9 ms·

Ask HN: My product isn't making any money, and I have rent and food to pay for

14 points by SunghoYahng 4y ago

For the past 3-4 years, I have developed one product. It's called Note Garden(https://notegarden.io), in which users can take notes and keep them in memory by using algorithms. (Remnot has a similar concept.) There is a very bad situation with this product right now. There have been many things I've tried, but there are very few users, and I can't figure out how to get them. It is more serious when it comes to the team. I am near my limit of living expenses (rent and food). Both of the other members of the team have fallen into a state of indefinite dormancy, completely demoralized. In this situation, how should I proceed?

mirntyfirty 4y ago
What are your skills? I can check if my employer has a relevant opening.
conductr 4y ago
Admit defeat & get a job. Make this a side hustle if you don't want to completely throw in the towel.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  What if I don't want to do that, so I'll continue to focus my time on this product in the future?
  - conductr 4y ago
    Nobody ever wants to do that but you make it sound like you'll be homeless and starving soon so I'm suggesting you evaluate priorities and cash flow should be #1. You could also pick up some contract work but, if you hadn't already thought of that, I think that would take you longer to line up and generate some cash from. There's no magic solution that HN can give you that will make your product start ringing in sales/users. But if this is some roundabout way of getting product feedback... It just looks like a Notion clone to me, the website is very disjointed and confusing, the copy has a lot of room for improvement (please have a native English speaker proofread or just hire a copywriter), a short explainer video might help as I think this could benefit from seeing in action, pricing>0?
  - bigiain 4y ago
    Sounds like you'll be homeless and hungry pretty soon then. There's no shame in admitting your pet project isn't and is unlike;y to ever be a commercial success. You sound like you have (or are just about to) run out of runway, and your business is not "default alive" but "actually dead". The longer you drag out admitting that, the deeper the hole you're going to have to dig yourself out of when you finally do admit it.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    You solicited advice so here it is, and I am going to be blunt. If you don’t want to go find a job and do this as a side hustle (which is the best advice) in my opinion you will need to do the following immediately just to start attracting folks organically. - Stop doing all product dev except bug fixes until you truly understand the product and features your users want. Think of what you have as being at the MVP stage. If you have additional ideas or features, just backlog them for now and come back to them if the product/company survives the next 3-6 months. There is no feature you can add that will rescue the company at this stage. Right now your only hope is that marketing can attract users, and the product is good enough to keep them. - fix the website: it’s not responsive, and not at all compelling to your product. The design is amateurish and dated. Get a designer to help, you need it. - Engage an “English as a first language” copywriter to fix all the copy on the site. When I read your site it comes off as “Let me write sign, I speak English good”. Poor copywriting like you have will literally exclude US users from using your product. It comes off as untrustworthy. - Understand your users. It seems to focus on all the wrong things. LaTeX, Markdown…developers might care about that, but it looks like your appeal is to med students. Latex means something completely different to a med student. If your app has specific benefit to med students or law students, set up specific landing pages optimized for those two user bases that market to them to compel a download. Why do they need to use your product? How will it make their lives easier? Target the 2-3 most likely groups that will use the product as is, and target all marketing to them. You can always expand to their user types later. - it seems your app is really more a flash card generator/guided studying utility than a note taking system. You should probably play up this feature and do specific marketing around it. More flash card and learning copy and less note-taking copy for SEO. For me, compared to a pure note taking app like GoodNotes or Apple Notes, your UX looks too complex. Perhaps it needs this complexity for the learning system you have created. So if your current marketing is centered around attracting folks looking for note taking apps I think you will turn people off. - might just be me, but I have literally never needed a statistical dashboard for a note taking app. I found that very strange that is was featured so prominently. I don’t understand how this is important, and your site doesn’t really tell me why I need it. Also, what is your plan to actually make this a revenue generator? If you are having difficulties getting an excited user base offering something for free…how do you plan on monetizing it? I get that this is a pet project, but does it have legs? Might have value to starving college students, but would they pay for it? I question that. You should too. If you don’t have a specific endgame in mind for it i.e. “I am going to sell this to Blackboard for $5M.”, you just have a hobby that is making you poor.
- thatguymike 4y ago
  Just gonna add my voice to the time to get a job train.
WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
Time to get a paying job and work on your project part time. 1) As soon as possible, get 10 users to use your product. Get feedback and work on pain points and then get ten more and work on the pain points again. Don't add new features unless you really need to add them. And welcome and thank your users for their criticism. 2)freeze your software updates and work on marketing 90%+ of your time available, so you get more users.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  Thanks. But what if I don't want to get a job, so I'll continue to focus my time on this product in the future?
  - smt88 4y ago
    Why are you asking for advice and then rejecting the answer? It sounds like you know what you want to do: work on your side project until you're poor or bankrupt. If you don't want to be poor or bankrupt, you need to get a job. Notes apps are extremely common and almost impossible to monetize. You could do everything "right" and still fail to profit from this. If you have cash, you can invest in marketing, but customer acquisition costs for B2C notes apps are extremely high. If you don't have cash and can't find investors, the company is dead. It happens even to brilliant people -- there's no shame in failure. There is pain, though. You will feel sad, frustrated, and maybe regretful for a while, but it will pass. Don't make the pain worse by risking more on this.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      > Notes apps are extremely common and almost impossible to monetize. And, I would add, so feature simple that it’s nearly impossible to find and create an innovative feature that will set your app apart from the others and force folks to switch to your product. I just counted six different note apps that I have installed on my iPad. One I paid for, and it’s the best of the bunch in terms of features but I use it less than Apple Notes.
  - imron 4y ago
imron 4y ago
> In this situation, how should I proceed? Put your product in maintenance mode and pick up a day job or contract role to pay the rent and bills. Work on Note Garden as side project as time and money permits.
paulpauper 4y ago
"how can I make a living doing what I love" for many people, they cannot
cultofmetatron 4y ago
how much effort have you put into marketing? this is the first I'm seeing of it. Right now I use fsnotes to keep track of things myself
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  Maybe that's the problem, but I don't know how to market it other than posting it on community boards like HN.
  - RandomSort 4y ago
    I notice on your team page - you have a CMO? Maybe they should know, or find out ;)
  - cultofmetatron 4y ago
    Thats definitly the problem. I'm a founder myself, the biggest step for me was realizing that I suck at marketing so I sought out cofounders who are the exact opposite. my cofounders are incredible marketers. they've been aggressive about meeting potential clients, sittng down with them, demoing the product and either getting them to sign up or come back with a list of features we need to get them to sign up. Our product may be good but its because they put it in front of potential customers that we are currently in 114 restaurants and growing. Your product seems like something university students might want. ever thought of actually jsut going to a university library and offer free coffee to anyone who signs up and trys the product while giving you feedback? The'll probably tell you its either what they need or tell you what's missing. Also, as echoed by the other guy. if you have a cmo, ask him what his strategy is. At your stage, a CMO is also doing Product development. that means sitting down with customers and getting the info required discover compelling features to implement. if He's solely relying on adwords and not currently sitting down and getting feedback, fire his ass. Going to individual customers and asking them to sign up doesn't scale? exactly, thats what doing things that don't scale means. It was good enough for stripe, its good enough for you! Half of the features my startups has came from restaurants asking for them. That doesn't mean you build everything restaurant owners ask for but if you keep hearing the same request come up from different sources, maybe thats a clue to prioritize it. anyways, thats my two cents.
RandomSort 4y ago
I have been diving reasonably deep into the Tool For Thought category over the last two years, but have yet to see notegarden in this space. I concur with the spend your effort on marketing not development. Look into tools that both do the same and more: - Obsidian.md - RoamResearch.com - Notion.so - Remnote - Readwise.io - Anki I am sure there are others. You mention remnote specifically, how do your tool compare, when is it the best, when should I go with some other tool? See for instance https://medium.com/geekculture/roam-research-vs-notion-3064a3e8c985 https://medium.com/geekculture/roam-research-vs-notion-3064a... Also the copy overall could take some overhauling, there are some errors and stuff that takes you a bit out - perhaps hire someone on upwork to check that up. With regards to team, maybe figure out what your cutoff point is for calling it quits. If you have been working on this for 3-4 years, without many users, three persons, what are the signals that you are working in the right direction? Figure that out, commit to some numbers and dates, and strategize based on those numbers. Good luck.
- SunghoYahng 4y ago
  Thank you for your feedback
hunglee2 4y ago
How are you distributing your product? It could be that you (and your now demoralised team) have spent too much time building, not enough time selling. This is normal if the core team are engineers, we all default to what we are good at and enjoy doing. The sad part is though, distribution is far more important than production. In my experience, it is close to impossible to recover a team that has mentally 'checked out'. If they are critical to project, it could be the journey for this product is over.
madmax108 4y ago
I would also suggest the same as others in this group and say get a job. That'll hopefully help clear up some mental space away from having basic needs satisfied and let you streamline your product without having to worry about immediate results (and trust me when I say, at "most" companies, having a stable job and holding onto a side hustle is not impossible) Only thing I'd say is avoid falling into sunk-cost fallacy, and remember that it's not always the best "technical" product that wins but also a lot of stuff outside of your control (timing the market eg. Google Wave, tech simply not growing fast enough eg. MagicLeap, the worse product having better VC/marketing etc.) so love your products, but unless you have a guarenteed soft-landing, don't bet your life on them. Perhaps relevant: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 Also website/product feedback: - Hire a copywriter to fix language on your website. "Edit free by drag & drop", "the effective-proven study methods", "Organie Knowledge" etc. makes it look quite amateur. You may also want to work on SEO a bit more to get more organic traffic and maybe add some content around the techniques the app uses for memorization. - Add a future pricing page. Everything free "for now" makes me think that if I get this and start using, one fine day you'll charge an amount that's too high for me and I'll lose my notes because I don't want to pay in the future ($1per month vs $20 a month is all possible). Let people know how much you expect this to cost them. Not written in stone of course, but it helps a lot.
phendrenad2 4y ago
I noticed that the page isn't responsive. On a 1180px wide viewport, I'm seeing a horizontal scrollbar (the page width seems to be locked to 1565px). The page also loads slowly from USA (is your CDN set up properly? Or maybe you can move hosting to AWS us-west). Many people won't trust a dmg installer, and would prefer to install from the Mac app store (or windows store).
spants 4y ago
1) Do this on the side (get a job) 2) Get the name out there (marketing) 3) Don't add new features yet. You need users first. 4) Don't use a GMAIL address for contact - it looks like a side project (Marketing) Other than that, is does look nice.

14 points by SunghoYahng 4y ago

mirntyfirty 4y ago

What are your skills? I can check if my employer has a relevant opening.

conductr 4y ago

Admit defeat & get a job. Make this a side hustle if you don't want to completely throw in the towel.

SunghoYahng 4y ago
What if I don't want to do that, so I'll continue to focus my time on this product in the future?
- conductr 4y ago
  Nobody ever wants to do that but you make it sound like you'll be homeless and starving soon so I'm suggesting you evaluate priorities and cash flow should be #1. You could also pick up some contract work but, if you hadn't already thought of that, I think that would take you longer to line up and generate some cash from. There's no magic solution that HN can give you that will make your product start ringing in sales/users. But if this is some roundabout way of getting product feedback... It just looks like a Notion clone to me, the website is very disjointed and confusing, the copy has a lot of room for improvement (please have a native English speaker proofread or just hire a copywriter), a short explainer video might help as I think this could benefit from seeing in action, pricing>0?
- bigiain 4y ago
  Sounds like you'll be homeless and hungry pretty soon then. There's no shame in admitting your pet project isn't and is unlike;y to ever be a commercial success. You sound like you have (or are just about to) run out of runway, and your business is not "default alive" but "actually dead". The longer you drag out admitting that, the deeper the hole you're going to have to dig yourself out of when you finally do admit it.
- kcplate 4y ago
  You solicited advice so here it is, and I am going to be blunt. If you don’t want to go find a job and do this as a side hustle (which is the best advice) in my opinion you will need to do the following immediately just to start attracting folks organically. - Stop doing all product dev except bug fixes until you truly understand the product and features your users want. Think of what you have as being at the MVP stage. If you have additional ideas or features, just backlog them for now and come back to them if the product/company survives the next 3-6 months. There is no feature you can add that will rescue the company at this stage. Right now your only hope is that marketing can attract users, and the product is good enough to keep them. - fix the website: it’s not responsive, and not at all compelling to your product. The design is amateurish and dated. Get a designer to help, you need it. - Engage an “English as a first language” copywriter to fix all the copy on the site. When I read your site it comes off as “Let me write sign, I speak English good”. Poor copywriting like you have will literally exclude US users from using your product. It comes off as untrustworthy. - Understand your users. It seems to focus on all the wrong things. LaTeX, Markdown…developers might care about that, but it looks like your appeal is to med students. Latex means something completely different to a med student. If your app has specific benefit to med students or law students, set up specific landing pages optimized for those two user bases that market to them to compel a download. Why do they need to use your product? How will it make their lives easier? Target the 2-3 most likely groups that will use the product as is, and target all marketing to them. You can always expand to their user types later. - it seems your app is really more a flash card generator/guided studying utility than a note taking system. You should probably play up this feature and do specific marketing around it. More flash card and learning copy and less note-taking copy for SEO. For me, compared to a pure note taking app like GoodNotes or Apple Notes, your UX looks too complex. Perhaps it needs this complexity for the learning system you have created. So if your current marketing is centered around attracting folks looking for note taking apps I think you will turn people off. - might just be me, but I have literally never needed a statistical dashboard for a note taking app. I found that very strange that is was featured so prominently. I don’t understand how this is important, and your site doesn’t really tell me why I need it. Also, what is your plan to actually make this a revenue generator? If you are having difficulties getting an excited user base offering something for free…how do you plan on monetizing it? I get that this is a pet project, but does it have legs? Might have value to starving college students, but would they pay for it? I question that. You should too. If you don’t have a specific endgame in mind for it i.e. “I am going to sell this to Blackboard for $5M.”, you just have a hobby that is making you poor.
thatguymike 4y ago
Just gonna add my voice to the time to get a job train.

WheelsAtLarge 4y ago

Time to get a paying job and work on your project part time. 1) As soon as possible, get 10 users to use your product. Get feedback and work on pain points and then get ten more and work on the pain points again. Don't add new features unless you really need to add them. And welcome and thank your users for their criticism. 2)freeze your software updates and work on marketing 90%+ of your time available, so you get more users.

SunghoYahng 4y ago
Thanks. But what if I don't want to get a job, so I'll continue to focus my time on this product in the future?
- smt88 4y ago
  Why are you asking for advice and then rejecting the answer? It sounds like you know what you want to do: work on your side project until you're poor or bankrupt. If you don't want to be poor or bankrupt, you need to get a job. Notes apps are extremely common and almost impossible to monetize. You could do everything "right" and still fail to profit from this. If you have cash, you can invest in marketing, but customer acquisition costs for B2C notes apps are extremely high. If you don't have cash and can't find investors, the company is dead. It happens even to brilliant people -- there's no shame in failure. There is pain, though. You will feel sad, frustrated, and maybe regretful for a while, but it will pass. Don't make the pain worse by risking more on this.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    > Notes apps are extremely common and almost impossible to monetize. And, I would add, so feature simple that it’s nearly impossible to find and create an innovative feature that will set your app apart from the others and force folks to switch to your product. I just counted six different note apps that I have installed on my iPad. One I paid for, and it’s the best of the bunch in terms of features but I use it less than Apple Notes.
- imron 4y ago

imron 4y ago

> In this situation, how should I proceed? Put your product in maintenance mode and pick up a day job or contract role to pay the rent and bills. Work on Note Garden as side project as time and money permits.

paulpauper 4y ago

"how can I make a living doing what I love" for many people, they cannot

cultofmetatron 4y ago

how much effort have you put into marketing? this is the first I'm seeing of it. Right now I use fsnotes to keep track of things myself

SunghoYahng 4y ago
Maybe that's the problem, but I don't know how to market it other than posting it on community boards like HN.
- RandomSort 4y ago
  I notice on your team page - you have a CMO? Maybe they should know, or find out ;)
- cultofmetatron 4y ago
  Thats definitly the problem. I'm a founder myself, the biggest step for me was realizing that I suck at marketing so I sought out cofounders who are the exact opposite. my cofounders are incredible marketers. they've been aggressive about meeting potential clients, sittng down with them, demoing the product and either getting them to sign up or come back with a list of features we need to get them to sign up. Our product may be good but its because they put it in front of potential customers that we are currently in 114 restaurants and growing. Your product seems like something university students might want. ever thought of actually jsut going to a university library and offer free coffee to anyone who signs up and trys the product while giving you feedback? The'll probably tell you its either what they need or tell you what's missing. Also, as echoed by the other guy. if you have a cmo, ask him what his strategy is. At your stage, a CMO is also doing Product development. that means sitting down with customers and getting the info required discover compelling features to implement. if He's solely relying on adwords and not currently sitting down and getting feedback, fire his ass. Going to individual customers and asking them to sign up doesn't scale? exactly, thats what doing things that don't scale means. It was good enough for stripe, its good enough for you! Half of the features my startups has came from restaurants asking for them. That doesn't mean you build everything restaurant owners ask for but if you keep hearing the same request come up from different sources, maybe thats a clue to prioritize it. anyways, thats my two cents.

RandomSort 4y ago

I have been diving reasonably deep into the Tool For Thought category over the last two years, but have yet to see notegarden in this space. I concur with the spend your effort on marketing not development. Look into tools that both do the same and more: - Obsidian.md - RoamResearch.com - Notion.so - Remnote - Readwise.io - Anki I am sure there are others. You mention remnote specifically, how do your tool compare, when is it the best, when should I go with some other tool? See for instance https://medium.com/geekculture/roam-research-vs-notion-3064a3e8c985 https://medium.com/geekculture/roam-research-vs-notion-3064a... Also the copy overall could take some overhauling, there are some errors and stuff that takes you a bit out - perhaps hire someone on upwork to check that up. With regards to team, maybe figure out what your cutoff point is for calling it quits. If you have been working on this for 3-4 years, without many users, three persons, what are the signals that you are working in the right direction? Figure that out, commit to some numbers and dates, and strategize based on those numbers. Good luck.

SunghoYahng 4y ago
Thank you for your feedback

hunglee2 4y ago

How are you distributing your product? It could be that you (and your now demoralised team) have spent too much time building, not enough time selling. This is normal if the core team are engineers, we all default to what we are good at and enjoy doing. The sad part is though, distribution is far more important than production. In my experience, it is close to impossible to recover a team that has mentally 'checked out'. If they are critical to project, it could be the journey for this product is over.

madmax108 4y ago

I would also suggest the same as others in this group and say get a job. That'll hopefully help clear up some mental space away from having basic needs satisfied and let you streamline your product without having to worry about immediate results (and trust me when I say, at "most" companies, having a stable job and holding onto a side hustle is not impossible) Only thing I'd say is avoid falling into sunk-cost fallacy, and remember that it's not always the best "technical" product that wins but also a lot of stuff outside of your control (timing the market eg. Google Wave, tech simply not growing fast enough eg. MagicLeap, the worse product having better VC/marketing etc.) so love your products, but unless you have a guarenteed soft-landing, don't bet your life on them. Perhaps relevant: https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 Also website/product feedback: - Hire a copywriter to fix language on your website. "Edit free by drag & drop", "the effective-proven study methods", "Organie Knowledge" etc. makes it look quite amateur. You may also want to work on SEO a bit more to get more organic traffic and maybe add some content around the techniques the app uses for memorization. - Add a future pricing page. Everything free "for now" makes me think that if I get this and start using, one fine day you'll charge an amount that's too high for me and I'll lose my notes because I don't want to pay in the future ($1per month vs $20 a month is all possible). Let people know how much you expect this to cost them. Not written in stone of course, but it helps a lot.

phendrenad2 4y ago

I noticed that the page isn't responsive. On a 1180px wide viewport, I'm seeing a horizontal scrollbar (the page width seems to be locked to 1565px). The page also loads slowly from USA (is your CDN set up properly? Or maybe you can move hosting to AWS us-west). Many people won't trust a dmg installer, and would prefer to install from the Mac app store (or windows store).

spants 4y ago

1) Do this on the side (get a job) 2) Get the name out there (marketing) 3) Don't add new features yet. You need users first. 4) Don't use a GMAIL address for contact - it looks like a side project (Marketing) Other than that, is does look nice.