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Ask HN: How can I save my failing product?

7 pointsreallycurious12 comments

Background: My product extracts data from pdf files. Free users get 8 free jobs. Paying users get 40 jobs. Each job is a data extraction from a pdf file.

Problem: User engagement terminates after they run into a bad extraction. On some pdf files it just doesn't work, it returns empty data. Most times it extracts data but not exactly to what the user had in mind (duplicate, mismatching column, unwanted data). Right after this happens, the user will either try a few more times with other pdf files or just give up and never return again. To fix the cases where it returns empty data, it takes me at least 10 hours.

Concern: I can't support myself to work on such fixes and I can't see the number of bad data extraction that needs to be fix decreasing for each user. It's very tough problem to extract data from pdf files, it's never perfect but I was hoping it was good enough for some users. Even a paying user with their number of fix requests, I would have a hard time getting to them all. The bigger problem is that I priced is cheap so I would get more users, turns out this would lead to a far greater number of problems being encountered with the data extraction process.

Search for solution: My immediate thought is to ditch the free plan, increase the product price and somehow deal with the number of fixes being requested and barely breakeven.

I don't know if anyone's been in this situation, it almost seems like the end user cares about the result of the data extraction unlike say a bookkeeping web application that has a much narrow scope of problems expected. Like if a pdf doesn't extract correctly, it's of no value to the user so they will want this to be fixed right? And as they keep encountering more and more fixes I won't be able to keep up....I'm really about call it quits I've worked long and hard on this project and I don't think I can go on.

The way I am reading this, even if you went paid you'd barely cover your costs (given how time consuming it is for you to bug fix). Plus without the free "trial" you'd struggle to attract paid customers, but while the paid "trial" exists people can just re-register to get all their files or otherwise only needed one page anyway so won't pay.

So my question is this: How much does running the service cost? If it is fairly inexpensive to run you could go a mixed "ad supported" and freemium model, with zero more bug fixes. Just sell what you have.

Instead of selling PDF conversion you sell convenience. You give your paid users an identical product but allow them to queue up dozens, even hundreds, of files via some basic desktop program maybe. Alternatively auto-magical conversion via email (PDF comes in, plain text goes out). Plus turn off ads (e.g. make free users wait 20 sec on an ad page).

The vast majority of your revenue would come from adverts, and while it might never be a screaming success, it might at least make a little profit year upon year and eventually pay for the effort you put into it.

But if it is expensive to run as is then I have nothing. You'll just have to try to make the paid model work.

Running the service costs $100 / month. But me having to work on it full time for free.

Successful number of jobs is around 70~80%. sometimes bad extraction is also caused by the user labeling things incorrectly.

Say my hourly rate is $30/hr, I end up spending 10 hours, $300, fixing one user's bad extraction. My hope is that this fix will transfer to other user's encountering similar bad extractions. The smallest plan earns $30/month. From this pattern I can see that what the average user pays won't cover my time spent on fixing bugs with the extraction system or maybe this is an early assumption? Also about 10% of bad extractions are simply impossible to do with just software alone, it really requires human to intervene and do it manually (something I can't do because it takes so long).

I would try to cross sell on the bad PDFs. Ask the user if conversion went well; if they say so, direct them to Fiverr with an affiliate link.

Thank you, I will try it, such a good idea, like the manual conversion idea from above.

We regularly perform PDF extractions at my startup. For each new client, we'll run batches of several thousand at a time.

A more attractive monetization model for a customer like us would be $0.01-0.03/conversion ($100-$300 per 10,000). A low per-conversion cost would easily allow us to test for a given group of PDFs if the conversion service was a good candidate for that batch, and if not, chose an alternative up-front (but allow us to test again the next batch easily at low cost). Also with a low start-up cost, its much easier to tell customers you won't make any specific fixes (take it or leave it, and test it first). Then you'd have the flexibility to work on broad classes of problems/improvements more at your leisure.

Ditch the free plan and make it a subscription service. Make it clear that some data can't be automatically extracted, and charge a per-page premium for manual extraction. If you don't want to do that work yourself, farm those jobs out to people on mechanical turk.

It costs $30/month for about 40 conversions. I didn't indicate that some data can't be extracted. I will add that warning in the dashboard.

The manual labor is interesting but it will cost far more than $30/month for the user, so I'm guessing that's a potential upsell?

Sounds like a fairly niche product. Have you given any thought to that aspect? I've build a few too many products that are too niche. When eventually I woke up to that I just abandoned the projects. What's the point of building something for a handful of people.

I always thought that it was more generic tool since it's made for people who wants a tool to extract data from pdf files. But maybe that itself ends up being a niche.

Warning: I really don't know what I'm talking about.

I'd switch to having paid jobs only, but offer a money-back guarantee. Any users that take advantage of this offer too much could be turned away.

Who are your current users? If they are from a certain industry (real estate maybe) then try to target them and monetize off of that market.

Current user base is widely distributed there's no strong user base from one industry although real estate is a possibility. Selling to that niche means I would need to create a separate marketing page and maybe even modify the software to their needs?

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