[brudgers]

The product is quick and easy to use...even if my grandpa's use case probably doesn't match any of the three primary options :). The aesthetics are tasteful.

My design advice is to get rid of the part that is unpleasant to the maximum extent possible. That's what good design does. It's one of the things Hacker News gets right.

How useful are email updates with static text versus a dashboard that can slice and dice data? Sure some people will want email because that's the way they have always done it. Some people will want email updates because it fits their use case. But everyone won't so it can be opt in.

Or to put it another way, it's not clear that most people will have the problem that email notifications solve or at a finer grain, that the problems that come with email notifications are less painful than the problems that email notification solves.

Riffing a bit...email notifications could be an upsell. The conundrum I encounter with free platforms is investing time in building something when there is not an obvious revenue model.

[anges244]

The revenue model is simple in this case. For everyone that wants to use a full website (custom domain, analytics, no attribution), a small price is worth it. Adding the notifications on the dashboard is the next step but for now receiving it directly was much easier and instant. I think any grandpa would love to receive contact emails! Haha... By the way you had me worried that it looks like an email catcher website and added a features page. Hope this is a good step but anyway, you are the one to blame!:-P

[brudgers]

0. It's the 'a small price' plus a free tier that concerns me in terms of sustainability for a business. It makes sense of Walmart to provide and maintain and support free software because the free software:

  a. does not cannibalize sales transactions.
  b. does not have design incentives to be delibrately
     bad/frustrating/incomplete
  c. does not allow the creation of bad business metrics
     like "Look how many free users it has!"
  d. *does* create a virtuous cycle where there is revenue
     for support and maintenance proportional to its use.

The free tier of a paid product does the opposite of each. Not only is the paid tier "competing with free" the company itself is actively anchoring the price to 0€.

1. 10,000 free users and 1000 paid users means supporting 11,000 users on the revenue from 1000 (and that's assuming an optimistic 9% conversion rate and an optimistic 1000 users). With the current pricing that's less than 50k a year before expenses.

2. The revenue model in #\1 suggests a significant probability that the business will be underfunded. Underfunded businesses tend toward ceasing operations. I mean if the business gets to 1000 paid accounts a year from now at a steady rate, that's only 25k in the first year.

3. Where I am going is that the as a business proposition, if it is worth investing the time in building and managing a website on PageRocket, then it is probably worth 50€ a month and with 50€ a month per paid account, there is money to run a business and incentives to make the product worth 50€ a month or 100 or 200.

Of course, if the goal is passive income, then that's a different model.

4. There was an interview with Jeff Atwood (I think on Hanselminutes but maybe Software Engineering Daily) where he described the three things a landing page has to do. The two I remember are it has to tell people 'what it is' and 'why the person should care'. A lot of goes in to those will be subject to interpretation by the visitor. "Oh a box to type in my email address" leads to a lot of quick assumptions that it is probably better not to have people make.

[anges244]

I think you are right but since it's an immature product, we had to decrease the price significantly.

The goal is somewhere between passive income and becoming something more so maybe that's why the mixed signals. Have to take a look at that, I guess.

I know and we did the math on how free users impact our finances but had to somehow launch it and get attention. What would you suggest? Trials and increased pricing? By the way, thanks for providing your feedback!

[brudgers]

I'm all for 'shipping' by which I mean making something and getting it in front of people and getting feedback. https://blog.ycombinator.com/minimum-viable-product-process/

Launching, not so much because often the idea of launching creates a PR driven process optimized around getting attention rather than the hard work of talking to people at the risk of rejection. It's not that PageRocket is not a fine piece of work. It's more than GoDaddy and Wix run advertisements on TV for free websites and WordPress has a free tier and that's what PageRocket is competing against (plus its own free tier).

but since it's an immature product, we had to decrease the price significantly

There are many people, including myself, who feel reluctant to charge people a lot of money and find reasons to lower their prices. One way of validating a business idea is whether or not people will pay a substantial amount of money for something that has not yet been built. Patio11 (Patrick Mackenzie) tells the story about validating Appointment Reminder here: https://www.conversionaid.com/podcast/patrick-mckenzie-kalzu...

I recommend his advice (since much of what I have written here is stolen from him, much of the rest was stolen from YC) regarding bootstrapping a business.

The third source of my advice is my own business experience. I've learned that getting to "No" quickly is better than a slow death of maybe and starvation revenues that only allow writing the rent check.

[anges244]

To be honest you got me! In my mind shipping is the way to go and in the last few days launching is a weird option I almost get dragged into pursuing! Haha... You got the reluctant to charge part completely right and I know you make a great case. Will try to do it the hard way since this is more disappointing and you easily get caught up in a momentary launch fantasy that does not exist! Thank you again for everything!

[brudgers]

I'm not saying it is impossible. I am suggesting that it is hard and the hard part is talking to people about something that they might not want.

PageRocket is a really nice piece of work and could be the basis for a profitable business I think. But that profitable business probably means going out and selling to one customer at a time...there are a lot of small businesses in the world for which PageRocket could be a very very good solution.

Currently, I see a possible business that is closer to the design agency end of the spectrum than the Wordpress end. Design agencies ship and don't really launch.

37 Signals is that sort of model. It was a design agency that eventually built a product, Basecamp. StackOverflow is sort of similar...Fog Creek Software was both a consultancy and built FogBugz. Slack was a game company before it hit on a product.

I want to reiterate that the process for PageRocket is well designed and the aesthetic results tasteful. I suppose one way of putting it is that the quality of what I see suggests that the team is capable of building something businesses might pay 'real' money for and I hate the idea that the bar would be set at a place where doing so becomes unlikely. So in the end, I guess I am encouraging you to aim higher or at least at higher fees.

Another HN classic: https://jacquesmattheij.com/double-your-price-and-no-im-not-...