Is it finally time to quit?

Hint: people in academia are struggling. And they re not really used to paying for online services (i mean, hell they are giving their work away for free). That's why all the saas startups are targetting the cash-rich startups. You might want to think of an alternative funding model. Or maybe that the project is unmonetizable, but the experience will make your next project so much easier to build

Math professor here, at a large public US university. I think that academia presents a large, but challenging, market. My university has recently purchased huge amounts of software, not all of it of high quality.

Two questions for you:

(1) Who are the people whom you hope will buy your product? What positions do they hold? Are they professors? Administrators? Something else?

(2) Of these people, where will the money to buy your product come from?

For example, if it aids research, then it might come from individual professors' NSF or NIH grants. These can be large, and they are at individual faculty members' discretion. But they tend to require a lot of advance planning.

If it aids teaching, then you probably need to sell to an entire university at once. Department budgets tend to be meager, and the money is often spoken for in advance.

In any case, budgets tend to be idiosyncratic. It might be that your target audience is willing in principle to pay for your software, but that there is no suitable pipeline of money.

I recommend this website

https://academia.stackexchange.com/

to get a further sense of how academia "works", to whatever extent you don't already know.

Best of luck to you.

If you build it, they won't necessarily come; as you're seeing now.

I think you need to stop development. Don't put another minute into dev work until you've found someone to pay for this.

Sometimes it's helpful and motivating to approach the first few sales in a completely non sustainable way. Don't try to establish a customer acquisition funnel - try to find one single person willing to pay.

It sounds like your December 31 users are a good place to start. Send each one of them an email and give them an incentive to renew before the accounts expire. Offer them a discount or something for every referral they bring in for a trial or as a new customer or a discount that is a bit higher for every trial day they have left so people feel an urgency to move on it now. Try to convert ONE trial customer into a paid customer over the next three or four weeks. If you fail, it's not your software, it's your sales and marketing skills. Take that as a hint that you might need to bring in a new person to do that for you.

It sounds like you're quite adept at building product but it's not a business yet. It's time to stop building and learn to convince people to part with their money. Building a better tool isn't enough. You have to build a better tool, educate them on why its worth it, eliminate their reasons not to buy, and then ask them to take action.

I recommend taking a break and then consider bringing in some outside expertise. Someone who knows how to sell online.

Nobody builds an empire alone. It just can't be done.

If you weren't sounding so tired and burned out I would recommend that you double down on marketing and promoting. I wouldn't give up until I had given it a good flogging! But, if you're burned out you're going to find that difficult and probably it won't work with that kind of mindset. Either farm out the marketing to a new partner or wait and do it yourself but either way take a few months off!

You know its time to quit when you:

1) Need the money that comes from a day job.

2) No longer like the work you are doing, and can afford to stop doing it.

3) Can think of something better to do.

For me I was working very hard on something I enjoyed but nobody else cared about. I needed money, so I went and got a day job. If I didn't need money, I would have kept doing my project.

It almost sounds like you're experiencing a kind of post-partum depression.

I would recommend that you not "quit", but rather "step back." If you've launched the project, and it's being used, then how much more do you really need to do?

You must have monitoring that you can check occasionally, so maybe you can just let the thing simmer[0] for a while. Take your mind off it, do some other stuff that you enjoy, then take a look at your logs in December. The watched pot and all that.

[0] https://chefmimiblog.com/a-basic-omelet/

Agree with @buboard below that academics likely aren't the right target audience.

Before giving up, I recommend testing two paths to validate whether there's real opportunity or not.

1. User Research: if you haven't already, reach out to your user base to get real input and guidance from them on how they use the tool, the value they see in it, how they would promote it and what $ they would pay for it log-term. I recommend doing this a 1:1 conversations on a platform like Zoom so you can chat live and record the conversation for further review. You'll likely uncover some gems on positioning, utility and organic marketing opps. You'll be surprised how much people love to participate in these kinds of sessions as it's a validation for them and stroked the ego a little bit.

I would lead with a personal email invite asking for the time. If that doesn't work you can always default to a survey.

2. Rethink the solution. Take academics out of the picture and strip back to the basic functionality, features and solution you provide. What are other verticals or user audiences that could benefit from it? What are competitive companies doing in that space that you could improve on or offer something totally different?

3. Bonus thought...look back at your competition. What are they doing that's driving their success? Sure, they make have an inferior product from your POV, but they're doing something right to be winning. What are they doing that's winning? Can you emulate that at all as another final validation on the vertical and audience?

Good luck!

Is it me or is there a worryingly large amount of these kinds of posts. Where people feel tired, lost or straight out depressed.

I don't see this that often on designer or some other professional forums.

I am not complaining, I am just worried is there some underlying problem with this profession? We are worried about technical debt accumulates in our codebase, we might forget about social debt that accumulates in our life.

It would depend somewhat on if you can conclude there is absolutely no one (or not enough people) who are willing and able to pay money for what you have made. And also if you need to earn money again soon to live off.

Is there any avenues to find out from the market why they are not buying. I'd suggest calling everyone who was on the trial and interviewing them. Come up with a set of questions that is to discover why they didn't buy. Maybe they loved it but couldn't get approval? Maybe they were just trying out because they liked you or are friends but the product doesn't really solve a problem for them?

I'd give it a deadline (3 months). Spent that time trying to proving beyond any doubt the product is a failure so you can finally scrap it. If it isn't a dud then use the information to form a plan to sell your solution to people. Also keep an eye out for a pivot.

I feel for you. I have been there as well. I knew it was time to quit when I found out exactly why the idea wouldn’t work after taking to multiple people in the industry and seeing it in real life.

So, my question to you is, do you still think you idea will work? If so, take a break and come back to it in a few weeks and continue to try. You need more feedback form people that will give it to your straight.

You already have a product so actively find the reason why just having a better product won’t work. If you need someone to talk to, I can give you more insight.

If you're saying you launched in July, that's like a couple of months. The three years before doesn't matter, I mean it seems like a mistake, should have launched something after 2-3 months but in any case that time is gone. It took over a year after the launch of my SaaS to get the first paying customer. Need to find a way to market to these academics.

You quit when the problem is solved where you find you don't care enough about the problem. And if you allow yourself to feel the pain of the problem you remember why you want to keep working.

you mention psychology and sociology researchers but can you be more specific about the the pain point they're dealing with?

"Build something that people want." It really is the best advice ever.

Maybe more specifically helpful, I would figure out a pivot. I bet there's an idea that can build on the work you have so you're not throwing away all that work. But, even if you are, better to do so sooner than later, if no one is using it.

(however, let's see what happens when their free accounts come to an end on December 31st)

Set a deadline and set some goals for financial objectives. Start prioritizing monetization.

If you can't meet those goals, then go get a job or do what you need to do to take care of yourself financially.

> niche academic domain

> Officially launched in July and everything has gone silent

Of course I can’t tell whether it is a significant factor, but July and August and even early September aren’t the busiest months in academia.

Can you bring in someone with marketing/biz dev chops? You've hit a dip, it sounds like someone new to the project with fresh eyes could give you and the product a boost.

i think tech is great career starting point but you should look to ‘exit’ at some point - take skills you’ve developed and apply them to a different field.