9K downloads and Zero Sales, Why? | Hacker News Reader

9K downloads and Zero Sales, Why?

4 pointstealpod8 comments

My product 'Tealpod Image Compressor' is downloaded more than 9000 times but zero sales. Can someone help me understand why?

https://tealpod.com/compressor/index.html

Thanks in advance.

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I'm quite outside your user base, and can't provide suggestions along those lines. I'm also not in marketing and sales, so it's a bit of blind-leading-the-blind here.

The "pay what you want" model is very tough. Most people "want" to pay nothing.

You have (putative) email addresses for some of your downloaders. You could ask them. Perhaps as part of a short survey?

It's currently easier to do the "free download" than use the pay option. You could remove the "free download" link and have only "Pay what you want $", defaulting to $15 as it is now, with an option to pay $0.

You could switch to nagware.

I'm hoping that my giving feedback here might encourage others to chime in, even if only to explain that I'm wrong. ;)

Thank you very much. Most of the emails entered by downloaders are fake, just like 123@gmail.com :)

I will consider your suggestion of removing the free download link.

Thank you for taking time to give me feedback.

One problem with shareware is:

  trivial cost * many > non-trivial cost

Sure your program asks only a bit of money. But people use lots of free software which asks for a bit of money.

Some of it is not useful enough to warrant payment. But it has the same model.

How does someone execute a consistent approach? How do they treat everyone equally?

The simplest thing is not paying. Then there is no fretting over "should I pay?" No wondering "since I paid for A, should I pay for B?"

If you want money, require payment for download. Simple and tells you whether you are actually building something people will pay for. Requiring payment is a reliable form of feedback. Good luck.

I will seriously consider your feedback. Thanks for taking time to write, appreciate it.

It's the combination of a simple tool type (many free and proven alternatives), a relatively professional usage pattern (many potential users already set up with something good enough) and, I'm afraid, lack of compelling novel features that are worth testing and/or paying for and/or taking the trouble to use something other than a general purpose image editor for. Some specific features are perplexing: where is lossless PNG recompression, with size benchmarks? How do you convert PSD and raw formats to simple images?

This product includes a quality asjuster with live preview, you can adjust and see the resulting image size.

from looking at the page, it looks interesting, and it might be something i would find handy, for blog posts or my photography site. my question: are you asking for a payment in the app? Looks like its a "pay what you want" offering, but is "free" an option? when the app opens and you use it for months, does it pop up and ask for a payment?

No, it wont ask for money. Once downloaded and install there is no login/paid/free user check, it wont even communicate with the server.

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