Show HN We launched our first digital product – hard lessons as Indie Developers

7 10 1 year ago

Hi HN,

We recently launched our project, alt-generator.ai, a WordPress plugin designed to automate the generation of optimized, multi-language alt texts to boost accessibility and SEO. Despite our hard work and numerous iterations, our launch didn’t go as planned—we ended up with 0 conversions.

We’re sharing this openly to learn from our experience. We’d love to hear your honest feedback on our product, marketing approach, or any other aspect you think could be improved. What do you think went wrong, and what would have made you consider using a tool like this? Any insights or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help!

mtmail• 1 year ago

What was the marketing approach so far? The usual producthunt launch + submitting the tool to many directories?

On HN you can use https://news.ycombinator.com/show which requires less upvotes to get visibility. Without 'Show HN' in the title new tools get overlooked easily. Not sure if your target audience (Wordpress agencies?) hang out on HN though

alex_arc_nine6• 1 year ago

Thank you!

Yes, exactly. We published on: ProductHunt, Medium, X and here. Also some sharing from our friends in networks.

Nice, I will try it over there as well.

esafak• 1 year ago

Did you try reaching out to companies that look like good targets?

alex_arc_nine6• 1 year ago

Yeah! But no response at all. Cold emails don't seem to work well.

alex_arc_nine6• 1 year ago

Thanks everyone for taking a look. We crossed 300 unique visitors, unfortunately still no conversion.

If you have any feedback on structure, layout, pricing, please let us know!

iterateoften• 1 year ago

The pricing is phrased weird

€0,05 per asset forever

That makes it sounds like I need to pay that forever. Instead compare to:

€0,05 one-time fee per asset

Makes it sound like I just pay it once and it is good forever.

alex_arc_nine6• 1 year ago

Thanks for the input!

If you have any other feedback, pls let me know!

ostaquet• 1 year ago

Building the product is the easy part. Selling the product is the hard part.

I’m scaling and advising small and medium businesses. The biggest challenge I saw is to find the product market fit (PMF).

The PMF is first to solve a problem people wants to solve and who are ready to pay for it.

Did you have an idea about who is your ideal customer? Maybe it is press media? As soon as you answered this question, you can promote your product at the right places.

alex_arc_nine6• 1 year ago

Totally agree!

We were just trying to be honest. The product is very specific so we kind knew it would be hard to really find paying customers.

Ideally we need agencies or others who work on websites and want to use our service to provide this service to their clients. Also, they could mark it up nicely.

Show HN We launched our first digital product – hard lessons as Indie Developers

Related Stories