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Ask HN: 150+ signups, 0 paid ones – should I move on or keep building?

1 points by hammadn ↗ HN
Hey there,

I recently launched Conntent (https://conntent.xyz) on Product Hunt. It's a simple tool that lets you generate content for various social media platforms from any online article using just its link.

Over 150 users signed up, but nobody ended up paying. I got some good feedback though. Now, I am in this dilemma whether I should iterate upon the feedback and improve the product or move on to the next one.

Let me know your thoughts, please!

11 comments

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akerl_
What's the pitch for this service? Why would I use it?
hammadn
It's a simple tool that lets users generate content for various social media platforms from any online article using just its link.
akerl_
Yea, but why. Who is your user, and why is that something they want?

Is it businesses? Is it individuals posting for their friends?

hammadn
I run a STEM page on LinkedIn & X. I have to post something STEM-related daily on them for which I search Google News for an article, open it, copy its content, and then ask ChatGPT to write an engaging LinkedIn post or Tweet for me out of it.

So I made a tool to make this task a bit simpler. I used conntent to generate my weekly newsletter yesterday. You can read it here: https://stemble.substack.com/p/indian-astronauts-embark-on-a...

To answer your question, people like me are the users.

akerl_
This just sounds like blogspam to me. Why not just share the link and let it speak for itself, if you're not actually putting any original thought into what you're saying about it?

But going back to the question in your post, I suspect the reason you aren't getting paying customers is that people/companies who are reposting content across social media already have established patterns to do it and there's not a value add of switching that to your service.

hammadn
Right. This could be a reason! What do you think I should do?
adastra22
Honest feedback: that url (not the website content, the domain name) looks like a scam and not something I’d trust with my payment data. Buy a real domain.
hammadn
cries in lack of capital
jruohonen
What's the demand and the competition? I'd reckon that people can generate garbage ("content") easily enough on their own with LLMs.

As for AI startups generally: please get rid of Google/Facebook/etc. login mandates, and, preferably, get rid of mandatory registrations altogether for demo purposes. I don't know whether there are any reliable statistics on this matter, but I'd argue that the presumed retention due to mandating registrations may prevent a larger user base from emerging.

hammadn
Conntent reduces a step or two in generating content. I felt a need for this product for myself so I made it.
WheelsAtLarge
Fail fast is good advice but not if you don't understand why you failed. Try to get information from your current users on why they aren't willing to pay for your service. Cycle on that and update your product to get a better understanding of what you need to produce as a product that people are willing to pay for. If you can learn from every effort then you can eventually get a winning product.

Also, understand that a product is not a business. A business is the supporting organization that produces the product. Get that going before you move on to something else.