Should I shut my startup down?
I launched JustToSay Cards around 18 months ago to provide online group greeting cards, after changing jobs twice during UK Covid lockdowns and missing the farewells when you normally change jobs.
It's fair to say it's not got any traction and, to be honest, my enthusiasm for it has taken a dive.
I think functionally it's pretty reasonable, and I have more ideas to make it better, but it needs marketing and, frankly, I don't know where or how to start .
The domain expires next week and I need to make a decision...do I let it lapse or do I renew it and really double-down on marketing?
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Listen man, ima keep it 100 with you,
I was hopping from project to project, boat to boat because I feared marketing. It was just some high-level form of procrastination--made me feel like I was being productive by building something new.
you really only need two things to have a successful business,
figure out #2 as soon as possible!!!
I know its hard my brother, but the demon will keep haunting you until you battle it. So my opinion: TASTE that success you were looking for when you first started this project, that way you're building upon a huge psychological W when you start something new.
Give me a time machine right now. I would warp back and give my younger self this exact advice. Stay strong, you're a talented dev, and you'll pick up marketing no problem, good luck my friend!!
Renew, make it free, do some light marketing, and then spend most of your time on a new project.
If you get some traction when it's free then maybe add some ads or something.
For me, why am I going to pay 5 bucks to send an eCard. I expect to do that for free.
I'd been thinking about making it free and seeing if that helps. I've got some ideas about monetising that wouldn't involve charging but would avoid putting ads on it. I need to find a channel that drives traffic to it to make that work though, and that means marketing which is definitely not my strength :-(
For this sort of thing, I would focus on SEO. It takes a long time to get it to work but for ecards it's probably the only real way to do it? If I was wanting to send an ecard I would 100% google and go with the first few results that were free.
I'm not the target audience for this, but I clicked create card and I hated it. All I get to see before signup is text boxes, nothing visual. Compare this to Canva: https://www.canva.com/cards/
I'm not sure how big the market is, but it's likely that Canva already owns a large share of it. To make this succeed, you need better UX and great SEO.
Canva is going after a different market - printed / downloaded cards - but you make a really good point about what happens when you click to create a card. It would be much better to drop you straight in to the card creator so you can see what a card will look like, and play around with it. If I work further on it I think that will be a key focus. Thanks!
If it’s fully functional, hang onto it.
I work in a reasonably large company and we’re always signing these farewell cards on groupgreeting.com. There’s no network effect, so you can swim with the big boys and carve out your slice of the market. Maybe you could target HR departments and sell an annual subscription.
Try one simple thing now, though. Change the background color of the “Creat Your First Card Now” button. It looks disabled.
groupgreeting.com is exactly the type of competitor I wanted to take aim at. We use them a lot where I work too and, as you say, it’s a big market with space for other options. I’ve pretty much decided that I should aim to provide a freemium solution, with other monetisation options (though not ads). I have some ideas and I’ll be aiming to relaunch in the next month or so.
Thanks for the note about the button, I’ll definitely fix that.
If I was honest, I would leverage Viral Growth channels such as the Mobile Share Button. Adding to that, I would leverage Generative AI SO that creating cards is easy.
Then, I would grow the Generative AI card to about 10,000 users without monetization (unless AI tokens are cost-prohibitive.)
Then, sell the domain to another company that can integrate it into their larger suite of products for 5-6-figures.
Sometimes, building a list is monetizable in the right fashion.
Instead of closing down, I would try a different angle. Either provide some generous free version, or open source it.
I think a freemium approach is probably the way to go. Got some ideas and will work on those next.
Hey Simon,
Funny timing - I just wrote a post answering this exact question: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-know-for-sure-you-should-give-up-and-quit-9db3322f70
I think your second question nails it “Do you accept the fact … your life will be 99% marketing and 1% building?”. I’ve really avoided that for too long. I’m going to pivot to a freemium model then focus hard on marketing.
And don't forget - there's no shame in not being an entrepreneur. Not everybody is cut out for it and life is too short to spend it doing something you don't want to do.
P.S. I wouldn't recommend the freemium model though (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-freemium-free-trials-are-a-terrible-growth-strategy-for-startups-937542e2a1)
Agree about freemium - I think you need huge traffic volumes to make it work and that seems unlikely. I think I've found an alternative revenue channel so I could offer the core product for free. Shouldn't be too hard to build, so I'm going to have a go over the next couple of weeks, then focus on marketing to drive more traffic.
How much marketing have you done?
Have you considering selling it rather than shutting it down?
The answer to your first question is definitely not enough. I'm not really sure how to market it, to be honest. I'm going to look at changing the revenue model and then focus on driving traffic, though I'm at a loss as to how to do that at the moment. I think I need to partner up with someone who knows marketing (and design would be a bonus too).
If all else fails I may try selling it. Probably not worth much as a pre-revenue product, but someone with basic technical skills and strong marketing skills could probably do something with it.
Honestly, I don't really know what I am doing either. It is like the hero's journey in all the classic stories. You think that Hercules knew what he was doing and that he was sure of his success but you only make it when you put your all and have tons of faith in it.
Hey @SydneyHacker I think you should think about how much time can you give it and if it is something that still excites you.
Did you do a PH launch? Did you market it enough on Twitter? Did you get feedback from users to see what to improve? If it is just a motivation problem perhaps you need to dig deeper as to WHY you began working on this project to begin with.
How many customers do you have right now? how are they finding you? what are your current traffic stats? do you have competeitors? if yes how are they performing? how are customers finding them?
May be see if you can sell it on microacquire or other such sites.
Your website looks good. Here's my thought.
The TLD for .cards costs roughly GBP 39 per year for renewal (give or take, depending on your registrar). That equates to GBP 3.25 per month.
You may decide to properly shut it down eventually, but at GBP 3.25 per month, if I were you, I would extend for another year. Maybe something will come up for a pivot idea or minor product improvement that may give it the traction you need. Or maybe not.
Extending the domain does not cost too much, so 1-year extension seems reasonable. But you may want to make a mental note when to stop extending it, if you indeed will stop it for good. If you are renting a VM/VPS, you may want to switch to a small size to reduce that cost too, if you are not on it already.
In my case, I shut down mine last year but extended the domain and put up a page to tell visitors that it is closed. To be specific, I extended the primary TLD only (.com) but not the other TLDs of the same name (e.g. .co, etc). It is running on free tier cloud infra, so the only cost I incur at the moment is just the domain.
Whatever you decide, all the best.
That's a really good point. It only costs a few bucks a month for hosting so it probably makes sense to keep it running and put some effort in to marketing to try and drive more traffic. I think that's the key - it's just a matter of finding a channel / message that works.
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Bro there is no way this was not written by ChatGPT. But it kinda right though