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by gus_massa 1655 days ago
Do you have any current customer? Can you just unplug it without hurting anyone?

The price structure is strange. I think 50 VM in the free plan is too much, and $1200 in the next plan is too much. [This is extremely far from my knowledge area, so perhaps my opinion is very wrong.]

Also, from this post by patio11, https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s... the sell price is the annual profit multiplied by a small number, like x1, x2, x3, ... It depends on a lot of things, and people have sold companies without profit, but don't be too optimistic.

1 comments

I don't have any users. A few tried it out but did no continue using it.

Honestly I can keep it running forever since it's running on a dedicated machine that has lots of resources and that I use for other projects as well. So it's not like it's costing me to keep it up. The burden is purely mentally (I just don't want to keep thinking about it anymore...I tried...I failed...right?)

I experimented with pricing a lot. The one you see now is the latest iteration. The idea was you pay 1$ per EC2 instance per month. So kind of like insurance right? The trick is that if you have say 60 instances you're paying 100$ still because the tier allows 100 instances to be monitored. I wanted the expense to be fixed every month because I've gotten feedback from folks that companies don't like variable cost per month for infrastructure...and it's already an issue that AWS is costing them a different amount each month....so it would be a hard sell to get to them to pay me a variable amount as well (small fish and all that).

Initially I didn't have a free tier at all. I only added it later as a desperate attempt to attract users. That's why historically I never gotten around to setting up a register flow without an invite link. :/ I don't know if 50 is the right number for the free tier but it definitely needs to be a larger number since companies/individuals that I target have a larger amount of servers. The ones that only have a handful don't really need this tool at all since they already mostly know all of their servers by name (so to speak). It's the whole "cattle vs pets" discussion. Anyway, that's where the limit to 50 comes from.

Thanks for the link btw. I read a bunch of patio11's posts but I don't think I've read this one.

In my opinion, if as another comment hinted there is a real need then either: a) you are unable to reach your target user or buyer b) you are unable to close a sale c) you onboarding experience or UX needs work (the little things needed to manage this solution day-to-day.

As the other commenter suggested, I would recommend finding buyers on Twitter and seek feedback before selling. It's easy to lie to yourself in customer interview so suggest reading The Mom Test to understand how to get meaningful feedback that is unbiased from your potential audience. You should also Tweet on your subject with a focus on the problem you are solving and why it is a problem, rather than your solution.

Thanks. I'm pretty sure it's a little bit of all 3 of those. And possibly other things you didn't list.