Rakathos

Slightly off-topic, but I wanted to expand on anxiety quick:

Anxiety, though, (and I'm speaking from experience here, having had some light anxiety attacks caused by too much regular caffeine usage) seems to be characterised by a feeling of impending doom, that everything is wrong, it can't be fixed, it's all hopeless, etc.

I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder earlier this year, after some career-related stress gave me a panic attack. Your description, the feeling of impending doom, everything is wrong, etc. is spot on. For me, it feels like a broken fight-or-flight response. I feel like I have to physically do something right now, and if I don't then something very bad is going to happen.

After my first panic attack, I immediately scheduled an appointment with a doctor. I was prescribed Xanax to take whenever I feel anxious, and then I was given a recommendation to see a therapist.

The therapy has helped, but by far the biggest improvement has come from daily, rigorous exercise.

Two months ago I started running twice each day, along with walking to/from work and walking our dog. My anxiety has been almost completely eradicated, excluding a couple random 5-minute bouts every other week, whereas before it was an every day, all day thing. I'm also happy to say that I have not had to use the Xanax at all since I began exercising.

If you're feeling any of the symptoms of anxiety (feeling of impending doom, it's all hopeless, etc.) or depression, please, make an appointment and see a doctor. You can get help.

As someone that has a Windows Phone and uses Cortana, yes. Everything he was doing is a pretty standard response or action from Cortana.

I mention this every time, but I think the most interesting thing about it is that developers can integrate their apps with it. For example, you could open Cortana and say "Send a Yo to John Doe" or "GenericBankingApp, transfer $25 to my checking account".

I've been meaning to sit down and build a couple small apps that take advantage of this, but I haven't gotten around to it yet.

FYI, it looks like the mobile site has some issues in IE on Windows Phone. The white text is a bit hard to read with the background image [1], and refreshing the page results in this [2]. Looking forward to trying it out though!

[1] http://imgur.com/vtp2PnZ

[2] http://imgur.com/3iEI4kw

Oh I agree, it shouldn't be advertised as a headline feature if it's not fully functional. I'm just pointing out that Microsoft considers Cortana to be in beta, and it's only available on the developer preview of the OS. With that in mind, it's possible that Cortana just isn't doing everything that it should be doing, and thereby isn't quite as useful as it could be.

It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta. I think the most interesting news about Cortana is that, unlike Siri and Google Now, it can be extended by 3rd-party developers.

For example, my Chase Mobile app uses Cortana. By activating her and saying "Chase Mobile ATM", Cortana will launch the app and search for nearby ATMs. I imagine that the GroupMe developers can extend it in the same way: "GroupMe Send 'your message here'".

Just bought a makeup bag from her Etsy shop that my girlfriend is sure to love.

Good luck!

A few people were upset that I called it a failure after 4 months. You're right, 4 months is nothing compared to most other startups or software businesses.

Let me clarify that I'm calling it a failure not because I wasn't rich in 4 months. Instead, it's a failure to me because I lost interest in what it did and who it was for, and I had no intention of ever working on it again.

I'm a very proud person, and I'm proud of what I've accomplished. That being said, you're right about coming off as negative or ashamed. I don't actually feel that way about myself or my efforts, but I realize that it may not look that way over the internet.

In fact, I had intended the "downright embarrassment" bit as a joke. Still, thanks for pointing it out!

If there's one thing I've learned from Rob Walling and Mike Taber's podcasts[1], it's that marketing and customer development are by far the most important parts of building a successful SaaS business.

the product is not as bad as you think

This is true. I know that I'm a developer, and as such I can easily see the mistakes that my competitor has made. Meanwhile, the average user just thinks it's a run-of-the-mill program, put on this earth to torment them like any other software.

[1]http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/

My entire site design and copy have been a source of downright embarrassment. In fact, this week's "challenge goal" is a brand new home page, landing page and sales page design.

The copy itself is going to need to change to reflect the pivot from inventory to ERP, so happily "Inventory management without the suck" is going away.

The "not interested" inversion of "contact us" is also pretty weird and announces that you expect people to not be interested.

Curiously, I thought this myself when I put it up. To this day, I can't fathom why I thought that was a good choice of words (or why I never changed it).

Then as you scroll it's just a wall of text all the way to the end.

I had been experimenting with the "hybrid copy"[1] sales page that Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers has been a proponent of. It's worked incredibly well for my actual landing pages, where a user knows what the product is about when they click whatever link or ad brought them there. However, I took it way too far by doing "hybrid copy" on the home page.

The new design I'm working on is going to be the classic home page with a brief overview of the product and a CTA linking to the "hybrid copy" features/tour page.

Edit: I neglected to mention that the "hybrid page" experiment resulted in a noticeable increase in new trials.

[1] http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/

<4 months part-time is't really enough time to spend on a business before evaluating it as a failure. Wile pivoting may make sense, I'm pretty sure that $300 + 120 days doesn't generate enough data to say anything conclusive.

There was a lot of hubbub before about calling the whole thing a "failure". I should have made it more clear that I wasn't calling it a failure because I spent 4 months and only got one customer. Instead I was calling it a failure because I was no longer interested in what it did, and I had no intention of working on it any longer.

SaaS products like Rakasheets are deceptively expensive for customers. This is good for the SaaS provider. Your middle-priced plan is ~$700 annually

This is something that I hadn't even considered until an actual small business owner sent me feedback saying the exactly that. Previously I thought people were like me, and only considered monthly costs of products unless they were buying an annual plan. It may be that I'm alone in that.

There's also the issue of how many inventory items I would let each plan track. The smallest plan, which was $29/month, only let a user track 25 inventory items at a time. That's a laughably small amount of inventory. I attribute this to not targeting a specific type of customer, but it could also easily be attributed to not thinking it through.

If you're low on cash, try direct sales to start. That's you on the phone, or sending email. Or getting in your car and driving, if your area warrants it. If you're really offering something that will benefit your prospects' business, they want to hear from you.

I live in a small town of less than 4000 people, and the nearest printing company other than the one I work at is an hour's drive away. That makes it hard to talk to them in person while still holding a 9-5 M-F job.

With that in mind, there's really no excuse for me to avoid cold calling potential customers. If my own printing company is an indicator, sales won't be made until numerous phone calls have been made.

Not harsh at all! You're right, but in my defense "Iron Conversions" was just going to be a massive dunning email generator. It would have hooked into a user's Stripe account and responded to webhooks with A/B tested dunning emails. The onus would have been on the user to convert their trials.

I'm interested in knowing why you think it's worth doubling down?

There's a bunch of reasons for me to try it again. The most persuasive one has been all of the great feedback I've received from trial users, people on my mailing lists and interested HNers telling me that it just needs a little bit more to be a viable product. "A bit more" in this context is stuff like accounting or order management, which I was really resistant to before as it went against the "grand vision" I had for my product.

And if I fail again, it will at least serve as a guide on "what not to do" for everybody that has been following along. I won't be any worse off financially; I'm not risking my job or income beyond the $50 I spend on AdWords each month. That being said, I'm still highly, highly motivated to succeed.

Besides the lessons you've learned, did you see an actual opening in this market

There's a big gap in the "ERP for printing companies" market. The only big name in this area (which I won't mention for fear of legal reasons) puts out a terrible product. It fails so often, and it's so darn complicated for Regular Joe Employee to use that it's a wonder this company has any sales at all. I'm often the person that gets called in to fix the problems it causes at my own company, much to my dismay.

You're right about people switching from legacy products though, and that's definitely an area I'll need to gather more information about when I start customer development in the next few weeks.

or is your motivation mostly that you think you know much more than you did a year ago?

I feel like I know a lot more now than I did before, but I'll never know it all. For example, I know that customer development and marketing is way, way more important than any code I'll ever right. In fact, that's why I'm not writing a single line of code beyond my MVP until I get some real customer development and feedback.

The flipside is that a lot of developers don't have enough hobbies to draw from with which to start a business.

This was (is?) definitely me. I have a grand total of three hobbies: Building software (also my job), playing WoW and reading.

I couldn't think of any business idea that I could build off of WoW (and I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't allow that), so I took a different route for finding a problem to solve:

I surfed through small business forums and picked the problem that most people were complaining about. That happened to be inventory management.

(I'm happy to say I've since quit WoW, on account of the nonexistent IRL returns).

(Blog post author here)

I wondered where the random burst of traffic came from.

For those who haven't read the more recent posts, I received a ton of great feedback from HN and other entrepreneur friendly places. I've also been gobbling up great advice from places like Rob Walling's "Startups for the rest of us" podcast.

About a month ago I started a "challenge", inspired by Brennan Dunn, to rebuild my "failed" product, and it's been going pretty well so far.

Most importantly, a few days ago I announced that I'm "pivoting" from just inventory management to a full-blown ERP for printing companies. I chose printing companies because I'm a full-time developer at a printing company, and I know exactly what kinds of problems we face with our terrible ERP system. Though I need to be super careful not to build a system that is so focused only my own company can use it.

If there's one piece of advice I could give somebody else, it would be to narrow your niche like I did with printing companies. This has helped me so much it's downright ridiculous.

Edit: Also, when I originally posted the article some people were concerned that I was just trying to build a "meta" product with Iron Conversions. I admit I had planned to build a product with it, but I've put that on hold indefinitely in favor of rebuilding Rakasheets. I don't know if I'll ever return to it, so for now Iron Conversions is just the place I'm blogging about my progress.

I sell Inventory Management software, and I priced the three plan levels by guessing. I went for $29/$59/$129 across three different plan levels.

Many trial users have told me that my pricing is way too high. I imagine these people actually want the product for free[1] and will probably never "buy" it until it is.

On the opposite side of this spectrum, I've been told by potential customers that my pricing is so low that they wouldn't consider buying it because it isn't a serious price.

I've just started rebuilding[2] this product because it failed for a variety of reasons, and once I get to pricing it won't be hard to figure out which side of the argument I'm going to favor.

[1] https://twitter.com/Rakathos/status/350615055223644160/photo...

[2] http://www.ironconversions.com/blog/post/Breathing-Life-Into...

You're right, the online inventory management bidding for AdWords clicks averages far more than I spend per click. I haven't checked recently, but $3-$6 sounds about right.

I started to bid as cheap as I could, figuring it'd be better to get 15 clicks a day at 20 cents or whatever, instead of 2 clicks a day at $1 each.

My total AdWords budget is around $75 per month, and I spend $1.5 - $2.5 a day. My math is probably off here, I'd need to double check.

By a fluke I noticed that "mobile inventory management" and variants brought me tons and tons of clicks from AdWords for incredibly cheap.

Attempting to capitalize on that, I did my best to make the product "mobile ready" and started flinging some of the traffic at a special mobile landing page.

Having not converted any of that traffic, I've ascertained that they're probably looking for a native inventory app rather than a web app.

Edit: "tons and tons" is relative to the clicks I was getting before this discovery.

The entire backend of Rakasheets is built in C#/Asp.Net.

For the real-time technology I'm using SignalR, which I highly recommend. It's like websockets for .Net and it's very simple to use.

Sidenote: While I love SignalR, "real-time inventory" has added zero value to the product from my customer's point of view.

You're somewhat correct, I'm building Iron Conversions as a way to boost my trial-to-paid conversion rate for Rakasheets.

Without going into too much detail (I'm not 100% sure this is what I want it to do or how I want to word it) I'm building the tool to respond to Stripe webhooks[1] and other subscription events with dynamic[2] emails.

The goal is to prod my trial users into using the app more, or at the very least telling me why they won't use the app.

This is a problem for me because as it stands my trial users don't even use the app. They'll create an account and then just disappear, never to log in again.

"When seeking advice/services for converting users, I'm not sure I would look to the person who just blogged about failing to convert users. Maybe I'm wrong."

Perhaps because I've failed miserably at converting users, I know exactly what doesn't work (insert winky face here). That's up to you to decide. Of course, I'll be blogging about all of the progress I make with Rakasheets on the Iron Conversions website, follow along if you like.

I'll be honest, yes I plan to sell this service if it works. However, using it to get more conversions out of my trial users on Rakasheets is the main goal here. If IC is popular, then it's popular. If it's the stupidest tool in the world, it still serves my purpose.

(1) Can't I just make Rakasheets respond to my webhooks? Yes, it already does. The problem is I find it a hassle to have to open up my IDE, write a bunch of logic for this or that situation or webhook, and then add in the email html/copy on top of that.

Finally, when that's done I need to test all of the changes and push them to the server. It's a hassle I don't like to mess around with, and severely impacts my testing of these "dunning" emails to the point that I don't even test them anymore.

If you don't have these concerns, more power to you. It's just an itch I want to scratch for myself.

(2) Iron Conversions will query Rakasheets for that user's inventory data. For example, an email will be sent saying "Hey you're tracking 1500 foozles in Rakasheets, if your trial ends now you'll never see those foozles again". That's an exaggeration, but it gets the point across.

I'm still here! HN is throttling my comment submission rate though, so I can't reply to very quickly right now.

I agree, this advice is priceless.

Thanks for your feedback!

1) I've quickly learned this point but for a long time I resisted adding any other "features" to the app. I considered it a waste of time, if I couldn't get more than one person paying for the product, why should I spend even more time building something that may never get used?

Suffice it to say I've changed my tune and building in all of the other modules is just something I'll have to deal with if I want to make any money.

2) The terminology is an antiquated reference to some very old copy. Originally a sheet was like an excel sheet, each one would do something different or track a different location, etc.

After going through a bunch of iterations on the copy, I just started referring to the product as a sheet, as in "inventory sheet". I agree 100% that this is confusing and needs to change.

3) One of the first things I'm going to do for rebuilding this app is charge far more. Businesses that scoff at paying more than $29 per month are probably not the kind of business that should be using the product.

4) I've tried a bunch of different designs and copy for the landing page, including a bunch of screenshots at one time. One big problem I've had is my failure to accurately track what was a success and what wasn't. What you see there is my last attempt before losing interest in the product. (I was going for "hybrid copy" for those of you that read CopyHackers).

5) In my latest iteration on the home page and other parts of the site I tried to go for a more "personal" approach instead of "corporate-y" like my competitors. Like the point above says, though, I have failed to accurately track what works and what doesn't beyond saying this iteration has been my most successful at getting trials.

All in all, great advice. Thanks!

"Small business owners aren't hackers" is what I've learned recently, and I wish I learned it months ago. In hindsight I know I went about finding my problem-to-solve in the wrong way.

Instead of interacting with my potential customers, I only read what they were talking about from afar, and somehow divined that "real time inventory management" was the solution.

I didn't ask them what they thought, and I didn't validate the product. That was a big mistake and could have saved me months of effort building something I'm no longer interested in.

Re: "Online inventory management without the suck". All copy so far has been written in a vacuum. I have had literally zero feedback from random internet visitors (until today, from HN). My only way to gauge if my copy was working was by the amount of trial signups I was getting each week.

It happens that that was one of the last messages I tested before losing interest. Trust me, the copy has gone through numerous iterations over the last few months trying to find something that sticks.

I've tried long copy, short copy, "hybrid" copy, screenshots, no screenshots. I didn't just stick that message up there and call it good for a few months.

This might sound like I'm irritated or angry, I'm not. I genuinely appreciate all of the feedback I've been getting. Thank you!

This seems to be a common theme so I'll post this here instead of replying to each comment with the same thing:

I probably should have named the blog post "I've lost interest in my product" instead of calling the whole thing a failure, as that may have been more accurate.

To me it is a failure, but not because I've only gotten 1000 visitors over four months, or because I've only had one paying user.

Instead, I call Rakasheets (the product) a failure because I've lost interest in what it was built for. I built it to solve inventory management for small businesses, but small business inventory does not interest me any longer (if it ever did).

I find it hard to open the project in my IDE and work on it, or even to think about it at all.

With that said, however, I haven't given up on the problem I built it to solve (inventory management). Instead I've given up on who it was built for (small businesses).

I'd like to give more details about that but for now I'd rather build a plan of action before talking about what I'm going to do.

On another note, I completely agree that four months is far too short to call anything a success or a failure. If I were still interested in the product I'd never admit it was a failure simply out of pride.

(Also, thanks for commenting. I really appreciate the advice. If I didn't reply to you it's only because HN throttles comment submission rate. I was unaware.)

Great advice. I admit I had no plan of action when I started building my product.

My line of thought was: "Okay, I'll build it. People will somehow hear about it and start using it. I'll make money which I can then put into marketing the product".

I'm now developing a clear plan of action before I take another step with my product. A lack of one in the first place was crippling.

A grand total of zero. With all of my projects I've been adamant about not doing phone marketing, phone calls, or phone anything.

I realize that that is a crippling problem, especially when my target demographic is small business owners who seem to do everything by phone.

Agreed, four months definitely is not enough time to be calling this a failure.

I've explained my motivations for calling it a failure elsewhere in this thread if you're interested. I probably should have named the post "I've lost interest in my product" as that may have been more accurate.

As for your other point, a motivated marketer would help me immensely. I'll be the first to admit that my marketing sucks. However, hiring another person to help with this project is simply beyond my meager income. I make enough to live comfortably with my girlfriend, but I can't afford too much beyond that.

Even with the issue of money aside, my core problem is that inventory management for small businesses no longer motivates me, I find it hard to work on the project as it is.

That's what nearly all of the feedback I've gotten has been. "It needs to be like X or do Y".

I fought that for a long time but I've been forced to see that inventory management by itself is not something that many businesses can use. They need inventory + X.

Agreed, thanks for the feedback. I'm not a great writer, and my marketing skills definitely leave something to be desired. Nevertheless, it's something I've been trying to improve recently.

When comparing the copywriting I have on my product's website (Rakasheets, not Iron Conversions) it's leaps and bounds better than what it was when it first launched. Originally, my "copywriting" was a rant against using Excel sheets for inventory.

And personally, after re-reading this blog post I feel it was a bit jumbled and jumped around too much. Like I said, it's something I'm trying to improve.

Actually that was a bit that should have been cut out. I previously had a paragraph in there that said most of my mailing list subscribers were from India (according to MailChimp).

I then went on and said that the people on my mailing list weren't very interested in opening the emails I sent or responding to them. I took the line out however because there's no correlation between being Indian and not opening my autoresponders.

I've got Americans and Europeans on there too and they don't open or respond just as much as people from India.

Another sidenote, this probably suggests that what I'm sending isn't all that enticing to anybody and could use some work.