[alanbyrne]

Stop coding, pick up the phone and call some of your free users. Ask them if they'd pay for your product and why/why not.

If none of your free customers are willing to pay, then it might be time for a pivot. Such as licensing your app to financial providers as a value add.

[timv]

If you do pivot, there might be enough return in acting as a broker (/lead generator) for selling financial products to your users.

Once they're paid down their loans (and even before then) you should have a pretty good picture of their financial situation. What are they going to do with that extra cash they have now that their loans repayments are done?

* Take out a loan for a car/holiday?

* Open a share trading account?

* While they're paying down their debts can you get them a better deal on their credit card?

[stevesaldana]

You are spot on. There are so many alternative fee-generating sources and maybe I've been too stubborn at ignoring them. My motivation going into this was that I wanted to create something that provided a definitive value of x, and have customers happily pay a function of x. The known value / known cost approach seemed fair to me.

Pitching additional product for me is troublesome because of the intrinsic fees associated with them. I look at my service as something that accelerates debt repayment in the most efficient way. But to encourage customers to roll-over into a cc balance transfer, mortgage refi, or student loan consolidation, it just pushes their obligations further out in the future. Now, this might not be a bad thing for some people. But ultimately you could get a lot of people into the fee roulette game and it becomes a never-ending cycle where every economic peak and trough of high->low interest rates creates a new incentive for a financial services company to pitch new product.

So, I struggle with this. Do I want to maximize my revenue, or do I want to just provide a really good service for the small group of people willing to pay for it...

[stevesaldana]

Guilty as charged. But I do appreciate hearing it directly from you as it serves to drive the point home.

As a first-time founder and relatively new developer, I could never really tell when the time is right to stop creating and start pitching. Looking back, I definitely went too far with the build, but better late than never to snap out of it and start soliciting.