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Ask HN: When to give up?

17 points by ds_ ↗ HN
I recently launched my first SaaS.

I have received positive feedback from one or two people but I don't really know if it solves a problem that people are willing to pay for.

To what lengths should one go to validate an idea? At what point would you give up and accept that noone is interested?

EDIT: It's http://crawlspa.com.

55 comments

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arielpts
Please, send us the URL.
ds_
It's http://crawlspa.com.

I'm interested if anyone has any rules of thumb along the lines of "well, I didn't get a), b) or c), so I'm not going to invest any more time in this".

gizmo
The fonts on that page are nearly unreadable on Chrome for Windows.
esw
Ditto on Firefox for Windows.
ds_
Apologies, I wanted to validate the idea before I invested much more. I will surely improve the design moving forwards.
izolate
Please, for the love of all things readable:

    body { font-weight: 300; }
ds_
Updated, thanks.
kayhi
The $3.99 price seems off due to the 99 cent add on, just make it a round number.

I would also add information about what problem this solves and how it saves time.

ds_
So you would prefer a round $4? I didn't concentrate much on the problem it solves and how it saves time, partly because I thought that if you don't know the problem, you're not the target market. I'm starting to reconsider that logic.
_nate_
I'm not sure why I would pay for this? Couldn't I implement something like this on my own? I'm assuming if I’m competent enough to build a quality single-page app, I could manage the redirects on my own.

Either way, the decision to give up has a natural way of finding itself at the point where opportunity costs are greater than the current work being done. Meaning, it’s probably a path you have to find on your own.

ds_
Yes, if you are competent to build a quality single-page app you are more than likely competent to set something like this up yourself. I was trying to offer it at a price point where it just wouldn't be worth the trouble and to add more and more metrics as I go along.
tixocloud
Here's my 2 cents and some thought questions that will hopefully help you find your way: You've received positive feedback from several people but are they your target market? Will they be the ones paying? It's also important to think about what value you're bringing to the table.

If you're targeting single-page apps, you'll have to seek those customers out. If you're targeting websites who want to get indexed on Google, SEO-related, etc, then your customer base will be bigger. Seek them out.

As a previous poster had already mentioned, if I'm competent enough to build a single-page app, I could easily manage my own redirects. Unless I have more than 100 single-page apps, then I might see value in your service.

Communicate what your value is to me and how you're saving/giving me money/time/something by taking money away from myself.

ds_
The feedback I got was mostly from other developers (perhaps not my target market). They actually suggested I target wordpress theme-makers and the like, potentially it could be marketed next to ajax-heavy themes for non-technical people.
Sakes
Given the way one sets this up, I'd definitely say your target is developers. You can't use this if you are not technical.

More specifically though, your target is developers who are not familiar with seo, or developers who would like a quick solution for seo until they have time to address it in more detail later.

3.99 is a weird number for me. Just throws me off. I'd raise it to 4.99 or drop it to 1.99. Actually, just raise it to 4.99. If I'd pay 2, I'd pay 5.

Also, a case study would be a good idea, showing a specific example of how crawlspa has aided in indexing your single page site.

I really like the idea, have no use for it myself though.

ds_
> developers who would like a quick solution for seo until they have time to address it in more detail later"

Makes sense. I'd hope that the price is low enough that they decide it's not worth ever having their own setup.

> 3.99 is a weird number for me. Just throws me off. I'd raise it to 4.99

Thanks, advice taken. To any late-comers, please contact me by email if you're interested in a subscription at the previous price :)

marcomassaro
I'd say you definitely need a stronger value proposition. I have no idea why I would need this for my app.

Communicate to visitors how it will help their website (e.g. increased ranking, indexing, etc.)

ds_
Thanks, will try to make it clearer.

I think the value proposition is this:

1) You can configure it in minutes, whereas it may take a competent developer several hours to set this up on your own servers (possibly $100s in wages = several years subscription).

2) One less worry.

3) If your servers are bogged down, google still gets served the pages quickly (point 2).

4) Bonus metrics.

marcomassaro
But what does it do? #2 and #4 don't tell me anything.

You have to solve a customers pain point. What is the problem you're solving?

ds_
2 is just a generalization of 1 and 3. To expand on 4, currently I display how many crawler requests were made and the average response time. If I were to further invest, I'd split these metrics by path requested and have it available over any time interval.

Do you have any ideas on what other pain points I could solve with this idea?

marcomassaro
But what does it do. Those are features..what is the end benefit a person gets from using your service?
ds_
Understood - so I should clearly state that crawlers can't usually see AJAX content and that this will allow them to see and index it, leading to more search engine traffic. I was cautious of spelling out the obvious, I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence :D
marcomassaro
There we go! Its not an insult..some hackers might not even know enough about SEO to understand your service..and even so, I don't think your market is just hackers. I'm a designer and am planning to build a SPA so I'd probably refer one of my developers to your service.
resu
Will my site not be penalized if the crawler thinks everything on it points to crawlspa.com?
ds_
It shouldn't, because the crawler should only see your server (your server stands in front of crawlspa as a proxy). If you don't have access to your server config and redirect in the code, then it's possible.
srgseg
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941, Harrow School

Sakes
This quote is correct but only with the proper perspective.

Consider your goal to be starting a business, and this first SaaS is your starting strategy. Switching strategies (killing this first attempt) is very different from giving in or quitting on your goal.

So please, by all means, don't give up! But definitely consider switching direction.

marcomassaro
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.."

- Thomas Edison

avenger123
That quote is only relevant when you look at it in the context of never, never, never, never give up on your entrepreneurial dream.

Trying something and seeing that their is no market for it or its just not working and continuing to work on it, is not the intent of that quote.

It's hard to know when you should quit and try another idea. But, quitting opens the runaway for the next better venture.

Also, each "failure" is a stepping stone to gaining the skills to make the next attempt easier.

If you look at any major founder they have had a history of starting small companies or failing a couple of times until they found the right business. They had the good sense to move on from their failures but they didn't quit.

At the end of the day its about maximizing your bandwidth. For someone with limited time due to family and kids, the bandwidth is just not there. So writing a book, maybe focusing on iOS apps, etc. might be the better approach or finding a niche that can accommodate a slow ramp up time would be the best.

I would love to know about others who have gone the iOS route. I'm thinking about focusing the next while on gaining iOS skills to develop Apps. The strategy would be to develop some niche apps and see where it goes. Even if it turns into passive income and I've gained new skillset, it might still be win/win.

Sakes
My elevator pitch for crawlspa.

"Worry about optimizing your site for search engines later. Use crawlspa to automate search engine indexing and focus on what matters, creating beautiful sites that convert visitors into customers."

Crawlspa Tag Line: We index & you convert.

Edit: One more thing, have you considered manually approaching custom web shops? If they are pumping out sites, they probably wouldn't mind passing along the $5 a month to customers in order for them to not worry about indexing the trendy single page sites.

ds_
Thanks, that's great.

And yes, I have considered it. Actually, I've had that suggested before - a number of developers have said they would have liked it for their last client.

gildas
Does crawlspa really crawl sites? Or is it just yet another "prerender-like" SaaS? Why should someone use your service instead of existing ones? What is your added-value compared for example to seo4ajax.com?
ds_
It doesnt crawl (although I will offer this soon) but it doesnt require entering any domains or sitemaps like the other options (easier to configure). You just submit your top level domain and let google do the crawling.
gildas
FYI, seo4ajax.com doesn't need any sitemap (but it generates it) and is very easy to configure. Actually, I still don't see where your service is better currently...
ds_
The crawler is a bit hands on. Crawlspa refreshes the cache in the background after each request. For sites with frequently updated content, having to recrawl may become a headache.
gildas
The crawler is just mandatory if you don't want to penalize the site with long response times or to prevent serving 5xx pages the first day you launch your Ajax site in production. BTW, be prepared for headaches, they are some surprises when dealing with search engines and their escaped_fragment implementation ;). Anyway, welcome on the SEO for Ajax SaaS providers (disclaimer: I'm one of the SEO4Ajax co-founder).
ds_
Cool, ill be interested in seeing what you start charging after the beta :) Good luck with it, its reassuring that im not the only one to have thought this to be a good idea.
gildas
If you are interested by the pricing you can have a look at prerender, brombone, getseojs, ajaxsnapshots or blitline. You'll see that it varies a lot.
ds_
Yep, I thought brombone had an interesting pricing model :) I wonder if they managed to get any signups.
palidanx
What is a single page app? A website with one page?
ds_
Yes, but they simulate multiple pages by fetching new data via ajax requests and modifying the DOM with javascript.
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ereckers
I'm sort of what you would call a small developer and WordPress jobs are the majority of my business. I'm speaking only for myself here but when I see stuff like this I pass:

		RewriteEngine on
		RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^_escaped_fragment_=(.*)$
		RewriteRule (.*) http://crawlspa.com/s/%1 [P]
I understand what you're doing, but there's something about writing redirects to relatively new 3rd party sites that make me uncomfortable.
ds_
I can appreciate that. Is there anything that would alleviate your concerns? It is something that should only affect crawlers and I'd expect most new users of the service to have zero Google presence (so better than nothing/worth a try?).

I can't see a better way of handling the integration.

ereckers
Sorry about just getting back to you. I'm not sure if this is a better way of handling integration, but you could have it implemented via a plugin (this is WordPress specific).

This way you can abstract away the redirection and not ask the user to add it themselves (thus having them thinking about it). The install is then the "magic".

There's a danger that this can be seen as dishonest, but as long as it explicitly states what it is doing in the plugin description I think that's understandable.

I probably wouldn't mind the redirection if it was abstracted away with a plugin install, it's just the minute that I had to think about what I was doing by writing to my .htaccess file that I had reservations.

Weird explanation.. but that's my thoughts.

davidsmith8900
- I dont think you should give up.
ds_
Me personally? Or 'one'? :)

I think it's like others have said, there is a difference between giving up completely and changing direction/priorities.

geekfactor
People often refer to Seth Godin's The Dip as a book that helps address this question. Personally, I didn't find it all that insightful, but I'm mentioning it here anyway to solicit others' opinions.
AznHisoka
Question: When you add [P] to the Rewrite rule, does the URL in the browser show crawlspa, or the original domain?