Ask HN: Should I abandon a functioning SaaS with no paying users?
Me: I'm a full-time software consultant (https://benhowdle.im/), Ekko was intended as a side-project to generate passive income, not to be a fully fledged startup from day 1.
My aim was/is to make it incredibly simple for small businesses to create and keep their business website online and updated. The user connects their Facebook Page to my service, picks a theme and their new site is online. Every time they update their FB Page, the website (on my service) is instantly updated. This part is free, as you have a subdomain URL. To add a custom domain, it's a monthly fee.
I launched the SaaS in early 2017 and spent 3 months promoting/pushing it out to my networks online. This led to a lot of positive feedback, but almost zero paying customers (in fact, only 1 person ever paid, then subsequently cancelled their subscription due to budgetary reasons). Since then, I've occasionally tweeted about it, and gone through various phases of motivation to properly push/advertise/market it, but that side of it feels completely unnatural to me, I'm far more happier sitting behind the screen, building the product.
It gathers 1-2 sign ups a week, but zero conversions.
My specific question is, what the heck do I do with it?
In my opinion, it is my most complete piece of software that I've released. Everything works nicely, payment integrations with Stripe and GoCardless, domains through DNSimple, themes are just a set of React Components, so they'd be easy for people to build. It seems a real shame for it to be sat online, doing very little. I really don't want to abandon/take it down, because I spent a lot of time building it.
Should I try and sell it? Should I just give up? Am I missing something blatantly obvious? If anyone's got any advice, broad/specific/big/small, I'm all ears.
If you want to drop me an email, I'm at hello@benhowdle.im
62 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWhen you built this, did you validate the idea at all with people in your own network (or extended network) wether they wanted something like this?
What (in terms of feedback) have you received from people you judge to be your target market?
When you say people don't convert, do you mean they don't even test the product or that they don't convert to a paying subscription?
Having worked in 'websites' for 9+ years, I spotted the pain points people had with various aspects of updating their website - paying an agency thousands to create/update a simple brochureware site, not being able to navigate various CMS's people put in place, etc. I spoke to multiple people in/out of my network and in my opinion, validated the idea.
> What (in terms of feedback) have you received from people you judge to be your target market?
Good question. I've had less feedback from my target market, vs. my network (designers, developers, etc). I think this is where I didn't do particularly well. I validated the idea with the target market, but in terms of ongoing feedback of the product, I didn't acquire that.
> When you say people don't convert, do you mean they don't even test the product or that they don't convert to a paying subscription?
They reach various phases of the sign up process. It goes: Email/password -> Auth with FB -> Pick FB Page. Then you go through to your Dashboard, where you can view your site online, or pick a new theme, etc. People got to various stages of this, with most people going right through to the Dashboard (a created site), but rarely deciding to pay.
I tend to think validation is a terrible word for the stuff we do when building a product. As well as a product needing to offer something of value, it needs to offer that to people who are willing and able to commit money to acquire that value. If businesses are setting up Facebook pages, that puts them in the "free site" category of customer at a first approximation. Your business is actually an upsell, and I think that's tough.
I just noticed you're in the UK. If you're interested in a coffee/chat at some point, hit me up - I think it's a lovely looking thing, but I doubt you'd be able to sell it to someone given that it has demonstrated it doesn't generate traction so far. (I also think you've put too much work into it - but I'm guessing you already know that).
Locate where they gather, and go meet them. Maybe small enterprises, which you could meet during a trade fair?
Which pain are you trying to fix? If it is "just having an online presence", then FB already solve it.
FB is good enough for a lot of people seeking online presence. It's even mandatory for some to be there, regardless than the existence of a real website. So a lot of people make to choice of "just FB" instead of "FB + website" (when "website only" is not seen as an option).
Yeah - quite a lot of small businesses seem to just use FB pages are their 'website'. While I can see this is a clever idea a lot of people might struggle to see why it is worth paying for benefits that might not look that obvious.
I have all the Facebook domains I can find null routed in my hosts file. So I would never see a business site that was hosted on Facebook.
For me the required(?) link to Facebook is already a showstopper. I also don't understand what info is being pulled from there. It's also not clear from the sign up page whether there is a trial.
Considering that the subscription is not exactly cheap I don't think I would sign up.
I don't want to be too harsh. It's just my honest feedback.
Seems to be a good product for a freemium model. It can be beneficial for your career to have something which has success (in the sense that you have a lot of users) instead of focussing to make some money out of it. This can accelerate your career faster than making 200-500 bucks a month through subscriptions.
edit: I would try to sell it for you (I'm buying/selling websites), but I think it could be hard to find a satisfying price point without any revenue proofs.
The main thing I noticed when scrolling through the home page is that fifteen pounds a month seems like quite a lot. I was expecting it to be about a fiver. Given that your target market seems to be people who don't really want to have to bother with a website then it seems quite a high monthly fee.
I think for me, I'm not sure I see the value between this and the FB page itself: if I've got an FB page, I probably want my clients to interact with me there. That's where I am, where I advertise, where I collect likes/etc. This feels like an interstitial between Facebook and my users: granted, it goes on my own domain, but frankly I could just buy a domain and have that forward to my Facebook page.
Your homepage is basically solution-oriented, but not really telling me what problem it solves.
I'm in a position right now where I have a domain, I have a FB business page, and I want to use my domain a little better. I guess I'm your target market but I can't see how you plugging all these things I already have together is worth £14.99 per month.
If I am established business, I have somebody on staff that manages social media accounts, and I have a website.
If I am a small business, I paid X to have a web presence, but they told me I need this social media presence, so I paid Y for Facebook presence (or I manage it myself). Why do I need to duplicate it?
If I am a savvy user, I have a professional site that's different.
If I am a novice user, why do I have to pay to display my pictures again when Facebook does it for free?
I guess, you are trying to earn a living from duplicating content already hosted on a free platform, but I just don't see target user audience that would want that.
Sorry about the negative feedback.
After reading OP's post my first thought was "some of my clients need this!"
Once a website is built and launched, and/or a social media presence is created, the single hardest challenge we have is convincing the business owner and staff to stay engaged.
Connecting Facebook to a website (terrible as it may be) is just another tool for the small business owner who is limited on time (they ALL are!)
My reason why I thought this is that your example links don't work - or at least, didn't work as I expected. I middle clicked them all open and resulted in 3 additional tabs open to your site. It turns out on closer look that they're modal popups rather than links to the examples.
Link to the examples! I'm not going anywhere, you don't need to be that paranoid! :)
If you're not getting people landing on the site at all, then it could be something to do with your pipelines. Are convinced you're in the places where your customers are, do you run ads, or are you just tweeting into the void? Again, these are most likely fixable and may not even require any changes to your site and product.
If you're getting a lot of page views a day, and a good conversion rate to creating an account and playing with the product, then there's some reason they're not becoming a subscriber. This again could be something todo with on-boarding, or with product market fit.
I'm assuming you have some idea as to why this is the case, but if you don't then you really need to find out. This is especially important if you want to sell it and get a good price for it, without knowing that you're selling a mystery product to someone.
Assuming you do have this information, it would be good to know, if you don't know then that should be your next step.
So on and so forth - the money in nearly all business is at the pointy end, that 20% who do 80% of the spending.
The problem is your market. Why sell to people who aren't convinced and can't be bothered? If they really cared about this stuff they'd pony up the cash and get a real website like the other people out there.
If they don't have the cash but still care, the bottom end of the market is Squarespace, Wix and Weebly and all of them require people to invest a fair amount of effort in order to get their site up.
If they don't have cash and don't care, it looks like you'd be the person to go to.
It's hard to imagine this going anywhere, I'm afraid. I'd pull the pin, if I were you.
(- From an experienced web design business owner who also had a Saas-ish model.)
Before giving up I suggest: - tracking your users behaviour (pikwik, google analytics, tamboo, etc.) - experimenting with long term bulk discounts - creating drip marketing campaigns - find 10 niches which heavily use facebook in your area (e.g. bands, djs, wedding photographers, dog trainers, etc.) and consider tailoring your services towards them: create landing pages that appeal to those niches and see which ones stick.
Try to see if the problem is FB itself, maybe other social networks (say, instagram) could work better for some niches which require a picture portfolio, some text content and a contact page.
I think that 1-2 sign-ups a week is too low for you to have enough chances of a conversion, try enlarging the funnel entrance (e.g. by doing in-person marketing, licensing your instant-website tool to small hosting companies you find on lowendbox, etc.) and see if conversion rate changes.
Should you need help w/ the above HMU, email in profile.
Edit to add: Maybe adding some side-by-side examples would help? i.e. where you can see the Facebook page along side the synchronized website.
My costs are a few dollars a month for the 7 sites I've set up, comes with SSL, gzip, etc.
There's a common AWS Service static site pattern that chains together four services: Serverless Computer, Object Storage, CDN, DNS.
In your mind, reframe what you do as a marketing service. Offer vanity email addresses, email marketing services. Add analytic reporting or something. Perhaps a Drift like embedded Facebook Messenger client as your customers already have Facebook?
Good luck!
That’s a hypothesis I don’t think will prove true.
If you don't have customers then it's one of 3 things: 1. Your pricing is wrong. 2. Your value is too low. 3. Your marketing is not working.
I would ask around at https://www.indiehackers.com/ for advice as well.
If all else fails, sell it at flippa.com and try something else.
FWIW your presentation is attractive and the explainer video is a nice touch. I wouldn't give up just yet. Maybe you just haven't found your niche.
1. Drop price from $15 -> $5 per mo. It’s not like you don’t have the margin for it. As a small business owner, I would not consider using this at $15 but at $5 it feels like a no brainer.
2. Start writing relevant blog posts in your niche. “How to integrate Facebook with your website”, “Top 5 small business website services” (name yours as second/third), “Small Business Spolight: Girl who takes pics” (especially good because you can partner with small biz and cross-pollinate your marketing efforts. No biz will turn down a free blog post on them, and you get free content). The trick to building your social community is give others something worthwhile to talk about online, and let your audience fill up your feed.
3. Facebook ads if you aren’t already running them. Even a $100 monthly budget will make a big difference, and I believe even more so because of your direct relation to FB.
What pain does your ideal customer have? Figure this out (most people mistake pain for problem. That’s wrong)
Go make content around this pain. Engage with those who comment. If it makes sense invite them to a call.
Doing this you should close 20% right off the bat. If you hip fire calls you won’t. If you are laser focused on a pain => you will.