[fandorin]

Thanks for your detailed response. I agree with what you wrote. But the key part is: "We sell to business not consumers." --> My product is not business-oriented. Probably there is a small % of businesses that use it but it's definitely not a majority (at least not right now). If I had a B2B product I would just do a subscription without thinking too much.

[bruce511]

Building a business based on sales to consumers is hard. Consumers are fickle, their life-time value is low and acquisition costs are high. Products also tend to have very short life cycles. Any hint of success is quickly cloned and iterated on by others. It becomes primarily an exercise in marketing, not coding.

Assuming the value in the sale is static (ie not something like DuoLingo but more like Tetris) I would say the approach here is to build something fast, (like a couple months), spend the rest of the year promoting and pushing it, then (more or less) abandon it to make the next thing.

By year 2 you're looking to spend money only on marketing that is demonstrably profitable, while relying on word-of-mouth for residual sales. Sales will eventually approach zero.

Rinse and repeat, with a new product each year. Avoid the trap of "just coding" - remember you need probably 5 times coding time in marketing.

Try and save up enough to cover the inevitable flop years.

Of course the goal is to find the increasingly rare "hit". With any luck, sometime in the first 30 years, you'll have a "great year". Try and see this as your retirement and spend it accordingly. Resist the urge to use it to improve your life-style.

I wish you good luck on your journey. It is a very crowded space, with many intrinsic barriers to success. But it can also be satisfying if you manage to find success.