Ask HN: I keep doing the same thing over and over, how do I change?

[wtfhappened]

So in the past 4 years I worked on creating a SaaS product in a particular niche and it goes down something like this:

1) Build product

2) Get a few paying customers

3) Start working on improving it for customers

4) Realize product is bloated or is pretty lacking in features.

5) Build more features.

6) No increase in sales, keeps building

7) Gets tired, refund users, abandon working on it.

8) Starts hating 9-5 job, repeat the whole cycle again.

Is my problem, finding a market fit first? I automatically assumed that because of poor sales, I must be lacking in features so I immediately start building. But I get really burnt out by doing this. I almost always end up refunding my customers because I realize what I spent months building is lacking.

The biggest problem I have is, when I start to make incremental changes to the product, I keep having the urge to restart from scratch. However, it's a huge time sink to do this again and again (4 times already). I'm beginning to think this is just an issue with me.

I'm basically in my fourth iteration and I think it's finally clicking. Something is deadly wrong with my thought process.

Any insight would help.

I built the product. I built the website. I got a few customers. Then I get burnt out building more features or making it "perfect". Then I can't work on it anymore and so I look for a job.

After 4 years, I either introduce a change in my process and turn this into a sustainable income or I just give up completely.

[nostrademons]

Usually poor sales isn't an indication of lack of features so much as the wrong features. Features that users don't use are worse than features that don't exist, because they clutter up the UI and make the product harder to use for everyone that doesn't use them.

Start building into your workflow a regular evaluation of "Do my users seriously love this feature? Does it engender a strong positive emotional reaction for a significant fraction of people?" If the answer to that is "no", then kill it. Remove it from the UI and rip the code out of your codebase. As a side benefit, you'll have less of an urge to rewrite from scratch all the time, because the codebase will be smaller and more manageable.

[pfitzsimmons]

Were the paying customers actually using it? Did they love the product (ie, would be a 9 or 10 on an NPS survey)?

If yes, then you should have worked more on sales and marketing.

If no, then you built the wrong feature. Blindly adding a collection of features won't help. You need to figure out what the one feature is that will make customers rave about the product.

The core problem might be that your product ideas were "pretty good" ideas and not "very good" ideas. "Pretty good" ideas are deadly, because they are just good enough to suck you in, but not good enough to make a product that customers rave about, and thus not good enough to make with a product that is easy to market or spread by word of mouth.

[wtfhappened]

Yes they were. They did like it, I don't know about an NPS survey.

My product was similar to others already existing.

[iandanforth]

No advice but I am impressed you've been able to build multiple products and get people to pay for them. That's pretty cool all by itself! Way farther than I've gotten :)

[mga226]

Although there's a lot more in-depth, actionable information out there, this blog post by Amy Hoy seems tailor-made to your question:

http://unicornfree.com/2013/how-do-you-create-a-product-peop...

[wtfhappened]

its really good article. I wish someone would upload amy hoys course its like really expensive.

[mga226]

I hope you're trolling.

If not: I think you'll find find the HN community doesn't react well to either stealing content or complaining about the (quite reasonable, in this case) cost of people's products.

[wtfhappened]

I wasn't. I can't afford a couple grand for a dozen power point slides. If somebody wants to share it then I would be thankful, definitely won't view him as a thief. You are not an ambassador for the entire HN community and their view on digital copyright or ethics for that matter. People complain about cost of people's products all the time on Show HN if you haven't noticed.

[mga226]

I didn't realize the comment I was responding to was from the OP. I really am sorry if I came off as harsh, but I stand by my comment.

[helen842000]

I think the key bit is 7) Gets tired...

If you get tired of working on a profitable side project - sell it! Don't refund users or abandon it. There are lots of people that would like to get started and learn from an existing product.

Decide what is the most enjoyable part for you. Finding the idea, building it, solving problems, selling? Try to do that more.

Maybe you end up building SasS products for other people, partnering on a project you really love.

Like you say, you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. The only reason to do something over and over is if you enjoy it.

[andyakb]

What are you doing to market the product?

From the outside, it seems likely that you have the common developer mentality of "If I build it, the customers will come."

If a business does not have a reliable, repeatable way to acquire customers profitably then any success they may have is based on luck. It is much easier to just try to code that problem away, but likely you need to step away from the code and start talking to customers so you can find out what they really care about and where you can find more people like them.

[wtfhappened]

literally I just put it out there and it gets organic traffic.

I'm working on discovering channels and selling to that niche. One way is linkedin but it's a tough sell.

[sirwitti]

Maybe the problem is perfectionism. For me it's often hard to know how important what is. So it's easy to get stuck in a problem that is not that critical right now.

I hope that helps a bit, Martin

[mrfusion]

Would you consider telling us what the past projects were? I've been in a SAAS idea drought for six years now. Or perhaps you'd want to sell one of your past projects?

[_random_]

Don't do it alone?

[jshevek]

That's the first thing that went through my head. Thought I've not had the OP's success, I've had some of his problems. Doing it alone makes those problems worse.