Ask HN: Do you struggle with getting more customers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you struggle with getting more customers?

6 pointsizzyfoshizzy8 comments

I’m not looking for advice or tactics and tips. There’s plenty of that online and more than enough people telling me what to do. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work, no matter how awesome your advice is. Getting customers is hard.

Do you or have you struggled with this? I figured all the founders on here would relate and thought it'd be helpful to have a thread where people can just share their struggles instead of being bombarded with all sorts of advice. I'll start:

I started my own online business with much hoopla and announced it to everyone. Big mistake. Now that I’m struggling to get customers, everyone is coming out of the woodwork to tell me what to do and telling me not to quit. Ironically, their support now makes me feel like more of a failure. If I stop now, it’s like I’m letting everyone down. If I don’t, I may just be digging a deeper hole. I feel like I’ve tried everything, I invested my time and money, but it’s just not working out.

TL;DR - Instead of asking for advice on how to get customers (there's plenty of that elsewhere), join this thread to share and vent about how difficult it is to actually find new customers.

We tried to get feedback prior to release. We put up a website and tried to get some postgres people to engauge. We were lucky, when no one was interested we were able to pull down the website and no one was harmed.

We use our product internally for a few customers so no harm done that no one was interested but, to be honest, it stung a bit.

I think it probably would be easier to build for consumers or businesses. Our product was a developer tool so we knew our chances were slim. We actually got only two email addresses and when we tried to reply to one we never heard back. A couple days later we pulled the site and went back to the drawing board.

We now have a plan to go B2B with a product and we have a first client so we're moving forward. I thought it would be tough to get the team to change focus but its actually been energizing.

I was also afraid we'd have more than one idea with the team split as to what to do.

It sounds like you knew your chances were slim but it still stung a bit? Why? I'd think if you braced yourself for that it wouldn't be as painful.

That's awesome that you were able to get the team to move forward and focus on the new product. Is there any fear or struggle with getting customers for that one?

Its one thing for me to fail, its completely another thing for my two sons to not get the recognition our customers and I know they deserve.

RE: getting customers for the next product. Again, we're building for a specific client so the bills will be paid. If it fails to generate interest to people beyond that we'll live. But we have a lot less anxiety over that since a straight B2B product is a lot easier crowd to sell to than your peers.

Getting customers directly is actually not the problem. The usual marketing and growth hacking tools worked quite well. Our problem is getting partners that refer customers. I don't mean affiliate partners but real partners that include our service into their service as a complement product. Potential partners happily include Google Maps and phone call back forms but shy away from using our service, even though it would make them money and could be really useful for their customers. The opportunities are there. We've spoken to a couple of promising partners but they a dragging their feet. If they would at least provide some feedback as to why they balk at using our service, that would be great. But that is apparently too much to ask for.

I struggle with it too. Sometimes there's loads of work then sometimes none. There's plans to start that never materialise. They always think you're too expensive. And they're always SO persnickety with their damn PSD layouts!

I've heard the "you're too expensive" too many times. How do you handle that? It's actually made me second guess myself and my rates in the past.

I refuse to talk cost until they have a way to judge value. For example, i might turn a spreadsheet into a program. It won't have everything but they'll be able to see something. Then I can say, OK, this is what I did, this is working, this isn't, and it took me X hours. Now I can tell them my rate and they can judge value. I've never failed to get a client once I was able to get them to that point.

Usually explaining that paying me £x per day works out the same or just a little more than the equivalent salary for a full time developer, works ok. If they still complain after that then I usually don't take them on unless I'm desperate and give them a rates cut.

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