Hey Michael, congrats on your success so far, you have built a community and product people are buying which is already a great achievement.
My experience as a tech founder (software) reading your blog (thanks for sharing) and your Cloud feedback at https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback is that you need to dig deeper into requirements and your user personas, and what combination of product and software adjustments reach an enterprise / professional market that are happy to pay recurring subscription amounts to you because they receive benefits and value.
Be careful you don’t set out to build and shape software entirely focused on users that don’t want to pay (because they have simpler requirements and free options) and you then don’t offer value to enterprises that needed different features because your talking to hobbyists instead of professionals with expensive problems they would pay to have solved.
You’ve got hobbyists that may not pay $30/month for a subscription, but to me they aren’t your target audience for a new revenue stream, what’s it look like if you focus your efforts in customising the hardware / cloud software to support enterprise scenarios? Can you be doing Zoom calls with a few of your users in the professional space about what problem they wish TinyPilot could be solving that they could be paying for?
Look at the feedback from Reeman and Larry in the above forum post, they’re asking for enterprise features that you’d be best positioned to solve and charge for (and a lot more than $30 per month), schedule calls with them and dig into their problems further, build for them, so they can order 100 devices and put them under cloud management for work, not the hobbyist that has no budget and wants different features.
My experience as a tech founder (software) reading your blog (thanks for sharing) and your Cloud feedback at https://forum.tinypilotkvm.com/-163/tinypilot-cloud-feedback is that you need to dig deeper into requirements and your user personas, and what combination of product and software adjustments reach an enterprise / professional market that are happy to pay recurring subscription amounts to you because they receive benefits and value.
Be careful you don’t set out to build and shape software entirely focused on users that don’t want to pay (because they have simpler requirements and free options) and you then don’t offer value to enterprises that needed different features because your talking to hobbyists instead of professionals with expensive problems they would pay to have solved.
You’ve got hobbyists that may not pay $30/month for a subscription, but to me they aren’t your target audience for a new revenue stream, what’s it look like if you focus your efforts in customising the hardware / cloud software to support enterprise scenarios? Can you be doing Zoom calls with a few of your users in the professional space about what problem they wish TinyPilot could be solving that they could be paying for?
Look at the feedback from Reeman and Larry in the above forum post, they’re asking for enterprise features that you’d be best positioned to solve and charge for (and a lot more than $30 per month), schedule calls with them and dig into their problems further, build for them, so they can order 100 devices and put them under cloud management for work, not the hobbyist that has no budget and wants different features.