Ask HN: One month, zero paying customers – keep it or kill it?
When I created the site scanmypage.com, I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it — especially because of the price: just $1 for a website analysis.
Analytics — Google Search Console — Still struggling to gain good visibility on Google.
I then started paying for Google Ads — Built and optimized what I believe is a solid campaign —
But now a month has passed, and the site still hasn’t generated a single paying customer.
So my question is: What would you do?
Would you keep the site alive and continue improving and marketing it, or would you kill it, accept that the idea isn’t gaining traction, and move on to the next project?
Keep it or kill it?
6 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] thread- Stop paying for ads immediately.
- Give away full access to other devs to get their opinion
- Dog food. When you run it on its own page, do the results make sense? I did and I believe some don't.
- PDF results are preferred for the devs? Show me a sample.
- What's the most appropriate format for results to feed to my LLM to improve my site? Is the answer PDF?
I'd do some of these and give it another 3 months and then decide.
But to be honest, it sounds like you haven't found your product-market fit. Couple of questions:
1. Why do you think many business owners would use it?
2. Who is your target audience?
3. What's your advertising campaign targeting?
One reason I ask is that you state "I genuinely believed that many business owners would use it." Consider that the vast majority of business owners outsource their websites to agencies and don't know HTML from a roller coaster, and that might indicate that your ICP (ideal customer profile) might be wrong. And then further consider that agencies have been doing SEO and these other things for a long time, which... might indicate that you're solving a solved problem for your ICP.
That doesn't mean that your business is a bust. But it might mean that your marketing strategy and market positioning might be off. I'd find some local businesses, run some analysis on your own dime, and then go talk to them and see what they say. Chances are they'll just direct you to their web dev agency.
So then you talk to the agency, and... maybe they've already solved it. Or maybe you can get the agency to pay you instead of doing it in-house -- especially if you're doing more than they are for less than they would spend.
This is not an uncommon space to be with new business ideas, so I wouldn't take this as a sign to give up, but rather a sign to dig in and figure out how to pivot to generate real income.
Best of luck!
Market analysis? Marketing plan?