This is resonating very much with me, but perhaps for a different reason. I'm launching a product within a business that is already successful. I get to give demos to potential customers, and I've been making a point of saying, "And this aspect of the product is unlimited" about many things in the product. On the one hand, related to the above, it's potentially possible that a whale user could cost us, but it's frankly unlikely. But it occurs to me that if I put a limit on certain aspects of the offering, it will likely make it seem worth more -- it's a scarce resource if we treat it as such.
On the other hand being free from arbitrary limits is great.
It was too cheap relative to what they expected to pay.
Hard to judge what is wrong/could be better as I couldn't gather what your actual project is. Maybe there are some obvious glaring mistakes on the landing page or something that scares people off?
Or it might just be trying to solve a problem that people don't actually have, or communicated poorly what problem it solves. I tend to see these being the most common reasons people don't even sign up.
I think SEO is the answer to that and I am planning on checking out resources or short courses if there are any since they might help me in the future as well. The reason I was curious about your process was whether you had tried something different which I hadn't tried (or thought of) which might help me avoid/improve on your feedback.
This would make them the last person to ask for recommendations (no offense intended).
It would seem preferable to seek advice/recommendations from people with a similar goal/situation to yours who are currently being successful at marketing their startup/product.
I wonder if there are opportunities for more call to actions. e.g. I scrolled the page and the only links to sign up are at the top (I’m on mobile).
Compare this to https://stripe.com/ and it’s super obvious how to “Start now” from anywhere on the page.
Our server bills are in EURO.
Our salaries are in EURO.
Our subscription for business operations are in EURO.
Our accountancy costs are in EURO.
It helps that our focus is on European customers, but that said, it is hard to justify going with USD pricing.
Is it painful in terms of accounting? Yes. Do I lose money on conversion rates? Yes. Am I making more money? Yes.
Unless you exclusively target a particular market, most people in US might not even know what EUR is. For them it might be the same as Zimbabwean dollars to you.
FYI we had USD pricing. When we dropped it we saw no difference in conversion.
Depending on where your vendors are situated, you might avoid the conversion losses by having USD accounts AND EUR accounts.
We use two separate banks (for redundancy), each of which allows us to have incoming payments in EUR, USD, and a couple of lesser currencies (CAD, SGD) and we keep a balance in each.
And then we use the USD balance to pay, eg. DigitalOcean, and the EUR balance to pay eg BunnyCDN. So we mostly don't have to incur the conversion loss.
Your tactic over paying with USD revenue for USD bills is a good tactic.
Our policy is to avoid US vendors and USD subscriptions.
Really?
USE CASES For a million reasons. Here's a few.
This is a common pattern ('We serve everyone!'), but you'd be well advised to actually pick a use case early on - you'll find that ecom, gaming, finance (especially), content, security, marketing all have their own specific needs and requirements, and they will want to see how you fit them before signing up.
This also makes your marketing efforts a little easier, as instead of having to spread thin across six different verticals, you can target for instance communities of indie gamers, bloggers, small shops who face this problem. when you've got validation from one of these, its easier to scale, but trying to go too broad too early in targeting is one of the most common errors founders make.
nicely designed site though and a lot of other stuff is on point.
EDIT: Your branding is also a little opaque. I wouldn't naturally associate "visitorquery" with what you were trying to do. Going for a domain like detectvpn even if you had to drop down to something like detectvpn.me feels like more of a direct match.
Game studios - a low touch way of getting around smurfing, botting and ban evasion, cheap farming accounts, and likely already think in terms of proxy/VPN abuse. Reach them through Unity and Unreal forums, dev groups, GameSec Twitter/LinkedIn
FinTech / Crypto compliance teams - position yourself as a plug in to KYC or KYB platforms. Behavioural analytics is a big play in fraud prevention, whether someone is using a VPN won't be the whole picture, but is part of it.
Deprioritise marketers, content teams - they're promising but ultimately false positives as no one but the very biggest players amongst them are losing sleep over this.
The key more than anything for both is going to be to emphasise in your positioning the ease of integration. Remember how Stripe had the exact code you needed to use on its homepage for ages? You've got to give the impression that integrating this is going to be super simple.
I feel like you spend quite a bit of time on your homepage selling why someone would want to do it, but not so much on the how and why you make it so easy fo them. Clicking into your docs it looks super simple, but the minute someone's had to click into your docs if they’re a non-dev audience, you're losing people.
You also absolutely must have a GDPR story. You’re detecting proxies and VPNs. This means you’re inspecting user connection data, possibly in real time, and possibly storing flags or identifiers. Even if you’re not processing names, emails, or cookies, under GDPR, IP addresses, device signatures, and behavioural data = personal data if it’s tied to a user.
Your GDPR story needs to cover data type transparency, what exactly what you collect: IP, device type, headers, connection method? If you’re processing requests in memory and returning results via API, that’s low risk. Highlight it. Offer EU hosting or at least say “data processed within EEA-compliant infrastructure." IANAL but you'll want to have a lawyer look at it.
But as someone already said, you maybe need to focus on solving a more specific problem or vertical, rather than being all things to all people. To find it, naybe think back about why you built this in the first place?
A more minor point : I would trust you more as a customer if you added an About page, to put a face on your product.
Take for example, we frequently see Cursor, Aider, Windsurf, copilot, but rarely are there mentions of cline, roo and I think like only once or twice in very early days we saw mentions or Supermaven.
While Cursor runs babble from supermaven creator, many cursor users don’t know what supermaven is though they may know Aider or even cline.
Now draw your conclusion.
P.S. while I have no connection with supermaven, I do use it day to day personally as cursor/windsurf feels overhyped and crucial target to be acquired and enshittified anytime now(windsurf already got digested by oAI).
Actually, except for Windsurf, I only learned about the others from your comment.
Please don't get me wrong: I also work in some spaces that are not highly valued by developers, so I empathize heavily. It's a pain in the butt trying to sell to programmers when this audience is literally one of the most difficult and obnoxiously inconsistently price sensitive. (Will spend thousands on hardware, scoffs at $1 apps.)
Smaller vendors in your price target might have the budget but not the mindshare to implement.
I’d be curious if you 100x your pricing.
Folks want to fit you into a neat bucket. If you don’t fit in, it causes emotional discomfort. This can be true even if strictly not the case in your pov - but customers perception and emotional response might explain some of your difficulties.
CloudFlare for example basically gives it all away, except to the people who make so much money that they want to pay a lot for a few niceties.
Indeed as someone else in the comments said, the personal touch is the best asset you have as indie. So talk with your customers.
I run a Android app, next to my day job, and I pride myself on always putting the customer first, and actually fixing their pain points or implementing their suggestions. Empathy is so important, and something a big company will struggle with.
I'll checkout the recommended books!
Did 2 hours a week work? Is it profitable now? Is it your only job? If so how many years of 2 hours a week did it take to become a livable income?
I love this philosophy of beating out the enshittification and not hypergrowing.
Mobile UX is important for everyone. For content creators, your target market, is crucial. If you postponed it for any other feature, you underestimated it.
For what is worth, I had a great experience using Cursor/AI to make a web app style mobile friendly. It also did some help with the copywriting as well. I would give it a try if I were you.
No intention of being harsh, but, from my point of view, your mobile UI is breaking your business. So immediate action seems advisable.
Good luck!
This is so spot on.
I am also in a competitive space. Couple of my competitor man-child founders blocked me on social media for simply being on their feed. I took it as a blessing. I tuned out from their noise quickly and focus on customers rather than social media attention disorder.
Do yourself a solid. Don't watch competitors. Watch customers and the market.
If you come to a market that's "wide open" with nobody else there, there are two possibilities:
1. You're the first person to ever think of that idea
2. Lots of other people have had the same idea, but failed to make it work.
I mean, #1 is possible -- somebody has got to be first -- but #2 is much more likely.
By contrast, if you're in a space with lots of competitors, that demonstrates that the business idea is sustainable: if the market can support N sustainable companies, is can probably sustain N+1, particularly if you bring something new to the table.
I like this quote a lot. I think it addresses a common execution paralysis where someone identifies a solution to a rich problem space but decides against building it due to there being an obvious competitor.
I've also seen this first hand. Customer emails me 3 times within 3 days and one of those emails included him stating that "time is precious". He subscribed on the $7 / month tier... and then cancelled the next day anyway because he didnt even read what the product did... sigh
I want to add another anecdote: I built an app for creating certificates[1]. It was originally a case study for a book I'm writing, so I didn't think much of "target users". But then I decided to make it a real/standalone product. I was struggling to find real users.
Then, just by sheer coincidence, a friend shared his struggle with existing ticket sales platforms. I thought, "Hey, with what I've built so far, it's just like adding another 10% of work" (It wasn't). So I "expanded" the app to become a white-label ticket sales platform[2]. People started using it, and they also use the certificate generation feature ("Your app can create certs for attending events? Sweet!").
I don't know how to distill this into advice, but you get the idea. It's like a South Park meme: Step #1: Listen to users, Step #2: ???, Step #3: Profit!
This is repeated constantly, but I fear that it is internalized as “write shitty code and throw money at it later.” If you have taken the time to learn your language well, you can avoid a lot of really bad decisions that don’t cost you additional time.
Similarly, on the infra side of things (where this advice is usually doled out), maybe take the time to have a modicum of understanding about the tools you’re building on. If you’re using a DBaaS, your vendor almost certainly has monitoring built-in, often for free, or a nominal cost. USE IT, and learn what it is you’re looking at. “The DB is slow” could be anything from excessive row locks due to improperly-held transactions to actually hitting an underlying resource limit – and for the latter, 9/10 it’s a symptom of something that’s misconfigured, or not understanding your RDBMS’ operation.
For example, do you have a write-heavy table with a UUIDv4 PK, lots of columns that are heavily indexed, and some medium-large JSON blobs in it? Congratulations, you’ve created Postgres’ (and MySQL, but for different reasons) worst nightmare. Every write is amplified by the indexes, and even if you’re doing an UPDATE and are only hitting one of the indexed columns, all of them will be rewritten. The UUIDv4 PK means your WAL traffic is going to skyrocket from all the full page writes, and if your JSON blobs are big enough to be unwieldy, but not big enough to have be TOASTed, that’s another huge amplification to writes. All of this can easily result in hitting IOPS limits, network bandwidth limits, or CPU saturation from additional queries piling up while this one is dealt with, and all of it could be easily avoided by having a basic understanding of your tooling.
For specific discussions on what I wrote about, I recommend (other than reading Postgres’ docs, of course) this [0] and this [1], and anything else on those sites.
If you like technical podcasts, postgres.fm [2] is pretty good.
[0]: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/hot-updates-in-postgr...
[1]: https://www.enterprisedb.com/blog/impact-full-page-writes?la...
[2]: https://postgres.fm/
Also, you really should consider creating a blog -- your writing is good, and well-informed.
From my own experience, I can say that this mindset can easily become an eternal excuse to procrastinate building and shipping. “First, I must perfect my knowledge and tools—only then will I build my perfect product.” But that’s just another form of perfectionism, and often, it’s equivalent to never shipping anything at all.
Or, explicitly germane to a language vs. an ORM, something like concatenating strings instead of building them in whatever your language’s method of doing so is. Does it have that big of a performance hit in a vacuum? No, but it also takes no more effort to do it correctly, and small gains add up, so why not do it right from the start?
mtlynch•19h ago
These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.
> When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.
I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.
> People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.
I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.
> When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.
I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.
I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."
> Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.
I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.
Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.
sebastiennight•14h ago
The trick I've found for this is to pre-sell. Would you buy, now, knowing that the feature is on the roadmap and will be there soon?
If yes, and they vote with their credit card: we build ASAP, to fulfill the promise.
If no, it might mean you should not waste time on that feature.
mtlynch•13h ago
Yes, exactly! That's the same solution I landed on. I'd say, "Great! You can pre-pay for three months of service, and your billing cycle won’t start until that feature is available."