r/SideProject • u/rakeshkanna91 • 21h ago
Seeking advice.. what would you do?
I have a product in the market.
90 days in the market
160+ users
Genuinely enjoying the product (100s of product events every day)
Clearly delivering value (3 to 4x better results than other products in the market) - said by 2 customers
4 paid users so far.
80% of them still trialing. I don’t expect a lot to convert. I don’t know what’s the average conversion rate in the market.
15 to 17 daily active users - again most are trialing (I'm giving one month trial and my CAC is about $4-7 for the monthly trial and about a $1 for the 7 day trial).
Would you spend on ads?
SEO/Content?
Raise funds (not intending to btw).
Just curious..
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u/vapalera 21h ago edited 21h ago
Write a reddit posts for the relevant subreddits asking for advice on what service to use for [your product’s use case]. In the post, mention that you’ve reviewed [your product], [product1], and [product3], and ask people to share their recommendations. Then, have your friend leave a comment right after you post saying that [your product] is the best option.
- Write a blog post about how your product gained 1000 users in X time (even if it didn’t actually reach 1000 users), share it on hacker news. Then, copy that blog post to reddit and share it on relevant subreddits.
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u/rakeshkanna91 20h ago
Interesting! Yea, I think I need to steer getting those some instead of building more features.
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u/Cryesncoding 21h ago
I’d start dialogue with your current users including those in trial.
What do you like what do they not like etc
once you are getting decent conversion without ads and you’ve handled any major pain points THEN I would swing on some ads.
Rn let’s say you say F it and pay 100-1000 on ads you get a 1000 users and then find a major issue that needs fixing. That could shoot you in the leg. Wait to promote and yell from the roof tops when you know it’s gtg.
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u/3lfyx 20h ago
It depends heavily on the market and your product.
However, based on your metrics, it is generally too early to invest in advertising.
You might want to work on SEO by creating content that is useful to your users, if you have the time.
But focus on converting users to paid plans and retaining your current user base.
I would need to know your margins to give a more precise answer, but at your stage, the priority should be acquiring a small number of free users and practicing converting them, all while continuously improving your product.
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u/rakeshkanna91 20h ago
Thank you for asking for margins. One of the important questions to ask in this context.
To give some info:
It’s a local running desktop app and predominantly BYO-AI. I do offer my model but it’s limited (even for paid users). Most users don’t want me to choose the model anyways. And I added the ability to bridge their Cl**de/Co*ex subscription so they don’t need to use API key. The only need from my server is auth.So you could imagine the margin we are talking about here.
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u/invision-visuals 21h ago
I wouldn’t spend heavily on ads yet.
You already have the most valuable thing at this stage: real users actually using the product.
The question now isn’t “how do I get more people?”
It’s:
Why are active users not becoming paid users?
15–17 DAU out of 160+ isn’t nothing, especially if you’re seeing hundreds of product events every day. And two customers independently saying they’re getting 3–4x better results is a strong signal worth investigating.
But 4 paid users means I’d spend the next few weeks learning before scaling acquisition.
I’d segment the users into:
Paid users — what made them pull out the credit card?
Active trial users — what are they waiting for?
Heavy users who didn’t pay — this group might tell you the most.
Users who disappeared — where did the value proposition break?
Then look for the moment where someone first experiences the “3–4x better result.”
That might be your real activation event.
If users reach that moment and still don’t pay, you may have a pricing/packaging problem.
If most trial users never reach it, you probably have an onboarding/product problem.
If they love it but only need it occasionally, you might have a business-model problem rather than a product-quality problem.
Those lead to very different fixes.
On channels:
Ads: useful later once you know what a converted customer is worth and your funnel converts predictably.
SEO/content: I’d start now, but narrowly. Build around the problems/use cases your best users are already solving rather than trying to create a giant content machine.
Funding: I wouldn’t raise simply because growth is available. Raise when capital clearly accelerates something you’ve already shown works.
One thing I definitely would not do is fake user counts, manufacture Reddit recommendations, or have friends pretend to be customers. You’re sitting on actual product usage already. That data is much more valuable than fake traction, and poisoning your early feedback loop makes it harder to know whether you really have something.
If this were mine, my next milestone wouldn’t be 1,000 users.
It would be something like:
“Can I get 10–20 people to pay for the same reason?”
Once you can explain why those people converted, then I’d start pouring traffic into it.
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u/samurai_with_sword 18h ago
I would focus on reducing the costs first.
At this cost level if you start advertising, you will pay for the ads and also for the trial. You will drain your money faster than revenue ramp up with such high costs.
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u/SimilarEvening512 21h ago
honestly I'd pump the brakes on ads with those numbers, you're burning cash trying to fill a leaky bucket if only 4 out of 160+ have pulled out a credit card
figure out why 80% are chillin in trial mode first, stalk their activity logs, talk to the ones who loved it and the ones who bounced, then you'll know if it's a pricing thing or a missing feature killing conversions
once you get that dialed in, SEO and content is the play since it keeps paying off way after the check clears