Customer growth is slow. Who do I talk to?

[alance]

Hacker News! Hive of the world's most cunning start-up minds! Lend me your ears and delicious brains.

I've been running a SaaS app for the last 5 years or so. But customer growth has been slow. Last year was a good year - the best yet, but I'm not getting any younger, and these fancy yacht parties aren't going to throw themselves:

Sign-ups:

2023: 102 new companies joined the free plan, 12 converted to paid plan

2024: 125 new companies joined the free plan, 6 converted to paid plan

2025: 129 new companies joined the free plan, 19 converted to paid plan

So 129 companies installed the app on the free plan last year, 19 of them became paying customers. Maybe that sounds like a lot? But the year before only 6 and the year before that, 12. So it's a bit wibbly wobbly.

Looking for a better way to get this into the hands of developers and sre/devops teams. The feedback I get is (overwhelmingly) positive, everyone bloody loves it - and there's almost zero churn - I just need to get it in front of the right eyeballs.

I've had some google ads going on and off for years. They appear to be useless and expensive. I've also dabbled with reddit and linkedin ads with little impact. But I reckon my target audience probably has ad-blocker anyway.

It's a bit of a niche - a Slack/Discord app for helping teams take turns with their tech (mainly servers/services/hardware/docker containers/staging environments in particular) and there are rather a lot of SEO experts on the web who may or may not be broadly helpful, but I think at this stage I need specifically helpful.

Who can I talk to? What do I focus on?

Anyway. This is a good problem to have. But I'm just a bit stuck.

(ps: it's sort of damned if I do, damned if I don't mention the app, let's just say it helps you call dibs on various things via Slack and Discord commands)

[jerryjobrien]

130 installs a year with ~5–15% converting and basically no churn is solid for a dev tool. That tells me the product works and people who use it get it. This feels much more like a “wrong eyeballs” problem than a product or pricing problem.

A couple thoughts that might help:

You might be aiming too broadly at “developers.” The people who really feel this pain are usually platform / infra / DevOps leads — especially teams sharing staging, CI runners, GPUs, test environments, etc. They’re the ones dealing with collisions weekly.

The value isn’t “resource coordination,” it’s avoiding the mess: overwritten envs, broken deploys, Slack arguments about who touched what. That framing tends to spread internally way faster.

Ads are tough here. Most of these tools grow by internal forwarding (“hey, we should use this”) rather than clicks. Communities, word-of-mouth, and very specific infra-heavy teams usually work better.

If it helps, I’m happy to chat or give feedback from the platform/infra angle. If you’ve ever had two people step on the same environment and cause chaos, you’re exactly who I’d like to talk to — feel free to reply here or DM me.

[Jeremy1026]

Does your free tier do too much making upgrading to a paid plan not worth it?

[alance]

Good question. So one change I made last year was to cap the number of queues the free account could utilize. It's sort of hard to know for certain if that was what moved the needle though.

There has been a suggestion that maybe the free plan could just be a time-limited trial instead.

But it feels like there is some risk associated with that - as often a customer will use the free plan for (eg) six months, before hitting the limits and becoming a paid account.