I'm in a similar situation myself and in the process of figuring out why. I would recommend reading the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.
I think it is relevant for you to share your project - there could be many different factors why traffic isn't converting. Trial users from a Show HN are great but I've multiple websites that had traffic but 0 converted. This tells me that the traffic audience may not be my target customers.
I'm doing things that don't scale now .. so actually going out to acquire users manually. What I've found is that the value proposition might actually be a better fit for folks outside of the HN community.
I definitely think that you're right about that, that the HN community is not the target audience but more of a board of critics taking a look. That's why after launch, I spent time (and money) into finding out what the target audience actually was and where to find them. I thought the brand strategist had a pretty good idea of the market, but no target users found so far.
What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?
> What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?
Figure out who my target customer is, where do they work, where do they hang out (online/offline) and figure out ways to go and interact with them (phone/coffee/conferences/etc).
I'm in a similar situation myself and in the process of figuring out why. I would recommend reading the book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.
I think it is relevant for you to share your project - there could be many different factors why traffic isn't converting. Trial users from a Show HN are great but I've multiple websites that had traffic but 0 converted. This tells me that the traffic audience may not be my target customers.
I'm doing things that don't scale now .. so actually going out to acquire users manually. What I've found is that the value proposition might actually be a better fit for folks outside of the HN community.