sign In" and float to the right on the navigation bar.
8. Reinforce the value you're creating by showing the following on the pricing table: Process 500 PDFs / Month, Instantly transcribe, Fix 15+ common PDF problems, 24/7 Support (you have one customer - you can give world class support here, don't try to segment based on this yet). Reconsider document retention - I don't think anyone will care about this as most people and companies won't use you as a document repo. Just as a utility.
I'm using Google's OCR api on the backend after using my secret sauce to "fix" the scan. I've found it to work better than tesseract, and heard that it's better than azure or aws. Google claims to support a ton of languages. But obviously, quality varies... I can't just copy their claim because it doesn't reflect my experience of reality, so what do I say?
I'm a software engineer at clay.com - our software helps you sell, and specifically run personalized outbound campaigns at scale. I'd love to try and help you and see if there are some learnings in the process.
Feel free to contact me adam@ my_company_domain