Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0 users. Has it failed?

Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by murukesh_s on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:51AM (#18274614)

Since your domain is very niche, you have to do marketing as well as targeted sales. Have you reached out to potential customers and asking them to use your service?

Also please consider making this a B2B enterprise product. To do that the main thing you need to do is hide the price or put insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above. If you are hiding prices, put a button to contact the sales team, which could be your phone number to start with.

Also put some white papers and add a lengthy demo with your own voice with an actual project, like Wordpress being protected and ask them to contact your sales if they need to enable the protection in their software as well. The demo could be put behind a sales form to collect contact details.

And hide your technology details. They don't need to know how you do it. Just give instructions on how to put enable your validation. Since you don't have a free tier it's very easy for you to validate your project's success. Just reach out to X potential customers (it's very easy for you to figure out potential customers too) and ask them to try your product. Give a 6 months money back. I

p.s. A great sales article I found on HN this week: https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/ama-steli-efti

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by murukesh_s on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:53AM (#18274630)

Overall the idea looks good, but the product looks too cheap, javascript validation? oh perhaps I could do it on my own.

Just hide the details and put some jargons (AI/ML to detect behaviour etc :) and give an enterprise look and feel.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by msiggy on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:22AM (#18274859)

Obfuscating what your product does is a terrible idea. Don't do this.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by skyde on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:27AM (#18274905)

I agree if you need to hide what value it really bring people will stop using it as soon as they understand.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by gmiller123456 on Monday October 22, 2018 @04:03PM (#18277934)

Unfortunately this is exactly what he recommends in his FAQ:

"Besides, we strongly recommend to let our JavaScript file blend in with the rest of your application's JavaScript. Webpack, compress and uglify the best you can, to make the code responsible for validation as difficult as possible to find and break."

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by msiggy on Monday October 22, 2018 @07:42PM (#18279585)

Wasn't talking about code obfuscation :)

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by wafflesraccoon on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:06AM (#18274728)

I agree, after looking over the project the first thing I thought was "I bet I could do this myself". +1 for hiding the details and adding a little jargon.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by arethuza on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:39AM (#18274995)

"insanely high prices. like $999 per year per license and above"

That's not insanely high - that's pretty common for B2B SaaS apps.

The most I've been quoted for SaaS was more like $100K per user per year...

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by arghwhat on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:48AM (#18275066)

Depends on what "per license" means. It's a license-managing software, that can have multiple project licenses, and... It gets confusing which license a "license" refers to.

All in all, it's not unusual to pay 10k, 30k or even 100k USD a year for a core technology like that. For example, self-hosted JIRA costs 8.3k USD per year (if you want updates) for 100+ users, and you usually have several services just from Atlassian in this price range.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by not_real_acct on Monday October 22, 2018 @02:27PM (#18277008)

Agreed, these prices are ridiculously low.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by frits1993 on Monday October 22, 2018 @09:54AM (#18274639)

Great feedback, thanks for that!

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by matt_the_bass on Monday October 22, 2018 @10:34AM (#18274964)

I agree. I understand that many enterprise customers have specific “bespoke” needs and in turn specific pricing. But I’d like to know order of magnitude cost that I’m looking at without needing to contact anyone. You could give $999 example enterprise cost with example features and offer a contact us for additional options/pricing.

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Re:Ask HN: 4 months after posting my project on HN, it has 0... by murukesh_s on Monday October 22, 2018 @12:49PM (#18276214)

I was just trying to help the author. Sorry if it hurt you.

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