A few things I have learned over the years and in particular launching and growing my latest project[1]:

1) Track everything including errors. Know what users are using and what they aren't. Remove or rebuild less used features.

2) Find out who your users are and what they value. Ignore non-payers.

3) Economize, market, and document features. You not only need to develop and deploy features, but also to price them in appetising business model, market them on social media and SEO and describe/show how to use them.

4) Keep it super simple. You only get the users' attention for a few seconds, use them wisely. Nobody will read long documentation or use illogical/complex UI.

1: https://aihelperbot.com

Edit: Why not add some AI features for like pdf.ai? Would make your product more attractive and easier to sell.

All good advice, but not really addressing OP's question of how to actually find and attract users

Has nothing to do with the original question. Is this AI generated?

No, that was written purely by me but I was halfway out the door, perhaps that is the reason for the slight misalignment. I don't use AI for my own writing.

why web GUI are you using for your app ? its super clean

Two thoughts: 1) Look for distribution through integrations with services like Salesforce, Zapier, no-code dev tools, 2) look for ways to increase value and pricing to support outbound sales. Your current pricing looks too low to economically support an outbound sales effort but that is probably changeable, look for niches where a business needs to handle lots of ingested documents quickly and what you're doing makes a big difference. Maybe real estate transactional work, litigation, etc.

If you want a taste of what the outbound world looks like Hustle Fund has a nice seminar they did with Pete Kazanjy here (1hr video, sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymGU7tiU1nE

Thanks, I'll take a look. I built it to scratch my own itch, so the market in my mind is grad students in the humanities...

Tiny nitpick: It bothers me that the website header is “Fix Pdfs” - I thought it should be “Fix PDFs”.

My feelings seem validated because the footer is “© 2023 Copyright: FixPDFs”

Good call. Appreciate the nit. That's what comes of iterations :)

Re. your pricing page:

* "User-friendly interface" - that's the minimum bar! you don't need to mention it.

* "Enhance productivity" - again, I should hope so.

* "Fair usage policy" - oh good, you'll cut me off just when I need you most.

Also:

* How are potential customers finding out about you? Online ads? You being a sales team and reaching out?

* How do I know that your product is worth me paying money for? There's no trial or similar.

* Who's your customer?

  1. Individuals? If so, how likely are they to need to constantly scan PDFs that $5/month makes sense each and every month? Consider doing a usage-based pricing model instead.

  2. Businesses? Who are you - i.e. what's the legal entity they're dealing with? Do you have APIs that they can use? Why you instead of a proven competitor?

Thanks for the feedback.

I won't lie to you, I totally agree on your critiques of the pricing page. It "feels" like I need to say "you're getting a whole lot of value" in words that sound nice. If I saw this, I would roll my eyes, but a lot of people don't seem to. And, importantly, it doesn't seem to detract (but I'm open to rebuttal here).

Regarding fair usage, this is because I need some way to tell people who sign up that I'm not going to let them abuse it. I could have a different pricing model where you pay per page or something, but, quite frankly, I think I get better margins like this.

The reason for this post is that I'm not sure how to get potential customers to find me :)

My own customer is an individual who started using it when it was free and emailed me that he was looking forward to when it "came out of beta" and was more than willing to pay. So I brought it out of beta and he started paying. I acquired him through twitter (no personal connection). You ask good questions from the perspective of my customers, though. Thanks!

Always prioritize selling.

Sales trumps technical quality and you can always hire warm bodies to do technical stuff.

People who aren’t paying you don’t benefit you and you don’t benefit people who don’t hire you.

Don’t use technical ability as an excuse. Accept that half assed is better than nothing. And swallow your ego and grow.

Good luck.

This logic has partly informed my decision to just paywall it, but it does increase the barrier to entry. And don't take my acknowledgement of an area of weakness as an excuse, take it as an awareness of where I need to focus energy ;)

Thanks!

Customers are a who-where pair. What's your Ideal Customer Profile, and where do they hang out. I would've started there "before" building.

Being correct and believing you have a valuable product is only one small part of convincing people to do the monumental task of opening their wallets and paying you. Your ability to communicate, empathize with your customer, and sell the value of your offering is largely what will determine your outcome. That and a boatfull of luck.

Paying is the easy part. The hard part is for them to imagine how your product can fulfill their needs and fit their existing workflows. That’s the sales part!

I think this is actually a mistake. More often than not I find myself not paying for something that I really like, because it is such a hassle.

Privately, paying for apps is fairly easy, but I don't because there is enough free stuff to keep me entertained for centuries.

However, professionally it takes just too much effort to transfer actual money. TPS reports, having to convince your boss, and worst of all: the expectation that something will not be supported in a short while.

You can blame my specific company, but this is how it works for most companies. In some cases it is better to charge a lot, because the amount of money is irrelevant, it is the non-zero amount that requires effort.

(A lot of people get to spend some MAX amount freely without having to consult with their manager -- it might be a good idea to account for that.)

Just want to be clear if you are looking for sales tips (converting potential customers into actual paying customers) or marketing tips (creating potential customers)? Because the tips are very different. As a starter:

For sales, e.g. people who have already landed on your page, you are working on improving your conversion funnel. It could be beneficial to have a high touch process in the beginning for a few to find out what they are looking for, whether they found the info they need on your site, and whether your product satisfies their need or not. (Maybe a survey page? Ask for email and try to talk to them directly?)

For marketing, it's about getting the word out to people who might need your product but don't know about it. Look to creating blogs, engaging in discussion forums of relevance, and creating a web presence where people can find your product easily.

You're right. I'm talking about marketing. But I think my problem is actually that I don't know how to find the people who I can sell to. My current belief is that the problem that I'm solving is not one that people know they have because they think it just can't be solved...

1. Identify target audience - who is buying? This could be through experimentation with different channels, messages etc. One starting point could be people who are reading scanned pdfs on kindle, maybe? (I've struggled with this personally)

2. Find out when/why are the buying your service. (Maybe because they really want to read a book, but digital copy isn't available)

3. Start imagining the purchase cycle as a funnel. For 1 paid customer you would need something like 50 people using your free/trial features (50 is an example, you can talk to founders in similar niche to get a better sense)

4. Define what the qualitative and quantitative outcome after using your service and double down on it - do this to an extent that your customer becomes an ardent advocate of your offering.

5. Get a sales/marketing person to help. You don't have to do it all yourself.

Hope it helps in some way. Best of luck

This is great advice, thanks! Since you mention the kindle niche, what did you do when you encountered that frustration? I feel like the people I actually had in mind when building this are not technical enough to realize they even have a problem that can be easily solved.

I've encountered this problem with PDFs in general, where the pages are images instead of text. I've learnt to search for the same book/document in epub/mobi format. If I don't find it after searching the web, I will still use the PDF version - either squinting my eyes to read the tiny text or change the orientation to landscape mode (so that the image is a little bit bigger). If none of this works / its too much hassle - I use laptop/phone to read the document

To be honest though, I am not sure if this a pain-point enough for me to pay for a service to convert it to text. In my mind, these are edge-cases.

It looks like you posted a Show HN about it:

Show HN: FixPDFs – Automatic PDF correction for document scans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37702373

I'd be willing to send you a repost invite for that if you'd be willing to open it up for people to try out. (Currently it looks like they have to send an email.)

Invited reposts go into in HN's second-chance pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), so they will get a random placement on HN's front page.

Thanks dang, I'm certainly willing to consider it. I don't think the HN crowd is actually a great target market, though. So I wasn't super surprised that it didn't get much traction. Let me give it some thought.

Honestly, this isn't a "sales" type of product. What you need is marketing. Figure out where to reach your potential customers and get in there. How that is done depends on your customers and the product.. maybe it's ads, maybe it's sponsored posts, maybe it's some clever social media stuff, maybe it's pure content marketing or maybe a few of those.

Sales only works if you can narrow down who needs the product and the product sells for enough money to warrant direct sales (in my mind, around ~$250/month or ~$3K per-year).

Your product seems more as-needed. You need to market, not sell... figure out where people go when they face that problem and be there when they face the problem.

Good advice, thanks!

I would consider reaching out to commercial scanner companies and see if they have any interest in either: integrating your service into their software or negotiating some kind of referral program for folks that buy their scanners. Same goes for advertising on forums for folks that are using DIY solutions to do a lot of scanning. You might also consider reaching out to businesses that you know do a lot of scanning of texts like this like libraries and law firms.

Just spit balling here but if the product works as well as the demo then it should be easy to start finding a few "Library Access" level customers and start to build some revenue.

Half answering the sibling here as well. I built this as a PhD student in the humanities (where we use a lot of undigitized texts). I constantly ended up cleaning up PDFs and OCRing them for my own use, and this was an excessive optimization of that process.

The market that is obvious from that starting point is other PhD students in the humanities—sciences tend to read more recent content (so more likely to be digitized), and in the sciences it's more likely to be digitized anyway.

I have a few contacts in libraries, and some interest, but I figure testing out the product on more peers is better to begin with. This discussion is making me think I should pursue library level usage, though.

Just judging from the example, fixpdfs seems targeted at unprofessional scans with a smartphone camera. A stand alone scanner should produce good enough results. But maybe your advice still works if you replace scanner companies with something else?

I had to take a screenshot to test selecting in safari from either side because of the slider but it worked, can select from the old and the fixed pdf directly in the browser. Just saying because it says select only on the 'fixed' pdf.

as for customers, its nice to upload and get scanned pdfs in small real text but is this for people who use this in a workflow? the video is too fast and funky for me, and looks like many steps - how about no music slower and 1 2 3 done? without the signup procedure, just what you get when your onboard. my2c

Thanks. I think your first point is related to some magic safari is doing, but it's true solving OCR is becoming easier and easier (and eating away any claim to a moat I may have).

Good advice on the video! Thanks.

Try to find niches for which your product will help them make money by working a bit faster. For example certified sworn translators that receive pictures of birth certificates and similar non-digitalized documents for translation and that need a quick way to extract texts to translate faster. Then figure out how to reach that niche (public listings with contact data, professional associations, etc).

Law firms might be interested in this. I used to do IT support for a bunch and they always were scanning stuff into their computers for document discovery.

Good to know, thanks!

Nice landing page.

I expected the video explainer to just show how the product works, not the entire sign-up flow (there's a common meme when presenting applications and software, never show the login screen or sing-up flow, people have seen thousands of such flows, no need to see yet one more).

Thanks someone else suggested the same. I had thought the magic link thing deserved some attention. But I agree, I'll ditch it when I have a chance.

Great landing page - got what you do in less than 5 seconds. You just gotta work on figuring out distribution.

Thanks

This was posted to HN a few days ago, I thought it was interesting and might be useful to you?

https://posthog.com/blog/dev-marketing-paid-ads

Congrats on the first customer!

So overall I recommend taking the approach of being there to support and understand your customers 100% to see why the love you and your product. DO NOT try and charge additional money for high touch support - you will benefit more from it at this early stage than your customers will. Later when you have a lot of volume, you can come up with a separate plan. Get your first customers from your personal network - you don't know enough to pour money into paid marketing. You don't even know the right target market yet (I assume).

Learn as much as you can, and build as many 1-1 connections with your actual or potential customers to understand your market and pivot accordingly.

Beyond that - I have some basic stuff for your website that you might want to consider. I don't know your target market but at the very least it will help more quickly show the value of your product. You can then refine later to make it more focused on specific problems that law firms, libraries, students, or whatever it turns out to be have.

Some notes on your website:

1. Change your title from "Tired of reading terribly scanned PDFs?" to "Fix and Transcribe PDFs in Seconds". This will match with your "proof" by showing a demo video that's less than 5s long.

2. Your product is doing a lot of helpful things automatically - but I honestly don't know what they are because they flash as the subheading. Remove this and add as a table on the right 1/2 of the page below the heading.

3. Make your demo video shorter to only show the valuable pieces: show ugly PDF, upload PDF, convert, download PDF, show pretty PDF. Show the user the video before they click on it - or better yet remove the audio and play automatically in the background. Make this the left 1/2 of the page below the heading.

4. Consider shortening time to value when using the product e.g. automatically downloading the fixed PDF after converting so you could make your demo video just "drag PDF into browser, automatically download and open fixed PDF and show I can now copy text".

5. Consider changing the interaction on the before and after comparison to be a mouse over so it is obvious - as otherwise the black arrows on the black text are hard to discern. Or automatically move the slider left and right to make the comparison obvious.

6. Combine your "Features" and Pricing" pages with the home page. Don't make me click to discover the value. Instead of calling this "Awesome Features", try selling the value here. "Transcribes and Fixes 15 Common PDF Problems in Seconds".

7. Put a signup box below at the very bottom of the home page. Rename "My Files" for logged out users to "Sign In" and float to the right on the navigation bar.

8. Reinforce the value you're creating by showing the following on the pricing table: Process 500 PDFs / Month, Instantly transcribe, Fix 15+ common PDF problems, 24/7 Support (you have one customer - you can give world class support here, don't try to segment based on this yet). Reconsider document retention - I don't think anyone will care about this as most people and companies won't use you as a document repo. Just as a utility.

This is great! Thank you. When you come back and see your suggestions implemented, feel the gratitude :)

Specify what languages are supported

Good idea. What if it varies in quality based on different languages? I read a lot of texts with English, French, German, Greek, and Hebrew. The quality of the OCR goes in roughly that order. If there's enough Hebrew, it gets detected reasonably (but vowel points are less reliable). If there's not enough Hebrew, it might not get detected at all.

I'm using Google's OCR api on the backend after using my secret sauce to "fix" the scan. I've found it to work better than tesseract, and heard that it's better than azure or aws. Google claims to support a ton of languages. But obviously, quality varies... I can't just copy their claim because it doesn't reflect my experience of reality, so what do I say?

Hey!

I'm a software engineer at clay.com - our software helps you sell, and specifically run personalized outbound campaigns at scale. I'd love to try and help you and see if there are some learnings in the process.

Feel free to contact me adam@ my_company_domain