HN Explorer

Ask HN: Scratched my own itch. Is one week too soon to pivot?

8 points by chrisdew ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I've written a bit of software that I needed. I have packaged it and attempted to market it. http://www.virtsync.com

With a few hundred dollars spent on LinkedIn and Google Adwords, there have still been no downloads of the evaluation version.

Is the site broken, or did I just have a unique need? (I would have happily spent the $49 that I'm charging, if the software had already existed.)

Is there a way to turn this software into a profitable service, perhaps like rsync.net? Or should I just forget it and get on with the next project?

Any comments on the site, software or future direction would be very welcome.

Thanks,

Chris.

17 comments

[ 47.1 ms ] story [ 455 ms ] thread
GuiA
Random idea: but if your service is so good but addressed to technical people, why not put it out for free (or even open source it) and offer paid support?
chrisdew
Thanks, do you think the price is a problem? Is everyone conditioned to not realise that $10/mo for ever is more than $50 one-off.

Yes, sysadmins are the target market.

jgrahamc
I think $49 per machine is a lot. But the software interests me. The one thing I'd like to see is a speed comparison between rsync and this product. Also, is the underlying technology something that could be licensed?

For example, at CloudFlare we are generating 20GB of log files per minute and we need to move these around. Finding a fast way to do that is important. Clearly, CloudFlare could pay $49 per machine without a problem.

t0
Split test and try some new pricing models. This seems like something that should have the core free, with paid upgrades and paid support for large clients.
kintamanimatt
You've conducted a single experiment and found out that the LinkedIn and AdWords adverts you ran put nobody in your funnel. This is useful data. Come up with some more ideas for experiments to run and run those. Pivoting after a single marketing experiment though? Too soon.
MDib
Pick up a phone and call 50 offices, push through to SysAdmin. Happy to break down why, but for now, try this.

Alternatively, but more difficult, track down some local IT integration specialists, resell through them.

All it costs is your time and possibly phone bills.

powatom
$49 per machine is a pretty high cost, particularly for something which is new and untested.

I'm no expert, but my gut feeling is that for this kind of tool - you need to offer a more 'enterprisey' offering. The way budgets for the kind of places that this tool would be useful are allocated, $49 for a single utility for every machine it might need to be run on is something that sysadmins might have difficulty explaining.

Bear in mind that the idea of syncing is not novel, and most sysadmins have built their servers around the current tools and constraints available. They are likely to look at your utility and think 'that's cool, but it's not worth the cost: what I have now works even if it takes longer, and I'm not paying anything for it'.

If you asked me to pay $49 for a faster version of rsync, which I then had to incorporate into my tool-chain, I'd probably just forget it. The cost of changing to a new utility is more than just the cost of the utility itself.

chrisdew
Interesting thoughts. Perhaps I should change the interface so that it is drop in replacement for scp?
powatom
Sounds like a good idea to me - if users can try it out simply by installing it and either aliasing scp or modifying their scripts very quickly, then I'm sure more would be willing to try it out in a real-world scenario.
afics
Doesn't this do the same as $ rsync --inplace?
chrisdew
No, virtsync creates sparse files

The difference is important when you have many 50GB VM disk images with just 2-3GB occupied (as I have).

Rsync doesn't support --sparse --inplace.

Also the virtsync command line is more similar to scp than rsync. No need for any configuration files - it uses ssh as its transport.

caw
I think one of the problems I'm having is figuring out where the product would fit in my workflow.

Are you looking for people with dedicated backup and recovery?

Are you looking for people without BaR but uses a lot of VMs?

Should I backup anything with this, or just my VMs and DBs? If so, how does it compare to [existing VM or DB backup system]

How does it compare to using rsync with hpn-ssh? Using hpn-ssh significantly improves rsync speeds, though I don't know how it works with sparse files since I use dedicated SAN backups for my VMs.

binarysoul
It seems to me that being "way faster than rsync" is not worth $49. Also there is no comparison / explanation on the site of how it is faster than rsync.
bjourne
Why not market a Windows version? As a Linux user, I'm accustomed to getting stuff for free. rsync also isn't as ubiquitous there so you don't have to complete with a free offering.
orangethirty
You only pivot when your tests point to it. Go test and make an educated decision.