We spent $980k on a failed SaaS project(niteo.co) |
We spent $980k on a failed SaaS project(niteo.co) |
I think that early traction is the key indicator of potential future success. Unless you're working in an industry where early traction is literally impossible to attain (pharmaceuticals, medical, VR hardware, R&D, etc.), the market tends to be pretty responsive.
If you're working on a piece of software, make a "free tier" open source version, give it out for free, get as many people to try it out as you can. If people aren't even remotely excited, pivot: it's not a good idea.
It's like fishing: if you're getting no nibbles, change the bait.
We asked ourselves many times: is this "too slow" or are we just being impatient?
We tried with a very low-price plan and got a lot of interest & signups. The moment we raised the prices a bit to cover hosting costs, the interest went away.
Yeah, this is extremely tricky to gauge (and I'm no expert), but when it "clicks" it's hard to miss.
And good luck with your future projects, Pareto Security sure looks interesting!
The only thing that the local agent running on a Mac does, is sending a list of failing checks every now and then. It does not allow any centralized pushing of configuration, no tracking, no remote access, nada.
I have to correct my partner here as his memory is a bit fuzzy. :) We tried a low tier price ($15/m vs regular $49/m) but it did not make any significant difference in signups.
We targeted the high-end of the WordPress market where we competed against Kinsta, WP Engine, Flywheel etc. And the problem there was they were "good enough" (and in some ways muhc better) as I mention in the blog post.
At the same time, the lowend SiteGround had prices below $5/m so we couldn't compete against them in that segment as we were paying more than that to Google Cloud.
I feel like this strategy is often just delaying and magnifying a failure, but if you really believe your product is better than similarly priced products, and the hurdle was getting customers to switch, then providing aggressive price incentives for switching, then ratcheting prices to parity would probably work pretty well.