Like many others, I had long dreamed about building my own micro-product — something I would slowly develop and promote, and that would eventually bring me a second salary.
Today I want to talk about my most “successful” project, its current state, and what might happen to it next.
About the project
I’m working on the project with a friend of mine. We built an online service that removes noise from audio or video, and we also made a browser extension with the same functionality.
It works very simply:
- Choose a sound processing mode (you can keep or remove music, remove extra breaths from speech, normalize volume, etc.)
- Upload a file
- Listen and compare the results
- Download the processed file
Market demand
Before we began developing the project, we tested demand. We estimated that demand was more than sufficient to justify launching.
There are already competitors, meaning the market isn't dead and there's room for product development.
Traffic
At first, we solved the traffic problem through the browser extension. It doesn’t bring a huge number of users, but every day new people come and use the product.
To get more traffic, we launched a website and are now actively promoting it through SEO. We also plan to test advertising, although, as usual, it probably won’t pay off.
Right now about 300 new users come to our product every month. Around the same number of users also come back and use the service again each month.
Expenses
APIs in this niche are expensive. To attract attention to our product, at the beginning we offered large free limits.
Now we have minimal free usage in the extension and slightly higher limits on the website. Still, every month we spend around $100.
We calculated all the project expenses — this is only part of them.
It’s almost impossible to optimize these costs. There are no good free APIs. At the same time, we cannot remove the ability for people to try the product for free — it feels like that would cut the conversion rate even more (which is already basically zero).
Current problems
So in summary:
- We have traffic (not huge, but stable and growing)
- The product is needed in the market
- The product is simple and solves the user’s problem well
- The extension already has the ability to accept payments worldwide
- We will add payments to the website soon
- We even have a very generous unlimited plan (none of the competitors offer something like that)
But no one pays.
Looking at the analytics, we understand that even with a 0.5% conversion rate from new users (which is already very low), there should be purchases.
But there are none at all.
What should we do next?
Right now we are in a strange position:
- Expenses keep coming every month.
- We keep working on bringing more traffic.
- We keep improving the product.
But no one pays.
Sometimes we think about abandoning the project and building something else.
We have some ideas about experiments we could run and things we could test. But I wanted to ask you: maybe we are missing something obvious or doing something wrong?
I would really appreciate your feedback.
Thanks!
Top comments (0)