We built the "Excel of Finance Apps," but the growth isn't there. Next move?

2 pointsposted 25 days ago
by caoxhua

Item id: 46608663

8 Comments

takkatakka

25 days ago

Do you have product market fit, and just need to do more marketing? If so, I would keep going. Otherwise, I'd probably be a bit burnt out after 3 years of no PMF.

caoxhua

25 days ago

How do you tell product market fit? we have about ~1K paid users, people constantly send positive praises, but also many people churned away.

I doubt if "bootstrap" is the right way for this type of product/market.

The famous PMF survey (how do you feel if you can no longer use this), %50.8 responds with "very disappointed". And I deeply know this product is pretty unique offering in "finance tracking" market.

But the MRR stays in this level for 6 months now. I feel I do not have ideas to break it through.

takkatakka

24 days ago

Sounds like you certainly found a market. Do you have any estimates on how big that market is, and thus how much of the market you have captured?

And then from there, figuring out what the rest of the market is using, and why.

caoxhua

24 days ago

Thanks! Some competitor did pretty well, the total addressable market should be huge enough, for example Intuit Mint claims to have 10M (free) users, some funded companies benefits a lot from its shutdown.

mmarian

24 days ago

If I was in that position, I'd probably give up. 3 years is a huge opportunity cost of not working on something more successful.

caoxhua

24 days ago

yeah, opportunity cost is huge.

blinkbat

25 days ago

have you identified parts of your business that might be costing you users as opposed to if the product was freeware?

caoxhua

25 days ago

There are some big parts identified for this case, and because it is dependency of 3rd party service, we can not do much about it.

But more importantly, I think it is the product itself, the market is probably does not appreciate that much of "customization / personalization" as I thought, in other words, we are probably haven't figured out the best path to get the ideal users yet.

In the other side, free users do not have this issue. We do have free tier which counts for 1/3 of all active users.