Hi HN,<p>We've spent the last few months developing a product, but now we've hit a wall and we're thinking about abandoning it. We'd appreciate your brutally honest feedback about what we should do and if our solution makes any sense at all.<p>For context, here is our YC startup school presentation, and our landing page:<p>- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxpVkonSHJQ<p>- https://tuiqo.com<p>Basically, we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues. While trying to find product market fit, we've separately tested it with different target groups, like writers, journalists, lawyers, academics and digital content creators. We kept getting great feedback from these groups, but had a hard time converting any actual users. We had to stop developing because while trying to sell it, everyone kept requesting more and more different features, and it seemed no matter what we would add, still no one was ready to pay for it.<p>Do you think there is any scenario where someone would find this useful enough to actually use it or pay money for it? Or did we just build something that seems interesting to a lot of people but no one is really willing to use it?
Your website is beautiful, name could be better because I'm not sure how to pronounce it so hard to tell friends. Unfortunately idea/product itself isn't something I can give much feedback on, I'm mostly a developer so I didn't realize this was a problem people had, I guess I can kind of understand some professions (lawyers, creatives) could really use this though but it's a tough sell getting people to change their ways unless it dramatically makes things better for them. It's hard enough making tech people do it in my experience.
<i>we made an editor that tries to solve document versioning issues</i><p>Document versioning is orthogonal to text editors and text editors are a mostly solved problem for most people anyway. Solving people's document versioning issues means meeting them where they are and providing additional capabilities not sending them back to ground zero. To put it another way, if a customer adopts your solution and your company goes out of business, the customer should be no worse off than if they had not adopted your solution.<p>The minimum viable product is not a text editor because text editors are complicated -- never mind Vim or Word or Emacs, the current state of even Notepad and Nano reflect many years of development.<p>The great news is that you have people who will talk to you. Ask them what their current versioning problems are. Become an expert in <i>actual</i> document versioning problems before deciding on a solution. Solve one organization's document versioning problems first. Go deep before going broad.<p>Good luck.
"We kept getting great feedback from these groups"<p>If someone says "they love it" and "it looks awesome", or "that's such a great feature", that's just them being nice. Did they actually ask you for an account to use? Did they ask when it would go live so they could pay you?<p>If not perhaps there's no market. For whom isn't basic collaboration (aka Google docs) enough?<p>The only group I could reasonably see paying for this are the lawyers, and I don't see it happening (they're not know for being cutting-edge in tech adoption). But I've been wrong before :)<p>Yes I would abandon it.<p>P.S.: the startup school link doesn't work for me, looks like requires a login.
No, the problem is your marketing. Time to pivot, your idea is not unique what you have built is the basics of a document management system. This problem has been solved by virtually every EMR, and other companies with products such as OnBase. The good news is that you are not alone, and there are other succesful/profitable businesses in this market space.<p>Remember you do not have to be Unique or the best in the market; you just have to be better than some.
I think you are right that you should stop development until you get a few customers for the current version -- otherwise you may spend time not focusing on the selling aspect! The web-site tells what the product does like it would be obvious to users, but you probably need to present a specific use-case/example/workflow where it will help an end-user. And this use-case should target the specific type of customer you want. Also, probably target a segment where people will try new stuff (i.e where they don't necessarily love Microsoft Word, etc) -- it seems like a interesting product for startups to write up product manuals maybe? Narrow your product's/service's focus market....
1.- name is ugly<p>2.- you don't have a target market<p>3.- while the Lawyers seem like a great target market, they like to use Word.<p>4.- there are Word products already in the market, so it's a Proven niche.<p>5.- I would drop the name and go for a Product that works inside Word with minimal fuss.<p>6.- Do you have the time and energy?<p>7.- why did you make this product?
It looks like a wiki to me. Packed with some "interesting" features (blocks/tabs). Don't see the connection with the headline "document versioning".
You might want to narrow the audience if you keep getting feature requests. Make the product awesome for one of those groups you talked to and then grow from there.