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Ask HN: Pivot Or Kill it?

20 points by webstartupper ↗ HN
Hi All,

A few months ago, I created a web application (gisconverter.com) that converts GIS files from one format to another. Initial market research led me to believe that there was a decent sized market for such an app. However, a month through advertising using google adwords shows that there is almost no market for this.

Since the core idea has no market, it makes sense to let this app die. However I am unable to let go and keep trying to find ways to pivot and come up with an alternate idea around this one. I know at some level its hard for me to let go after having invested time into this.

Any ideas on what I should do with this?

Much thanks for your time.

46 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
cperciva
a month through advertising using google adwords shows that there is almost no market for this.

No, it shows that there is no market on Google Adwords. I don't know anything about GIS, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a better way to reach potential customers.

webstartupper
I believe google adwords is the easiest direct way to find out if people are searching for something and are willing to pay for it. I did this by ensuring that the ads stated that the conversion was a paid service. Unfortunately while there were many impressions, the ads generated very few clicks.

Is there any other way to figure out something like this?

swombat
Find real live people who are potential customers and talk to them.

If you don't have access to any potential customers in your network, then you probably should kill the idea or partner with someone who does (but that's kind of difficult if you don't know any such person).

webstartupper
Unfortunately I don't have any potential customers in my network. If I did I would have picked their brain till they pretty much told me what to do :)

This idea was kind of a shot in the dark to start with - so I knew this was a possibility.

michael_dorfman
Well, that's a good lesson for next time: don't even think about writing code until you've got 5 potential users lined up whose brain you can pick.
webstartupper
Thats True.

I am a big fan of Steve Blank's book. However, often in the past I would analyze, research, analyze and then ... nothing. I figured this time I would just get something up there - and then figure out what I'm building along the way.

michael_dorfman
I guess it depends on how you "research/analyze".

I've found that customers are really crappy at telling you what they want, and product suggestions (and feature requests) should be treated with extreme skepticism.

However: they are absolutely brilliant at telling you what their problems are. Behind every feature request/product suggestion is a pain point of some kind; if you can find it, you usually can come up with a solution that is much better than what they would ever propose.

So: find a group of people who have a common problem. Once you do that, you're on your way.

jon_dahl
You'd be surprised how helpful people will be if they don't think you're trying to sell them. Make a list of 10-20 companies that might possibly be users, search for their developers (search Google, look for a blog, look for a Twitter account, search LinkedIn), and get in touch with them. Say something like "Hi [name]. I see you're a developer at [company]. I'm building a service for people working with GIS data, and I'm trying to learn more about the space. Could I pick your brain over phone/Skype [or coffee/beer if they're local]?" You won't get a 100% success rate, but you'll learn a lot from the people who are willing to talk to you.
ekidd
"Find real live people who are potential customers and talk to them."

Yes, do this. Find 10 actual real-world users, and talk to each of them for 30 minutes. If you need some good tips on finding users, convincing them to talk to you, etc., see Steve Blank's "Four Steps to the Epiphany". At the very worst, this will still be less stressful than sales or political canvassing, because you're only asking people for their opinions (which they love to share) and not their money (which they prefer to keep). You'll probably need a list of at least 100 users before you find 10 who will talk to you.

I _guarantee_ this will open your eyes, and save you months of wasted effort. Been there, done that.

michael_dorfman
This.

Who are the people who would benefit from this product? What do you know about them, and how to reach them?

Why not reach out to some of the customers you have now, and learn about what other problems they are facing, so you can build on top of what you're already got?

brudgers
Implementing GIS typically represents a substantial of blood and treasure. Even the most popular packages have been traditionally been sold with B2B technical sales (Google Earth being the exception).

As with any database, the issue of which tools to use revolves largely around trust. Adwords are unlikely to engender that.

Realistically GIS conversion is consulting, not a storefront.

jacquesm
Who would be your paying users? What kind of companies are we talking about? Is there a place where those people congregate on the web?

Adwords is a great way to spend your money, but it is not a guarantee to make any. My own business makes a fair amount, I've tried increasing it using adwords but it was a 100% waste of $, that does not mean the rest of the business is invalid. It just means that adwords and my target market do not overlap significantly.

I went through about $5K (without so much as a single sale!) on adwords before cluing in to that it wasn't the way I was spending money on adwords, it was just that it wasn't going to work at all.

So don't use adwords as the validation of your product, try other avenues to make sales.

revorad
My last company (who did environmental modelling) would have paid for this. We and other people in our work network always needed something like this. I imagine university and government departments, mining companies, environmental consultancies would find this useful.

How did you do your initial market research? Unless this is the only tool you are thinking of selling, I wouldn't give up so easily as GIS is a huge market and the most popular software (ArcGIS and MapInfo) sucks in so many ways.

Have you spent any time on the ESRI forums? You might find some leads there, but more importantly will learn about people's pain points.

webstartupper
I got the initial idea from a customer I was doing some geocoding work for. The initial market research was figuring out if people were searching for such conversions (keyword tool), checking out current competition, reading forums and posts about how converting was a painful activity. I decided to just go for it and get an mvp up and running (I have had paralysis through analysis before).

This is the only GIS tool that I have as of now. I have spent time on the ESRI forums (since the shape file conversion is what most people search for). I probably should not give up on GIS as a market though. Thanks for that.

wlievens
If you're looking for ideas and are into Open Source GIS, I may have a good one. I worked as GIS consultant for abiyt a year and there was one tool missing from the open source ecology that would have made work a LOT smoother. I'm still embarassed I didn't build it at some point, actually. Email me if you're interested and I will elaborate. Not sure there's much money in there though, since it's part of the whole open source thinking, but there's definitely utility in it.
stonemetal
Do you lurk on the ESRI forums or have you been posting. It seems like it would be great marketing to post links to your website when people ask questions about converting, if done in a low key non spammy sort of way.
revorad
Regarding your adwords strategy, you should talk to HN user zackattack. He's really good and recently helped me test some ideas.

Have you thought of making add-on tools for the big GIS software? For example, we used to use this one a lot - http://www.spatialecology.com/htools/tooldesc.php. You could possibly start with selling small scripts which fix problems people mention on the ESRI forums and build up a toolbox over time, which you could then sell as a package.

That way, you have a readymade market.

Earning karma by helping people on forums is probably your equivalent for an SEO strategy here.

EDIT: Oh and $10 is wayyy too low. Don't charger per conversion. If someone needs this tool, they are going to use it a lot, not just once. Charge at least $100 for unlimited conversions. Then charge more when your product is better. Even if your adwords CTR is low, at least make it count.

danielh
Even if you don't want to pursue the idea any further, I would not let the app die, unless it costs you a significant amount of money to run the site. Why not keep it as showcase for WebStartupper?

Two comments on the page itself: $10 seems steep, how did you find that price point? Your layout does not use the available screen space and requires unnecessary scrolling. It also looks broken on the contact page.

webstartupper
Since I have the domain and hosting for a year, I will keep it running. However, if it does not seem worthwhile I would probably not invest any more time in it - eventually it will die (or fade away into the oblivion).

So the way the pricing would have been figured - I started the pricing at $20 when I started advertising. I then reduced it every week by $5 all the way down to $5. At each point I could measure how many people were interested. Eventually this would lead me to a decent starting price. Unfortunately even $5 did not generate enough interest. The $10 on the website right now is just there.... :)

Thanks for the comments - the design definitely needed some work to make it more efficient. I think the contact page has worked fine for me on most browsers.

edw519
Forget the word "pivot". It's too vague to be helpful.

Rather, I would look for another instance of the same class.

You believe that your instance (converting GIS files from Format A to Format B) has no market. That may or may not be true. But I firmly believe that the Class "converting <x> from <y> to <z>" does have many instances with huge potential. There are tons of people and businesses using something that they would prefer was something else. Maybe an older version, format, or implementation. It could be anything. It's up to you to find them and identify what they need.

You already have one instance of "morphing", but it's not quite what you want. Find the right one.

webstartupper
Thanks. That makes sense and was a very interesting way of putting it.
brudgers
Conversion between mainstream file formats is built into many current GIS systems, and it will be hard to beat the software vendors at SHP conversion.

I agree, there is a need for converting to and from unsupported unsupported formats. How that need creates a market would probably be at the level of converting an entire dataset rather than file by file.

GIS conversion tends to be strategic and metadata is the bigger issue. Converting the file is only the first step. All the pain is afterwards.

rtyjhwq34etj
I'm not qualified to answer your main point, but I can tell you that a good next-step for an unsuccessful adwords campaign is to use disqualification marketing - if you haven't already.

In its most common form, it's basically listing, in the ad itself, as many of the things that are stopping people buying as you can. For example, if price was the sticking point, the common approach would be to hide the price while you sell the product so as not to scare people off while you're winning them over. The disqualification marketing technique would be to put that scary price right in the ad text, the idea being that those who click are not going to be scared off by the price, as they already know it.

This can do wonders in effectively multiplying your adwords spending - all those people who were never going to buy at that price stop using up your ad budget, leaving you more ad clicks for those who might buy despite the price.

jaggs
From a quick glance I would think also about changing your pricing structure. $10 a conversion sounds high, a better alternative might be to offer a subscription model with a free trial up front perhaps?

In terms of finding customers I would suggest you forget AdWords (too scattered) and start with direct contact with the major companies in the mapping field. For example, why not drop Ordnance Survey a line and explain about your product and ask if there's any way this could be useful to their users etc?

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gisfiles/

fierarul
I haven't touched GIS stuff in ages but last I worked with maps they were bought by the corporation and not quite cheap from what I've heard.

So I totally don't see somebody uploading the map to your server, not to mention they were rather huge, so not the kind of file you attached to an email.

This really needs to be some desktop tool although I see why you would do it as a website (no piracy).

apowell
Even if your target user thinks your tool is the greatest thing since sliced bread, do they have the authority to get out a company credit card and spend $10 on the spot?

Do people want to use a "beta" product for production work? (I assume very few people do GIS file conversions for fun.)

What happens if a customer gets a slightly different source file and needs to convert it again? Does that cost another $10? Instead of charging per-conversion, what if you offered a thirty-day "all-you-can-convert" plan?

In general, the website doesn't inspire confidence and it certainly isn't optimized for conversion. Payment information is lacking (yes, I see it's buried in your FAQ).

wlievens
> I assume very few people do GIS file conversions for fun

Actually that could surprise you, I know quite a few GIS nerds that would :-)

webstartupper
You are right about the issue with the Beta. That never did cross my mind. I guess "Beta" is the new disclaimer and I got sucked right into it.

I have been thinking about individual users - but the 30 day 'all you can convert' plan might work very well with a company.

wlievens
$10 for an automatic conversion from one file format to another? For something that can be done with a handful of scripts? Or am I not seeing the added value here.
jrockway
This is a startup.
wlievens
... and I'm asking him to explicitly state the value proposition. I'm not trying to insult or antyhing.
jrockway
I was being a little facetious. There are a lot of "startup ideas" that should have been a quick script in the pastebin. Needless to say, they don't get very far, because most people would rather use that quick script they found on pastebin. Because it's free, and easy.
wlievens
For this specific idea, I can imagine there being several items that add value. I just wanted the OP to clarify what he's offering.

For example:

  Queueing multiple conversions as jobs

  Faster processing than you'd do on your crappy box

  Renaming columns with a user-friendly interface

  Solving some of the hassle with character encodings (I've had some trouble with ESRI shapefiles on that front)

  Mapping to a user-defined model (e.g. specified with an XSD)
But the way it looks right now, he doesn't even offer a PostGIS SQL target, which is a real pity.
davidwilson
I work somewhat in the GIS space and I do a lot of conversions using a mix of apps and a few ugly hacks - so this would be immensely useful to me.

However, I guess price is your sticking point, but let me elaborate.

For people that work full time in GIS, many of the conversions you offer can be done with some very standard GIS apps that such full time professionals will likely already own. So in other words, your market is _exactly_ people like me who aren't completely immersed in GIS but make use of some simple mapping and GIS scripting from time to time.

And for people like me, $10 is asking to much - especially when we can piece together a few odds and ends and come up with a little script or an ugly conversion tool that does the job.

So, what is the perfect price point? You'll have to play around, but I guess at least a quarter of that would make it worthwhile. In fact, I would aim for something around the $1 mark - but that's up to you.

I'd suggest taking a look at the ocrterminal.com model. They offer a similar product, with a real easy registration process and a few free conversions each month.

dlib
I have dabbled with GIS files a while back and certainly would've found your website useful but 10 dollars would've been too high a price. It was a hobby project and it took some considerable effort across three different OSes to find the right free software to help me out but ultimately I got the conversion right (map projections were annoying too).

I think there is definitely a market in GIS since the current tools are such a nuisance but the current price is too high for me to experiment with it.

mrtron
I wouldnt give up on adwords yet.

(from your site)

If I want GPX to XLS or SHP to KML..thats what I will search for. I don't see your ad there.

Have volume discounts for someone doing a lot of processing.

joshuacc
It seems likely that you are underestimating the potential market due to the design of your site. A few points:

1. The video walkthrough has no audio, and the notes are too small to read at the video's default size.

2. The upload links on the left aren't obviously links. Someone who is in a hurry could easily overlook them. (And no, they won't read the instructions or watch the video.) I would probably incorporate them into the main content area under a heading like "GIS Converter can convert:"

3. There isn't a straightforward call-to-action on the home page. Even something as simple as a big "Convert My File" button might be helpful.

4. Though the overall appearance isn't that bad, dark sites seem to have a harder time gaining users' trust, especially in business. Changing the color scheme to something lighter would probably help.

webstartupper
I estimated the potential market based on how many people clicked on my ad. There weren't many.

Thanks for the comments. Now I understand why the web has turned white and blue everywhere. :)

themanr
ogr2ogr does all these formats (well CSV but not XLS) and more. Autocad DXF files on the other hand...
thrdOriginal
Is this just a nice GUI for ogr2ogr? I could be wrong (I certainly haven't done the market research) but my gut feeling is that most people who would need this service would also be technically savvy enough to use free tools like FWTools. That said, there could still be a use case (beginners?), in which case you'll have to do a great job in the SEO department. Also, $10/conversion seems very high: a flat monthly fee would be much better.
cousin_it
Exactly what I wanted to say. We use GDAL/OGR many times every day, it's an open source library that can do much more than this "startup". Frank Warmerdam is a hero.

http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html

webstartupper
No. This does not use OGR as the backend.

The idea was to have something out there and then build based on customer feedback.

jon_dahl
I don't know how your software works, so this may or may not be appropriate, but:

Open source the software. Promote it via a technical blog, Hacker News, meetups, and conferences. Become a thought leader in the GIS space. Keep running your service for people who don't want to worry about installing/running the software themselves. "Open Source for free, SaaS for pay" is a very valid business model, especially when selling to developers. Think of companies like Twilio or Sendgrid; I could set up my own Asterisk or SMTP server, or I could pay a low metered fee to have someone take away the headaches for me.

If you don't care enough about GIS to blog and speak about it, close up shop.

webstartupper
"If you don't care enough about GIS to blog and speak about it, close up shop."

I really like this line. Should apply it before I pick another venture.

damoncali
No results from AdWords does not mean there isn't a market. Is nobody clicking or is nobody searching?

Maybe your market is other GIS software vendors, not end users.