Ask HN: How would you market this service?

Hi all,

I have a genuine problem here, I have been working for myself on a licensing layer for my personal apps.

A few fellow developers are using it after seeing how good it is, but I've had a very hard time getting new users into the platform.

In average, a dozen of people are signing up a week and are going through the first steps, setup their dashboard and issue their first license. I made a CLI that automates all of that by safely.

Then, blank.

I feel like I didn't find the way to properly show off the service or I don't know. For me it totally make sense to use a licensing layer, it ensures your data stays in one spot, even if u use multiple payment providers or MoR.

Although it seems hard for people to understand the value of it.

I won't share the link, I'm not doing marketing here. The SaaS is really about, licensing your app, customer portal, payment provider agnostic, deep analytics, usage and cross-platform SDKs.

Do any of you have any ideas?

4 points | by dmzxnico 1 day ago

8 comments

  • gabosarmiento 1 hour ago
    I’d think about this less as “how do I market this?” and more as “how do I find a repeatable acquisition machine?”

    Do you know roughly what a customer is worth to you? If a customer is worth $1,000 and you’re willing to pay $100 CAC, then a channel you expect to bring 10 customers gets a $1,000 test budget.

    Run the test. If it gets close to that CAC, put more into it and see if it scales. If it doesn’t, kill it and test another channel.

    Once you find the one that works, that’s what you accelerate.

  • Ilia21489 8 hours ago
    I had this problem. And I think the best way to find out is to collect feedback from your most recent users. Ask them directly; someone will definitely point out the cause, and that will be more helpful than anything else.
  • codegeek 23 hours ago
    I looked at your landing page and I cannot understand what it does. What are you licensing exactly ? Is it a license for softsare product (e.g. license key etc) OR is it license as in restricting how many users can access the product etc ?

    I think you need to be very clear on what problem are you solving exactly and for whom ? May be I am not your target audience but I have no clue what you offer from your landing page.

  • davedx 1 day ago
    I'm actually working on this problem by building OctoLoops (https://octoloops.com) to help find channels to promote the app and get users. It's working so far (the main agent I'm using is communities, which finds threads on Reddit and Indiehackers to post comments on). It's all human-in-the-loop to avoid being spammy and try to be genuinely helpful to people instead while also promoting the tool.

    I'd love to hear your ideas on whether it would be useful for you too. Let me know if you give it a try (email's in HN profile), and good luck with your service!

    [-]
    • jcjmcclean 1 day ago
      Love this idea, thanks for sharing. I'll give it a try when I launch my next project!
  • whatdoyoumean02 1 day ago
    You might have a positioning problem more than a product problem.Have you tried asking users what made them stop after issuing their first license?
  • demibabs 19 hours ago
    I’m not the target audience so forgive me.

    Your site looks very clean & well designed but please please actually write the copy yourself instead of using AI for it.

  • coalstartprob4 12 hours ago
    how does your icp compare to what keygen.sh have?

    are you really solving a pain

    how painful is it really

  • tmpsvc2695f5 23 hours ago
    [dead]