Ask HN: Lack of traction, where would you go from here?
Hey there,<p>I&#x27;m Andrew, thanks for taking the time to check this post out.<p>None of this feels super new, I&#x27;ve done the startup thing before (Last good outcome was an exit of Checkout51.com to News Corp), so I am used to the rollercoaster, but I&#x27;d love some help from the HN community in figuring out how I go from here. I&#x27;ve never done this solo before and I guess I just feel a bit stuck without someone else collaborating with me on where I&#x27;m at.<p>I&#x27;ve been working on a very scrappy startup as a solo founder for a few months now (www.mappedby.com) I&#x27;m not at the point of throwing in the towel on this one, but I&#x27;m certainly getting exhausted and a bit disappointed.<p>Quick summary of where I have been and what I was hoping for:<p>* Started producing basic reports on property outlines. We bought a rural property and wanted a map to walk the approximate boundaries that showed my live location as i walked the property (not rocket science i know). I made that for myself, and thought &quot;great! i bet my neighbours could use this too&quot;. Made a one page site in an evening, and got a lot of traction via FB and instagram Ads over the christmas break (2021-2022) (and purchases, about 600 paying customers with an average revenue of $55 &#x2F; map over ~2 months).<p>* Received a letter saying &quot;please stop doing this&quot; from the Ontario land surveyors association. I think their claims were absurd, but i didn&#x27;t want to be in this &quot;opinion of boundary&quot; space anyway as it felt like risk I didn&#x27;t want to take on.<p>* I love real estate (I&#x27;ve bought 5 properties and sold 2, and every time learnt a lot...and been highly disappointed by the value provided by realtors). So i wanted to make a service that helped bring the less obvious facts about properties into a very obvious setting. I think there&#x27;s a world where commissions for realtors should come down (or buyers wont use realtors, only sellers - this is common in countries like Australia), but in order to do that data that is today locked behind a realtor needs to be front and centre to the consumer.<p>* I twisted my existing work into mappedby.com, focused on the Toronto (Ontario, Canada) real estate market today.<p>I&#x27;ve made a few sales, generated about 2000 free reports for people, met with tens of realtors face to face and over zoom...but it doesn&#x27;t feel like it&#x27;s really going anywhere good right now. I need to change something.<p>Realtors don&#x27;t want to pay, consumers don&#x27;t typically have multiple properties, brokers are somehow even cheaper than realtors, and I&#x27;m getting tired of trying to think of ways to motivate them to pay me.<p>Thoughts on what to do next:<p>1. Pick another location. Maybe Toronto isn&#x27;t the place to run this. The map product I found initial success was more rural Ontario, so perhaps I should just go back to doing something in that setting that&#x27;s likely less served by accessible data.<p>2. Switch models. I&#x27;ve successfully obtained a few people asking for intros to realtors via this product. Should i move into lead gen?<p>3. Keep the course. Perhaps I just need to add more value to the reports. Maybe there&#x27;s a critical mass of value I need to be at and I&#x27;m just too far away from it today.<p>4. Is it just the market? Perhaps people are not spending and it&#x27;s way more of a pullback than i expected?<p>Thanks y&#x27;all.