My startup recently launched and isn't doing as well as I hoped. Your advice would be appreciated.

Nobody cares about those things. You've started a business based on what you want to do instead of what the market will pay for. Take it out back and shoot it. Digital ocean is better for the DIY group. Rackspace is better for the high performance crowd. Amazon web services is better for the technical high performance crowd. Heroku and others have the app based people.

Instead of picking a market and going after it you've picked "Internet Entrepreneur" and I use the term picked lightly. You might as well say "everyone". Except "everyone" doesn't care about their hosting like that.

The market you're targeting is happy with the mid level providers. EIG has bought up a ton of smaller companies and "ruined" them but they still bring in all the mid level customers. Look at how many affiliate driven bloggers out there promote bluehost and get hundreds or thousands of signups each month.

A few weeks ago I saw on our local facebook group a "fundraiser to support <name's> cafe" This cafe closed down after a bad winter drove away customers and some water damage came up they couldn't afford. So they closed and now another business wants to help them out so they are promoting a "fundraiser". I'll tell you what I would tell them. When a business operates by trading goods and services for money that's not fundraising. That's business. And if you can't sell enough widgets (or meals) to stay open it's because something in your business is wrong not because you need charity.

My point is if this service were actually something people wanted you could easily buy up some digital ocean (or other similar provider). Install your customized system on their hardware and get your first 100 customers. Getting people to pay ahead on indiegogo is a stupid way to try and approach this business.

I'm sorry to be harsh. You're buying rice and trying to jazz it up and sell it at a premium. But it's still rice and it's a commodity with commodity pricing.

/r/Entrepreneur Thread