$0 revenue, 2 years and $106,000 in spent expenses later...
I just wanted to share some “real talk” about my entrepreneurial story with you guys.
As the title implies, I have so far spent over 2 years of my life and $106,000 of my life savings building a Javascript based image and video carousel-gallery maker after quitting a comfortable
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After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
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There are 2 parts to running a startup. Tech and business. You can be great at technology but not great at business. Having built multiple products myself for $100k that make money, it’s not about what you put in but about what you are learning and willing to change. I would strongly recommend you take a pause and explore other options like talking to more customers and potentially other products. You don’t need to spend a lot of code to make money. You need to know how to build something people want and aren’t afraid to charge for. If had a business unit at a company and they spent 2 years and $100k without strong gains, I would let them go. I’m sorry to be blunt but I think before you spend more time or money there’s some radical changes that need to occur.
It's true I haven't generated any revenue yet but it did take two years for this particular type of product to be built.
I wanted to start selling licenses earlier but when I spoke to potential customers after they looked at it, they refused to pay for it for x, y, z reasons until a, b, c functionality was implemented. Maybe I chose a hard technical product to build but all the easier low hanging fruits were already saturated.
To be honest, I'm not even entirely sure if it's actually MVP enough that people would be willing to pay for it because there is still a long list of known edge case bugs I haven't even had a chance to fix yet.
I think zTransitions can do a lot but I question whether people would buy a very fast sports car if it's only 95% painted and the air conditioning sometimes works but fails in certain edge cases. These bugs aren't critical enough to stop users from using the software while it's free but it would potentially annoy a paying user.
I have zeroed in on two main potential markets: online freelance web designers/developers, real estate photographers/videographers.
I'm also in early stage talks with a major real estate software company who is potentially interested in licensing zTransitions with an enterprise license to integrate the functionality directly into their platform.
Having had built multiple e-commerce products that generate revenue in less time and cost, I think you need to really question if it's technical constraint or a sales constraint. Being open to feedback at times like this is important. My startup is 2 years old now and makes 30k a month. If you aren't sure after 2 years it's not MVP enough than you likely aren't building in the right way. After 2 years a product should be heavily tested and improved. I don't think this is a hard technical product. As developers we often make assumptions but until you talk to users and get actual people paying and submitting feedback, you should leave assumptions aside.
Yes, that's true.
That's why I posted this product on here and I'm grateful for the feedback I've gotten so far.
Google Analytics tells me that approximately 1500+ users have used the actual web app with at least 1000 carousel galleries being published since I launched this a month and a half ago.
However, I got exactly zero feedback from these 1500 anonymous internet users so for the past month and a half, I've had to rely on assumptions until I heard otherwise. I've setup email, survey feedback and a free chatroom to make it as easy for them to give me feedback but so far... nothing.
I've gotten a lot of feedback on the marketing landing pages here which is really useful but no feedback about the actual software product itself.
I can assure you that this is a hard technical product to build because of all the behind the scenes work that isn't obvious. I had to do a lot of technical research, pre-testing and it went through a lot of design iterations and requires specialty technical domain knowledge to make it all possible. The video features alone took months just to get right.
You'll just have to take my word for it. The only other way to confirm how hard it is would be to try to build it out yourself.
It might be possible to build other software much faster than 2 years but these are the specialty technical skills I've used to make a living for a long time: making beautiful computer graphics renderings and pretty UIs using code. I'm not a back end developer and I don't know anything about CRM or sales so I can't build any products related to those on my own.
Here's some example of my work to give you an idea of what I'm good at and why I decided to build this type of product and what I envision my product being able to do by version 2.0:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39BbWdMq8j0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nStttb82T4Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpTEHgnguus
I am totally open to feedback but I wanted to give you a better picture of my background and situation so you can understand the challenges I face.
The marketing page feedback I've gotten has told me a lot and has made the decision on what I need to fix next:
Hi, did you ever crack getting feedback from your users? I'm encountring the same thing, tons of people are using my product day in day out, but none of them have anything to tell me (even though I know some obvious stuff is super broken).
I have checked your landing page, and to be brutally honest, I would scrape it whole. Slightly blurry, the loading dots just don't fit, UX is really low, it's quite slow. It will convert just a small amount of visitors.
Good luck!
Thanks BartBoch. Based on the combined advice of this thread, I spent an entire night revamping the landing page design so that the video is now 1080p resolution. I also removed the scroll down icon, removed the pagination dots and the two website/real estate buttons + initial scroll lock. Could you check it out now and let me know what you think?
I will just point it as I go.
-For first 4-5 seconds, I can see a mostly black screen (animation loading), which is bad for conversions (I have a really good connection, I am in Europe)
-Animation (header one) is super blurry for me. I cannot read anything. It makes the site look like its from 2010, not 2019.
-No call to action in the header (bad for conversions)
-Header overall for me is a designer nightmare.
-Design is not consistent. There is no set rule on how to digest the content, which is annoying.
-To much text, too small fonts. Show, not write (as much as you can). There is nothing wrong with a lot of text, but it needs to be balanced by visuals. It seems that you need to spend 5-10 minutes on your landing page to grasp what the product does and what are its features. A lot of people won't give you that much time.
-I think within 1-2 scroll from the top of the page you should have live example of the carousel. I don't care about videos, I want to see the product.
-I would seriously consider buying a premium, well-researched theme and work on that. Your site has the 2010s feel. Your UX is quite bad. There is a reason people study conversions and design optimization for years...
One more thing - I would ASAP go to the market and start monetizing it. By spending a lot of time, doing a lot of research you have increased your chances of success, but it's hard to more than double them unless you are really experienced in business and marketing. Your product will be never perfect and the sooner you field test it, the more time you have to (in worst case scenario) pivot slightly in a different direction.
Sorry for being down to earth, I think it is more healthy than patting you on the back and saying all is great.
Thanks BartBoch, I'll take these points into consideration as I am looking for a UX designer on Fiverr now.
You’ve already spent a lot of money. Add another $1000 to hire a designer who understands the basics of CRO and get a kick ass landing page.
Good luck!
My advice is stop all development right now. Go find out who has this problem and talk to them. Reddit forums, blog posts, etc... if they say they have a problem then put a buy now button and point them to it. If no one buys you know its not a problem they are willing to pay for. Give yourself 4 weeks to do this. If you cant figure it out - I think youve done more than enough and would do a hard pivot. YC has a great talk on this... https://jotengine.com/transcriptions/dGLCIx5GuSgO3y5Omuj0gA
Product seems cool, but as others said you need to revisit your marketing page. Best of luck!
Have you considered getting a full-time job or maybe a contract role and continue with this just in the evenings and weekends? I launched my project when I was still full-time employee in one software development company. For the first year it was the same - $0 MMR. I kept iterating over the landing page, documentation, examples, blog posts, features throughout the year.
It was very difficult regarding personal social life and at days I sometimes thought I have to just close it down but at those times I just tried to focus on some other projects and keep my main project running on its own (just pay the cloud provider bills). And, to my surprise, paying customers started coming in and now it's a healthy dose of income and most importantly I am heavily using my SaaS in every single project that I work on. So, just don't give up but consider maybe doing some contracting where you could potentially integrate ztransitions into the client's stack :)
Hi,
thanks for sharing your tough experience too. Are you talking about Webhook Relay?
Yes :) But same with other projects - https://github.com/keel-hq/keel has lots of users but pretty much zero sponsors. Huge time sink for me for ~1.5 year, however since I am using it my other projects too, it does give me back a lot of value.
In your case maybe when contracting for some other company you could introduce your project too?
Oh my goodness, that's rough. Huge respect for your persistence and grit my friend, I checked out the project and it's impressive!
On an unrelated note, I see we have similar interests in technology. I'm the technical co-founder of boardme (https://www.boardme.app) and Scrumbs (https://www.scrumbs.app).
If you'd like to bounce ideas off each other drop me a message.
Hi, like Bart Boch who mentioned it above, your main images are abit blurry and I think its very important to make the first impression counts. I think your idea is very interesting which might go far with a little bit of luck.
That said, I really admire you for your guts to burn these much cash and all the opportunity cost. I did something similar like quitting my job and working on an idea for 2-3 years though the difference was that I was making like 3k per month due to my freelance business.
I like the idea. Right now, it's a project, not a business, and that's fine.
If you want this to be a business, charge money immediately. Remove the free beta copy, integrate a Stripe checkout widget and then charge a monthly licensing fee, $50+ per month.
If no one buys, you are back to where you started, as you don't charge anything at the moment anyway. If you get customers, you will immediately learn what you will need to do next.
If people tell you they wouldn't pay, it means nothing if they can't even pay if they wanted to.
Question: how did you determine the $50/month price tag?
I looked at comparable libraries (for animation, data visualization, charting libs), made a quick price bracket list and then took the average price.
The product needs to have a price that conveys quality and endurance. You might even go higher, so add a $79/mo or $99/mo bracket. You'd be surprised about the number of people that don't buy anything under $50 for their business.
The price needs to communicate that this is a business that makes money. If people are expected to build their own businesses on this project, it must be clearly visible to the potential customer that you're in this for the foreseeable future. This signal is extremely important.
I've come to understand this part as one of the most crucial factors in a SaaS component purchasing decision, as I have made this decision many times for my own SaaS, and I was let down by a number of vendors who had great low prices and then eventually closed their business or got unusable, leaving me with the responsibility to integrate other things. One of those was a cloud provider hosting our product. Now THAT was a wake-up call.
Having said that: make sure you want to run this business for at least a few years. If you're sure about that, put on a price tag that conveys your confidence, skill and a promise that you will do what you can to make your customer's lives easier.
This is interesting insight I never thought of before as I don't have the experience to know this.
I plan to sell carousel/galleries for $20 using a pay-as-you-go model but I also plan to offer a SaaS subscription originally for $60/year.
However, your insight is interesting and I may bump that up to $50/month to see what kind of response I could get.
I am planning to target real estate photographers and videographers who make heavy use of photos and videos in galleries to showcase their client's real estate.
The $60/year was originally because I wanted to target online freelancers on services like Fiverr and I wanted to ensure they could afford the SaaS.
However, after reading, I will take your advice and price it accordingly when I commercially launch this product.
Thank you!
In my current startup, we serve online teachers, which are, like people on Fiverr, their own little business, trying to make ends meet. It is super hard to come up with affordable pricing that will satisfy your business goals and still be a good investment for your customers.
Here is what I learned: some people do not understand that a tool that saves them hundreds of hours in a month is worth more than their Netflix subscription. Those people do not value their own work. They don't understand the concept of investing in smart tools to make their work better. You will likely never get their money.
Don't fall for the trap of making your product cheaper. Cheap customers might buy, but then they will spam you with requests and questions, trying to squeeze every ounce of value from the product. We had a very cheap plan, and we stopped it a few months in because the people who had it were way too often asking questions they could have found the answers for themselves. Particular as a solopreneur, you can not handle that.
I applaud your plan to go with higher prices. It will certainly look more professional and give a sense of higher quality. Do make sure you are also targeting the right customers with your ads, both in audience and aesthetics.
Hi Anazei! My initial thoughts -
I'm a FI-er happy to help with free advice and coaching, so if you'd like to pick my brain for 15 min just let me know and I'll send you a link so we can talk in real time. :)
Thanks Ki, how can I contact you to get that free 15 minutes of advice and coaching?
Ouch... 12 hours a day, for 2 years, building 1 product without any source of revenue is no joke...
I also lost 1 entire year of my life just working in something, so I do know the feeling...
I hope you can generate some revenue quickly.
Honestly, it looks pretty good!
Thanks Findeton!
It took a long time and I had to change my entire philosophy where I was more focused on making the code "perfect" as if I was still working my corporate job to the mindset of a hungry entrepreneur where the focus became all about customer centric UX and "to hell with the code, what would the customer actually want?"
I'm sorry about the hardships you have endured. I suggest looking for a marketing co-founder.
Thanks for the responses everybody! I wasn't expecting so many responses or views to this post.
The takeaway I've gained is that the landing page UX needs to be redesigned, text copy shortened and a higher resolution video needs to be used. I also need to identify a target market of users and start focusing on marketing/advertising/sales instead of continuing to add features/fix non critical bugs.
I haven't tried to formally monetize zTransitions yet because I want as many people to use it as possible first for free so the word can spread organically while I also simultaneously promote zTransitions. Ideally, I would like 10,000+ users and plenty of feedback before I try to ask for any money from them.
I have identified that there may be a potential need for zTransitions in the real estate photography/videography industry where they make heavy use of drone footage and ground level photography and videography. I'm trying to figure out an effective strategy to build awareness of zTransitions to this potential market segment perhaps using some combination of direct advertising and direct email contacting.
I have spoken to a lot of traditional web designers/developers working in professional corporate services but not individual freelancers yet. Corporate designers/developers seem to be more resistant to even trying zTransitions because they don't want to add "complexity" to their projects or they feel CSS is good enough or they feel tools like Owl Carousel/SliderRevolution/LayerSlider are good enough since they've been using those tools for so many years already. I don't think they really realize what the benefits and features of zTransitions really are. I have to break the status quo of their mindsets.
I also want to target freelancers on websites like Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, etc to use my tool. I'm considering using a combination strategy of direct advertising/direct emailing.
One target market I feel would be better to target instead are the platform users who use Wix, Wordpress, etc and don't know how to code but want a DIY website.
I am currently approaching platforms like Wix, WebFlow, etc to allow me to build a plugin for their platform that I can use to sell zTransitions to their customers as a free add-on but I haven't heard any response from any of them yet either to accept or decline.
I do have one potential enterprise customer I'm currently talking to who is interested in integrating zTransitions web app/library API directly into their real estate software platform as an enterprise license. If I can win this contract, this single customer alone would be able to pay for several years of expenses even if I keep zTransitions free to use for individual users.
However, I haven't heard back from them in a week though I assume the principle decision maker is just really busy at the moment. I know he is shopping around to see if there are any competitor products similar to mine but he did say we would continue the conversation.
The analytics systems I have in place has told me that even without any formal advertising, there have been approximately 1500 visitors to the landing pages (+450 new visitors in traffic from this post in one day alone!) and at least 1000+ carousel gallery publishes since I launched zTransitions on July 15, 2019 a month and a half ago. I'm not an expert at Google Analytics so it's really hard for me to interpret the data more precisely.
Once again, thank you for all your feedback everyone! Despite the past 1500+ silent visitors, this is probably the most feedback I've gotten so far in the past month. Please feel free to continue putting your advice, suggestions, criticism or feedback in this post. I will read it all!
I will also try to reach out and contact several of you who have extended an offer to connect.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Thanks ybrickman. Based on the combined advice of this thread, I spent an entire night revamping the landing page design so that the video is now 1080p resolution. I also removed the scroll down icon, removed the pagination dots and the two website/real estate buttons + initial scroll lock.
Everything loads instantly without delay and you can scroll right away.
Shortening and editing the text will take additional time to review.
Could you check it out now and let me know what you think?
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Thanks for your suggestions ybrickman!
I agree with most of your points but I disagree on getting rid of the carousel at the top. I have to be able to eat my own dog food if I hope customers will be willing to pay to eat it too.
I did upgrade the six videos to full 1080p resolution from the previous 720p resolution that you said was too blurry on your 1920x1080 desktop monitor so it's a huge jump in bandwidth.
As part of the built in streaming video feature, some of the blurriness is because it takes a few seconds to determine your bandwidth speed and the quality jumps to that appropriate quality based on what your computer can handle. After that, it should be at the highest quality your computer can handle.
I don't expect customers to actually use 1080p full screen video like in my screen recording demo but if I removed the carousel because I don't think it's good enough to use, then why would they want to use it? It is definitely counter intuitive. I could crop the video but then it won't show the web app properly so at the moment, I'll leave the video demo up.
If I get too much feedback that 1080p video is lagging slower computers, I'll revert back to the 720p video which will look blurry when scaled up to fit 1920x1080 desktop monitors. No way around that quality vs blurry problem when it comes to screen recordings with web page sized fonts.
These are some of the initial challenges of figuring out how to deal with web video as zTransitions is a video pioneer web product. Until now, the majority of video comes from Netflix type streaming services or YouTube which haven't really faced these problems by nature of their use as a sole primary content focus rather than as marketing decoration on a webpage.
The lag could be from the transition occurring while you're scrolling down the page. I tested this on my desktop and laptop and they run fine without lag.
I've also discovered that YouTube videos embedded in websites outside of YouTube don't get view count tracking. Maybe it's YouTube's way to prevent fraudulent clicks? In order to monetize the view counts, a lot of content owners set their videos to "this video can only be viewed on YouTube" when I try to embed other people's videos in my blog. The only way to get a view count is to view the video on YouTube.com. When I click on my own videos, the view count doesn't increase. So there's really no way for me to tell how many people have watched the embedded videos.
I do agree that I need to shorten the text but not too much. From talking to potential customers, the problem I ran into right away was they kept asking, "what's the difference between zTransitions and OwlCarousel/SliderRevolution/LayerSlider? Why should I switch to use zTransitions when they're good enough, proven quality and been around longer?" This was the most common question I heard again and again and again.
I agree Owl Carousel's simple page with minimal information works but they've been around 10 years so they can get away with that. I don't feel that what exactly works for them will work for me.
I feel customers would only be willing to switch only if they understand the major benefits and it'd better be a lot of major benefits. Customers won't switch for 1 or 2 benefits unless it was some life altering benefits. And hence, the huge amount of text to explain all the different and better amount of benefits to switching.
However, I am going to have a UX/UI designer and a copywriter review the website and make recommendations for changes.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
Thanks ybrickman
Yeah, now I can see what everyone is talking about regarding the blurry video now as I took a look at the website on someone else's much slower computer at their home on their much slower internet.
So my laptop and desktop are directly connected by ethernet cable and sit next to the modem + I don't have any antivirus software that slows down the computer by 60%.
It takes a few seconds for the streaming video to calculate which video quality a user can support so it starts the video on the lowest resolution and stretches it up to fit the full screen.
It would look ok if the initial stream was played as a 320x240 but when it's stretched up to 1920x1080, yeah, it looks terrible.
Because the 6 videos are only about 20 seconds long each, half the video play time is spent doing quality calculations and when a new video is switched over, it has to redo the entire calculation all over again for every new video.
It looks good once the video is cached in memory and played a second time around.
The alternative is not to use streaming video and to use MP4 video but then that caused complaints from testers that it took took long to download all the videos before playback could begin.
I think this means that my 1080p video is not effective. I need to hire a video editor guy who knows how to make videos look pretty and fit it into a much smaller video banner format while communicating the same message as my current 1080p.