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I think I owe my paying customers some obligation to keep providing good service, prison or otherwise.

No, but he's no longer with the startup.

1) Nope. I wasn't allowed bail previously, so I was kept in prison for 1 week. I know how it works there. No internet, and phone is very expensive and limited to 10 minutes a week and for only 5 preset numbers.

2) Definitely considered that, and it doesn't even have to be 20 years for me to consider that. 2 years is long enough for me.

3) I'm sorry, do you have the link?

I have a decent lawyer. It isn't hard to keep alive; heck, I've been running it pretty half-assed for the past almost 2 years. Still, I cannot abandon it totally.

Also, I don't think it makes enough revenue to warrant hiring anyone to take care of it, I think. I'd make a loss. And since familiarising with the current code base etc. may require a lot of effort, way more effort than anyone would care to dedicate, unless they're paid a lot to get familiar with it.

My startup is http://www.zuupy.com.

I really want to keep the startup, because it's my main source of income that pays my rent, food, entertainment, transportation, etc. It's also my first startup -- it has great sentimental value.

And then?

My passport was impounded, unfortunately.

My story is actually well-documented in the local media, and, although there are segments of supporters, these count for nothing in a Muslim country. Thanks for the idea though.

No, that's click fraud, which could cause the very publisher you want to thank to have his/her ad account blocked.

A quote from JangoSteve that really resonates with me: "There are ways your users tell you your product is too cheap, without actually having to tell you. One good indicator is when you have a lot of people signing up, and then not using it, in which case your product is so underpriced that it attracts indifference."

Our product attracts a lot of indifference. This is good in the short-term (free money), but ultimately we don't get to provide the value we want to provide, garner feedback from their regular usage, and they also eventually cancel and not even switch to a competitor.

The nature of our industry (our customers' industry, to be precise) is that you need to have fresh products/offerings up every other day or so. So the process of adding content is time-consuming. But the same can be said for our competitors. This is one aspect that is very difficult to abstract away.

We have tried: letting them create copies of content, letting them create drafts, and also letting them appoint other users to create content on their behalf.

Unfortunately, it is possible that both the questions you posed are answered in the positive. We are grandfathering existing customers, so hopefully if we ever hit a brick wall with new customers, we can just rely on existing income from existing customers for the time being.

But we really want to take a bite at the enterprise/corporate segment, since we believe that what we have is even better than what our premium competitors offer. We have a couple of those now paying a lot of money but are succeeding in making profits, perhaps because their higher fees make them treat their business more seriously.

Hello Patrick,

Our landing page is actually converting pretty well, at >5% conversion rate (visit-to-trial signup). The problem is that I'm not sure if the right people are converting. We have no indication on the quality of those signups.

If you are willing to help me out, I'll send you an email with my website, so that you can give quick thoughts. I would say the things you pointed out are generally fulfilled, but I may be wrong and biased too.

Talking to them, I realise that a lot of it is just, "Wow, it's taking up much more time and money than I expected." While we can abstract away some of this time and money investment through better features and better UI/UX, a lot of them are just gunning for building a passive income engine without even investing much money and time in the initial stages. They are the classic get-rich-quick-passive-income-work-from-home crowd, if you will.

Certainly, there are many aspects of our SaaS platform that can be improved, but we have been constantly learning from our customers who are still continuing their subscriptions with us. So hopefully we are indeed improving our platform over time and tackling some core problems (sample bias, of course, but better than nothing).

P.S. Out of 39 people whom we surveyed over a few months (mostly people who continue to upgrade after the trial), 26 said that they will be "very disappointed" if they could not use our platform again, so hopefully this says something about our product/market fit.