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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure of what "Iron Conversions" is going to be, but it'll be depressing if this is another story of someone trying to build a product, and then failing, and then building a meta-product around building products and trying to sell that to people on HN who are still trying to build products. There seems to be a huge influx of things like this: books on how to sell books or build apps after their "real book" or "real app" failed to sell, sites for vetting ideas built by people whose "real idea" was bad, customer development tools for people who failed to do good customer development with their "real idea". I enjoy patio11's posts and talks immensely, but even he admits that most of his income is now from the product of teaching others how to build products, not building products himself. Necessity is the mother of invention, but the meta-product trend is getting tiresome. It kind of feels like an intellectual ponzi scheme at some point.

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Well I mean, if your first app was an attempt to scratch your own itch, and if your first app fails, then your itch becomes how to build something that doesn't fail. It's only natural that you'd scratch that itch by jumping up one level of abstraction.

As someone developing a "customer development tool" (http://www.petriapp.com/) I'm confused why you would label this "meta"? I (for one) am not building it because I failed to do customer development in the past. I'm building it because I want to do much more of it, and there are large parts of the process that are tedious, time-consuming, and easily automated. Even more time-consuming is the process of educating and coaching others, which freelancers and consulting shops frequently end up doing.

Whenever someone can take one of these pieces of the start-up/product puzzle and simplify it with a tool or a pre-packaged or curated resource, that's a good thing. If it provides value, the rest of us can pay for it and re-invest the time we've saved doing "higher-level" (e.g. more domain-specific) work. If it doesn't provide value, we'll stop buying it.

I consider tools/books made explicitly to help with selling, marketing, or coming up with ideas for software products as per the startup-trend of the Lean Startup, etc, as meta-products. This isn't a bad qualifier on its own, mind you, it just means that its a tool to help sell products/bootstrap startups/etc.

I'm not willing to single out specific products (like yours) and criticize/praise them since that is getting into the weeds, I'm just pointing to the larger trend of tons of HN posts where the author tells a story about their failed startup and then you realize, no, they are not just telling a story and sharing their lessons, they are pitching you to buy their (unproven) product so you, humble entrepreneur, can avoid the same tragedy they did.

If something doesn't provide value and people stop buying it, that doesn't mean the (hypothetical) snake oil salesman doesn't make off with a mint before people realize the fact that it's smoke and mirrors and didn't provide any actual value. It doesn't even have to be malicious, it could just be someone making promises they end up being unable to keep and people giving them money in the hopes of those problems being solved. Everyone has the urge to try something for a few months to see if it works if they are struggling. Why should I trust any fresh-on-the-scene meta-product with even my time (nevermind my money) other than the ones that come from a credible source: someone who built and used it to launch a separate non-meta product.

(The problem, of course, is if someone really has a compelling solution to a problem that provides a competitive advantage, they are disincentivized from selling it!)

The name "Iron Conversions" sounds like some type of service to boost your user conversion. When seeking advice/services for converting users, I'm not sure I would look to the person who just blogged about failing to convert users. Maybe I'm wrong.

You're somewhat correct, I'm building Iron Conversions as a way to boost my trial-to-paid conversion rate for Rakasheets.

Without going into too much detail (I'm not 100% sure this is what I want it to do or how I want to word it) I'm building the tool to respond to Stripe webhooks[1] and other subscription events with dynamic[2] emails.

The goal is to prod my trial users into using the app more, or at the very least telling me why they won't use the app.

This is a problem for me because as it stands my trial users don't even use the app. They'll create an account and then just disappear, never to log in again.

"When seeking advice/services for converting users, I'm not sure I would look to the person who just blogged about failing to convert users. Maybe I'm wrong."

Perhaps because I've failed miserably at converting users, I know exactly what doesn't work (insert winky face here). That's up to you to decide. Of course, I'll be blogging about all of the progress I make with Rakasheets on the Iron Conversions website, follow along if you like.

I'll be honest, yes I plan to sell this service if it works. However, using it to get more conversions out of my trial users on Rakasheets is the main goal here. If IC is popular, then it's popular. If it's the stupidest tool in the world, it still serves my purpose.

(1) Can't I just make Rakasheets respond to my webhooks? Yes, it already does. The problem is I find it a hassle to have to open up my IDE, write a bunch of logic for this or that situation or webhook, and then add in the email html/copy on top of that.

Finally, when that's done I need to test all of the changes and push them to the server. It's a hassle I don't like to mess around with, and severely impacts my testing of these "dunning" emails to the point that I don't even test them anymore.

If you don't have these concerns, more power to you. It's just an itch I want to scratch for myself.

(2) Iron Conversions will query Rakasheets for that user's inventory data. For example, an email will be sent saying "Hey you're tracking 1500 foozles in Rakasheets, if your trial ends now you'll never see those foozles again". That's an exaggeration, but it gets the point across.

Chris Dixon (and I'm sure many others) talked about it: http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...

I'm talking about very specific types of "pickaxes" that make me cynically feel like there is no "there there." Instead of selling a book on something, sell a book on selling books. Instead of executing on an idea, sell a app that lets people talk about ideas others can execute on. Instead of going out there and doing the hard work of customer development, build a tool whose sales pitch is that it will do customer development for you. I mean, it's really no different than when you see "How to get rich" books in the book store: the way to get rich is to sell books telling people how to get rich.

I get scratching itches and selling those tools you create in the process, but there's just something that seems off about these products that are clearly pitched by failed entrepreneurs to the HN crowd of struggling entrepreneurs and conceived as an after-thought from a failed "real" product. (As a counterexample, 37signals' books etc on building things, are byproducts of building real, successful products, not their main focus of effort in-and-of-themselves.) If you have some tool you built that provided real leverage when building another "real" product, by all means, you should sell that sucker since it's validated as providing real value. But if you had no luck launching a real product and are building some tool that potentially could have helped you if you went back in time, it sounds like you are copping out of the struggle of finding product-market fit and trying to pitch to people going through similar struggles that there is a "quick fix."

There's a grey area here but basically it's the pornographic definition to me for what constitutes ponzi-products: I know it when I see it. Some people are selling actual useful pickaxes, which is great, but others might be just selling fictional treasure maps and Gold Rush 2013 t-shirts.

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