Ask HN: One month, zero paying customers – keep it or kill it? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: One month, zero paying customers – keep it or kill it?

2 pointsiGag11 comments

When I created the site scanmypage.com, I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it — especially because of the price: just $1 for a website analysis.

Analytics — Google Search Console — Still struggling to gain good visibility on Google.

I then started paying for Google Ads — Built and optimized what I believe is a solid campaign —

But now a month has passed, and the site still hasn’t generated a single paying customer.

So my question is: What would you do?

Would you keep the site alive and continue improving and marketing it, or would you kill it, accept that the idea isn’t gaining traction, and move on to the next project?

Keep it or kill it?

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If it costs you nothing to maintain, keep it.

But to be honest, it sounds like you haven't found your product-market fit. Couple of questions:

1. Why do you think many business owners would use it?

2. Who is your target audience?

3. What's your advertising campaign targeting?

One reason I ask is that you state "I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it." Consider that the vast majority of business owners outsource their websites to agencies and don't know HTML from a roller coaster, and that might indicate that your ICP (ideal customer profile) might be wrong. And then further consider that agencies have been doing SEO and these other things for a long time, which... might indicate that you're solving a solved problem for your ICP.

That doesn't mean that your business is a bust. But it might mean that your marketing strategy and market positioning might be off. I'd find some local businesses, run some analysis on your own dime, and then go talk to them and see what they say. Chances are they'll just direct you to their web dev agency.

So then you talk to the agency, and... maybe they've already solved it. Or maybe you can get the agency to pay you instead of doing it in-house -- especially if you're doing more than they are for less than they would spend.

This is not an uncommon space to be with new business ideas, so I wouldn't take this as a sign to give up, but rather a sign to dig in and figure out how to pivot to generate real income.

Best of luck!

Why do I think many business owners would use it? Because ScanMyPage offers a fast, affordable AI-powered website analysis for just $1, helping businesses identify SEO, performance, usability, and website issues. Who is my target audience? Small and medium-sized business owners, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and website owners who want to improve their websites without hiring an expensive consultant. What does my advertising campaign focus on? The campaign focuses on people actively looking to check, analyze, audit, or improve their websites, especially SEO and website performance. But you’re right that most business owners let agencies manage their websites. Do you think I should keep paying for Google Ads?

Right. I think you're missing my point a little bit. To put it a little more clearly: if you're marketing and getting zero leads, then you're marketing at the wrong folks.

If business owners outsource their websites to agencies, then they don't care about your service, ergo your premise of "many business owners would use it" is not a statement around which to build a business. In other words, business owners should not be your target audience -- agencies should be.

So if I were in your shoes, I would go talk to some businesses that you think should use this site and ask them straight up if they would use it. And when they inevitably point you to their agency, you should go ask the same question to the agency.

I would not spend more money on ads until you have real user feedback.

I tried your site and here's what I'd do:

- Stop paying for ads immediately.

- Give away full access to other devs to get their opinion

- Dog food. When you run it on its own page, do the results make sense? I did and I believe some don't.

- PDF results are preferred for the devs? Show me a sample.

- What's the most appropriate format for results to feed to my LLM to improve my site? Is the answer PDF?

I'd do some of these and give it another 3 months and then decide.

The PDF is simply there so that you, as a business owner, can send the analysis to whoever manages your website and have them make the necessary improvements. thanks for feedback!

Is there a USP? Lots of sites do this kind of thing. Is yours better? More comprehensive? Why should anyone use it over the alternatives? That tells you your next steps.

Almost everyone wants to lock you into a subscription. But who really wants to subscribe to a service like this? With ScanMyPage, a complete website analysis costs just $1 — no subscription required. Isn’t that a strong selling point? thanks for feedback!

That is a strong selling point! I didn't see it front and center. Maybe I'm not the target market, or maybe the contrast could be highlighted more.

However, beware the strategy of undercutting your competitors, unless you have some way to ramp up the value later. There's a reason they go for subscriptions. Good luck with it!

Nobody wants to pay even $1 so it seems you don't have a business here. I think you would have the same problem finding users even setting the price to zero.

What's your business plan?

Market analysis? Marketing plan?

I'm going to be very direct because I think you are on the right path: I don't think your main problem is the idea or even the pricing. I think the execution is currently killing the product.

I opened the site to try as a user and my experience went kinda like this:

The thing at the top immediately confused me. I couldn't tell what language I was looking at. Then I discovered that the "NO" button somehow switches the site to English. That alone made the product feel amateur. The site have a very strong half-finished vibe-coded feeling. I use AI heavily myself, so I'm not saying "AI = bad." The problem is that your target audience is technical. The people who understand why they would want an audit like this are also exactly the people most likely to think, "I could throw this into Claude/GPT myself." You need the implementation and the resulting analysis to demonstrate why they can't get the same result from a simple prompt.

Right now it does the opposite.

I generated a report. The presentation isn't great, but the bigger issue is that the analysis itself is technically wrong in several places. If you're auditing modern websites, you need a real JS-capable crawler/rendering step, structured extraction, separate analysis for different categories, carefully designed prompts/evaluators for each area, and an architecture that produces deterministic evidence for the claims in the report. A generic "send some HTML to an LLM and ask for an audit" approach isn't enough here.

Another big issue: Because of the vibecoded nature of the website, I assumed the locked parts of the report might simply be visually hidden because of how the rest of the application was implemented. I opened DevTools and, sure enough, the supposedly hidden content was already sent to the browser. Anyone remotely technical can retrieve the paid result without paying. Given your target audience, I suspect a lot of users will notice this.

Basically:

1. The UI makes me question the quality. 2. That makes me inspect the implementation. 3. The implementation confirms my suspicion. 4. That makes me distrust the audit. 5. Reading the audit then gives me technical reasons to distrust the actual product.

And that's a shame, because I actually think the basic idea has potential, the domain is great, and your pricing feels correct too for what you giving;

If I were you, I wouldn't throw the idea away. I'd stop adding features and rebuild the core audit engine until the report is good enough that a technical user reads it and thinks, "Okay, this caught things I wouldn't have caught with a couple of prompts.". Work on your technical skills first, seems like your marketing skills are WAY ahead of your technical skills right now, you should switch focus for a bit.

You're doing the right thing by building things, shipping them, failing, and learning from them. That's how you get better. But for this particular product, your audience has a very high technical bullshit detector, so the quality bar is substantially higher.

Good luck. Keep building.

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