Original Summary

I'm a solo developer. Since last November I've been building GeoEngage, a tool that lets a website show different content to visitors based on their country, device or behaviour: a banner, a popup, or a text change on the page. For example, a store can show "Free shipping across Canada" only to visitors from Canada. It works. It has a dashboard, analytics, session replay and heatmaps. And it has 0 customers, because I only wrote code and never talked to anyone. Some things I learned, in case they save someone time: 1. Read the licence of free APIs before you build on them. I started with a free IP-to-location API. Then I read the terms: the free plan is for non-commercial use only. The popular free location database is for "internal business purposes", not for showing results to your customers. For a paid SaaS, both are a problem. I moved the location lookup to the CDN instead (CloudFront adds the visitor's country and city to the request), so there's no third-party API at all. 2. Your script runs on someone else's website, so it must protect itself. Session recording (I use rrweb) made some heavy pages freeze. My first idea was "tell the customer to exclude those parts of the page." Wrong. The customer will just remove your script. The fix had to go inside my widget. 3. "Personalization" is not what people buy. Proof is. Nobody wants another popup tool. They want to know if the change made more people buy. So I added holdout tests: some visitors don't see the change, and you compare the two groups. 4. Talk to people before month 10, not after. This is the big one. I don't know anyone in e-commerce or marketing, so I kept building instead. Don't do what I did. What I'm doing now: looking for my first 5 users. These are online stores or SaaS sites that get visitors from more than one country. I'll set it up for you myself, for free. In return I only want honest feedback. Two questions for you: What would make you trust a new tool enough to add its script to your site? If you had 0 customers and no network, where would you start? Link is in the comments if you want to look.   submitted by   /u/Worried-Anteater-275 [link]   [comments]

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SaaS
  • 发布时间：2026/10/20 17:02:31