Ask HN: When to give up?

My elevator pitch for crawlspa.<p>&quot;Worry about optimizing your site for search engines later. Use crawlspa to automate search engine indexing and focus on what matters, creating beautiful sites that convert visitors into customers.&quot;<p>Crawlspa Tag Line: We index &amp; you convert.<p>Edit: One more thing, have you considered manually approaching custom web shops? If they are pumping out sites, they probably wouldn&#x27;t mind passing along the $5 a month to customers in order for them to not worry about indexing the trendy single page sites.

Here&#x27;s my 2 cents and some thought questions that will hopefully help you find your way: You&#x27;ve received positive feedback from several people but are they your target market? Will they be the ones paying? It&#x27;s also important to think about what value you&#x27;re bringing to the table.<p>If you&#x27;re targeting single-page apps, you&#x27;ll have to seek those customers out. If you&#x27;re targeting websites who want to get indexed on Google, SEO-related, etc, then your customer base will be bigger. Seek them out.<p>As a previous poster had already mentioned, if I&#x27;m competent enough to build a single-page app, I could easily manage my own redirects. Unless I have more than 100 single-page apps, then I might see value in your service.<p>Communicate what your value is to me and how you&#x27;re saving&#x2F;giving me money&#x2F;time&#x2F;something by taking money away from myself.

I&#x27;m sort of what you would call a small developer and WordPress jobs are the majority of my business. I&#x27;m speaking only for myself here but when I see stuff like this I pass:<p><pre><code> RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^_escaped_fragment_=(.*)$ RewriteRule (.*) http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawlspa.com&#x2F;s&#x2F;%1 [P] </code></pre> I understand what you&#x27;re doing, but there&#x27;s something about writing redirects to relatively new 3rd party sites that make me uncomfortable.

I&#x27;m not sure why I would pay for this? Couldn&#x27;t I implement something like this on my own? I&#x27;m assuming if I’m competent enough to build a quality single-page app, I could manage the redirects on my own.<p>Either way, the decision to give up has a natural way of finding itself at the point where opportunity costs are greater than the current work being done. Meaning, it’s probably a path you have to find on your own.

I&#x27;m using crawlspa for crawlspa, you can see how google has indexed the homepage:<p><a href="https://www.google.com/#q=crawlspa+ajax" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;#q=crawlspa+ajax</a><p>from<p><a href="http://crawlspa.com?_escaped_fragment_=" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;crawlspa.com?_escaped_fragment_=</a>

Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.<p>Sir Winston Churchill, Speech, 1941, Harrow School

People often refer to Seth Godin&#x27;s The Dip as a book that helps address this question. Personally, I didn&#x27;t find it all that insightful, but I&#x27;m mentioning it here anyway to solicit others&#x27; opinions.

Does crawlspa really crawl sites? Or is it just yet another &quot;prerender-like&quot; SaaS? Why should someone use your service instead of existing ones? What is your added-value compared for example to seo4ajax.com?

I&#x27;d say you definitely need a stronger value proposition. I have no idea why I would need this for my app.<p>Communicate to visitors how it will help their website (e.g. increased ranking, indexing, etc.)

The $3.99 price seems off due to the 99 cent add on, just make it a round number.<p>I would also add information about what problem this solves and how it saves time.

On the same boat with you there with <a href="http://cloud306.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cloud306.com</a>

Question: When you add [P] to the Rewrite rule, does the URL in the browser show crawlspa, or the original domain?

Will my site not be penalized if the crawler thinks everything on it points to crawlspa.com?

What is a single page app? A website with one page?

Please, send us the URL.

- I dont think you should give up.