[melvinram]

Have you made progress in trying to understand your customers and their problems?

You mentioned that 1 or more customers in the pilot are paid-customers. If someone is paying you, either they are forking out the money in the hope that you're going to solve a problem for them or they are forking over the money for other reasons (ex. as a favor to you or due to past relationship.)

Do you understand why the paid pilot customers were willing to pay you?

[mlevental]

the pilots that signed with us signed because the pain point is real and we did a good job pitching them/they are extraordinarily impressionable. the problem is that a key assumption necessary in actually delivering value turned out to be pretty much false (basically we saw almost no adoption amongst users).

[tom_mellior]

> a key assumption necessary in actually delivering value turned out to be pretty much false (basically we saw almost no adoption amongst users).

I'm leaning out on a limb here, but if this means what I think it means, you have developed some app that tradeshow visitors are asked to install to reap some benefits that don't interest them. If that's kind of what you are doing, pull the plug now. People don't use that kind of thing.

[mlevental]

you're very close and

>People don't use that kind of thing.

is exactly one of the key hypotheses that needed validation/falsification. what we are facing now is whether we really falsified it given poor marketing/education on the part of the organizer.

[djur]

I worked in this market for a long time, and the biggest single problem with making software for conferences is that your users aren't your customers. Furthermore, your customers only have a rough understanding of what the users might want. Event attendees don't tend to provide detailed feedback to organizers.

This is why event apps tend to suck -- they're designed to appeal to people who aren't going to use them. To be successful, you have to actually figure out what users want _and_ convince your customers that you know better than them. This is incredibly difficult.

Also, organizers generally aren't invested in promoting your product. They buy your product in the hope that it will magically make their event more successful. It takes a lot of one-on-one training and coaxing to get most of them to participate. This is an extremely support-heavy market, and thus labor-intensive. Even as a startup, you rapidly end up needing dedicated customer support staff.

Also also, as it seems you discovered, there are a ton of pitfalls with building a product that is intended to be used by large groups of people, all at once, in a time-sensitive context, in a single enclosed environment, on their variously capable mobile phones. That makes failures nearly always catastrophic, and it erodes the average experience as well -- there's always people with some sort of bizarre cheapo phone that breaks in obscure ways, and those people also complain loudly and frequently.

[unclebucknasty]

1.) Selling to a customer is hard.

2.) Selling to a customer that must then sell your product to its customer is at least an order of magnitude harder, and may be one of the hardest tricks for a new business to pull-off successfully.

Simply put, you don't have the branding to convert the end customer nor the control over that second sales process. Compounding this is that your product is not a priority for your direct customer and is not mission-critical to them in addressing their actual priorities. Thus, they will not engage nearly the focus required to address item 1 above in selling your product to its customers (i.e. end-users).

This last point can't be stressed enough. As entrepreneurs, our products are our focus and we tend to project that priority onto others.

The only way this model will work is if:

a.) The product is extraordinarily compelling/valuable to the end user in the same sense as would form the basis for building any viable business

AND

b.) The product is easy for your customer to sell to the end user in a frictionless manner (easy to communicate, requires no onboarding or support from your customer, etc.)

AND EITHER:

c.) Your product were mission-critical to your direct customer (preferred)

OR

d.) There was an immediate value to be had for your customer from introducing the product to the end user (monetization, good will, etc)

It seems that you have achieved only b (perhaps) and d in this equation, and then only to varying degrees. If you cannot pivot to solving the other variables then you should shut it down now.

[nickfromseattle]

I used to go to a lot of conferences, and some of the big conference organizers would try and push us to download an app - they were always really painful and didn't provide much value.

What does your app look like and what pain point is it trying to solve?

[Maro]

I'm a comp sci guy, my fiancee runs big (2,000 attendee) tech conferences [1]. Being her partner I have a reasonable amount of visibility into this world. Happy to chat with you.

[1] https://craft-conf.com/

[foota]

Not sure if this fits your context, but could you get the conference to use your app for check in or something? Then they start out with it.

Edit: or find something else that benefits the visitors?

[danieltillett]

This is probably the key. Do you know why users aren't using the product? Have you asked them? It sounds to me like you have a market where one side has a problem, but the other side doesn't.

[mlevental]

>It sounds to me like you have a market where one side has a problem, but the other side doesn't.

yes that is probably a succinct way to express it

[danieltillett]

In that case move onto something else. Unless the side with the problem can force the other side to use your product then you don't have a viable business.

[confiscate]

have you considered which side of the market is more important to focus on first

if you can get a lot of attendees to willingly use the app, the event organizers will follow. They might even knock down your door demanding to pay you $ for a chance to be your customer

if you get the event organizers to sign up, but the attendees don't use the app, then the event organizers will leave

so it would be best to focus on signing up attendees first? aren't they 100x more important then convincing the event organizers? just a thought.

[confiscate]

finding a real pain point that a customer is willing to preorder with real-money, is much much harder than coming up with a tech solution.

the former is harder because it is totally outside of your control, and the latter is way easier because it is almost entirely within your control.

have you thought of other tech solutions that can address the pain point? e.g. put ipads across the trade floor, with the app already installed, so you don't need to ask users to install anything. Or provide a $3 free coffee deal for every person that uses the app, as a marketing promotion? basically some other out-of-the-box way to solve that pain point that you spent so much effort to find

i would say, don't give up so easily because it sounds like you solved the hardest part (finding the pain point), and you are held up on the easier part (coming up with a technical solution). The tech part can always be adjusted on your end to meet the pain point somehow.

[melvinram]

Sounds like you need to talk with these users.

[melvinram]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098643

Did you end up going to some conferences? There are serious problems with many conference apps. Even AWS Re:Invent's app had major problems this last year.

If you're wanting someone to do something (like download an app), you need to motivate them to do. This isn't about marketing. It's about delivering value.

Is your app currently only delivering value to the organizers and not really much for the users?

[mlevental]

>Did you end up going to some conferences?

yes i've been to ~1 conference per month since that post. would've gone to more but someone's gotta build the product right?

>Is your app currently only delivering value to the organizers and not really much for the users?

this is my stumbling point and it's a serious one because building a useful app for attendees is almost like building a fun app for consumers - you have to delight not just deliver value.

[dchuk]

Then do something about that! Don’t quit, go talk to the users and figure why they didn’t adopt. The answers are laying right in front of you but you seem deterred by doing the work. B2b is hard, try harder before quitting.

[mlevental]

>The answers are laying right in front of you but you seem deterred by doing the work

...i've been the sole full-time founder for 9 months. i have worked every single day of those 9 months (doing everything - sales, customer success, investor relations, product). i am not deterred by work - i am deterred by the prospect of burning money chasing a delusion. the users didn't adopt for the same reason every users of every other advertising channel fail to engage: no one likes overt ads.

[dchuk]

9 months is nothing, especially in the B2B world. A lot of entrepreneurship is surviving the grind of the process itself.

[danieltillett]

If it makes you feel any better it took me 11 years to make any money with my startup.

[matte_black]

Why did it take you 11 years? This doesn’t sound like a startup, more like a monetized hobby.

[danieltillett]

It is a long, long story [0].

0. https://www.tillett.info/2015/06/24/why-i-kept-my-startup-in...