I recently did a bunch of customer development and have concluded that users want my product but they don't want to pay for it. I could:

A) Finish building the product anyway and hope that some users will pay for it. B) Stop building the product.

Background:

I made Dusato (www.dusato.com) which was going to be an iOS/Android app that picks house chores at random and SMS' them to your housemates.

I’d already spent like 50 hours coding the iOS/Android app when I realised I hadn’t spoken to any potential users.

So I did a prelaunch where users could sign up to say “I’m keen for this when it launches”.

If no one signed up, then I’d stop building the rest of the app. That’d suck because I’d have wasted 50 hours but at least I would save myself the 50-100 hours I still had to go.

I did a Facebook post, a Twitter post and ran $75 worth of Facebook ads about the prelaunch.

The figures:

- 12,500 social media impressions - 700 dudes landed at www.dusato.com - 34 sign ups

After I got the 34 dudes mobile numbers, I called them to see if it was okay to send them a quiz. 7 dudes filled it out. All of them said they wouldn't pay for the product.

I figure what’s the point of building this whole app only to find at the end of it that I am losing money on servers, etc because users don't want to pay.

Maybe I could give them the first month free and then hit them will a $10 fee after that. It seems risky given that they told me already that they weren't prepared to pay. Could be a lot of work for nothing.

If you've been in this situation or know an instance of it happening, please let me know what you did.

Sam