My Business Is Dying

There is something I'd call Subscription Fatigue. People and businesses are asked to pay subscription fees left and right.

If I convert my bank statements only each quarter in a spike or once or twice a year, why should I pay for each month or the entire year? Of course I don't know the real usage patterns of this application, but that's one scenario I'd think of.

It’s fascinating to read all the tech feedback in the comments here, but I think this business is failing because it has yet to achieve true product market fit.

Any half decent product, with a nice website, a real solution and some SEO can get in front of say 100,000 prospects these days. Here I imagine discovery is mainly from Googling “convert bank statements”, and conversion from prospects to client is straightforward for 1-2% of views.

But a conversion niche like this is dynamic - you basically luck into it and unless you actively find and occupy niches faster than the competition discovers them and stomps on you, your “business” is on a time fuze. For example, if someone like Xero where this is a feature discovers the keyword combo and does some paid ads. Or if Google pushes AI results up and your page goes below the fold. My expectation is that this latter situation is happening everywhere as Google AI search starts to strangle everything.

Leverage AI to be your CMO. It should be telling you things like (i) your product is likely perceived as too technical to break into the general market, (ii) you need a much better handle in target customer profile (demographic, messages), (iii) you need a customer relevant sustainable USP and (iv) you need a distinctive and memorable brand. The ultimate win is to create market pull from customer to customer recommendations.

> Sharing revenue data is a good way to get attention on Twitter, but for this business the Twitter attention doesn’t really translate into sales. I stopped sharing revenue data because a lot of people started using AI to build their own bank statement converter applications.

A lot of build in public is theater with MRR porn which has no basis in ground reality creating noise. Now the agentic world is coming after it. Build in public has turned into display in public these days.

> My friends tell me the job is basically managing AI agents and reading Pull Requests. That sounds like hell, and I’ll try to avoid it for as long as possible.

It really is not that bad when you are in a company with a good culture. Leadership is gonna be AI piled everywhere, but imho that's how you learn where to use (and not to use) the technology.

> When a user cancels a subscription Stripe asks them for a reason. At the moment I don’t really do anything with the cancellation reason, actually this is the first time I’ve ever looked at the data.

This comes across as very unserious. If you’re truly trying to build a business then this seems like one of the best signals/datapoints you can get…

Ironically, doesn't the "Get a job" paragraph have the solution? If you believe that is what the future of jobs at a company looks like, perhaps try to market your tool to agents?

You could add an API which is perfect for agents to use. Something that survives the pull request review process.

I liked the article, although I have no idea what it even means to convert your bank statements. Is this a Chinese thing?

Hang in there. I've yet so see an even modestly successful business that didn't have this or some other bleak problem at one point in time. I'm sure they exist, I just haven't seen one yet :D

My gut says this one can be turned around. Even if 90% of people just happily prefer ChatGPT for this (which I'd doubt), the remaining 10% is still a lot to fund a small venture very well. Just gotta find them effectively.

Even the "giving up" route can be pretty juicy, there's companies that pay decent money for a "distressed asset". And there's also investment firms (like mine) that go for a minority stake and help turn things around.

> Last time I worked at a company was November 2020. I love programming, but I really do not enjoy programming at a company. Things were bad in 2020, but I feel like they’re worse now.

They're much worse now, but that also creates more opportunity than ever before. Chaos truly can be a ladder if you take advantage of it and endure the unhappy parts. Having a bit of savings to work with can make all the difference. You can focus on emerging opportunities without melting down over your next paycheck.

The concept of W-2 employment is completely dead to me now. Especially for this kind of technology work. I charge per outcome now (1099). I am no longer interested in being provided what amounts to hazard pay for the job of interacting with an adult day care center every day. Walking in as a hired gun with no political agenda and a clear mission feels great compared to where I was before. When I do participate in the clients' meetings, I generally get away with murder because I am laser focused on the outcome itself (my compensation) rather than belaboring whatever technical details behind it. If I'm on a call these days, there's an explicit reason for it. The business can sense that I am aligned with their goals, so the proverbial seas tend to be parted whenever I unmute my microphone.

The clients' salaried developers loathe me to the extent that it's creating even more opportunities. The amount of unqualified ego tripping in tech has become astounding and can serve as a powerful ally for humble wizards.

I like this writing style, dry and direct. Refreshing after reading ai output all the time.

> People are using AI to convert their bank statements. This works pretty well if you only have a few pages of bank statements to convert. If you have hundreds of pages, then you’ll need to pay for AI to do the conversion.

Or you could have AI write a script to handle the conversion for your specific bank. It'll be faster than any service and free forever.

I'll be launching in a week.

"Claude, a business is making $30K/mo converting bank statements!

Use all of my max 20x plan to build a BETTER version. Must have animated per-page progress indicators"

The author’s product extracts data from bank statement PDFs and puts it in XLSX format. Both of the banks I use provide CSV data export from their apps.

I’m not surprised the business is struggling - the author hasn’t found a deep enough problem to solve.

Seeing this with all my founder friends. Combination of Google AI summaries just sending much less traffic and AI tools being able to do small tasks by themself, rending a ton of SaaS less used.

AI kills SaaS dead - because most will use AI to do what this does directly (presumably convert bank statements), and the rest will use AI to write a non-AI tool that does it likely just as well.

A lot of these super-simple utility apps will die off with AI.

Two years ago I paid a little app to extract the member list of a WhatsApp community I manage. Now I just ask Codex to do it.

It sucks for the founders no doubt. But it’s better for the consumer not to have a million paid utility apps for solving small nuisances.

If it’s cheaper than having AI generate it directly, how about creating an MCP so AI can use this tool, and then trying connecting something like x402? It’s not exactly a subscription economy, but I think it could become a tool for AI

I have a feeling search traffic is down and lots of people are diverting to using AI, or to one of the sloppy competitors. Conveying bank statements doesn’t seem like there’s much of a moat around the workflow.

All I see is a company with a lot of users and good revenue. This looks like a great moat to build a business off of!

This was a really honest and nice read. I also appreciated the last paragraph.

Personally I work at a FAANG adjacent big tech company and dream of quitting every fucking second

Taking my homepage as an example, when I allowed AI bots, I got about 1,200 visitors a day. But when I blocked them, that number dropped to around 140. It seems like over 70% of internet traffic these days is dominated by AI bots.

Content marketing is dying because content slop is massively generated now.

This is alright, but your main page is just trash. You mention you have 0 pages every 24 hours in the "Registered" free tier. You can't even check that but have time to write a post about how your business is dying? Like I understand you like content marketing but at least have your product ready for the potential customers that you might get via content marketing jfc

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