Original Summary

Hey ! I run a writing SaaS for fiction authors (French market) : vita-nuova.fr. The product helps novelists with the parts of a book that aren't the actual prose: an AI assistant, character sheets, family trees, narrative structure mapping, and a manuscript consistency checker that flags contradictions across a long draft. Basically, the "keep a 120k-word novel coherent" problem that writers currently solve with Word docs, Notion tables and Post-its. Where I'm at: Launched in April, first revenue that same month ~$2.2k MRR, 118 active subscribers ~2,300 registered users total 10-20 new signups/day ~9% conversion to paid ~20% monthly churn I'm a business school student, but I've been running this full time. My goal is $5k MRR by December and 10k for may and honestly I'm not sure how to get there. Acquisition: almost everything comes from Instagram. My associate post value-first videos about writing craft and slip in a CTA to the site. It works as the signups are consistent and cheap. I've also started an affiliate/partner network on the side. The problem: churn. I did the math and it's depressing. At ~450 signups/month and 9% conversion, I add roughly 40 subscribers a month. At 20% churn I lose ~24. So I net +16/month, and my steady state is around 200 subscribers, so about $3.8k MRR. I could double my Instagram output and still hit a ceiling below my target, because the bucket leaks faster than I can pour. So more acquisition isn't the answer. Retention is. And that's where I'm stuck. The AI problem, which is specific to this market: Fiction writers are probably the single most AI-hostile audience on the internet right now, and for reasons I understand. A meaningful slice of my potential market will never touch a tool with "AI" attached to it, no matter what it actually does. So I'm walking a line: the AI has to be visible enough to justify the subscription, and invisible enough not to make a writer feel like they're outsourcing the thing they love doing. That cuts both ways in my churn numbers: Some users leave because the tool feels too AI. They came for structure and organization, got nervous about authorship, and left. Some leave because the AI isn't good enough. They compare my assistant to ChatGPT or Claude directly, and on raw text generation I can't win that fight I think my actual defensible value is the structural stuff : the consistency checker across a whole manuscript, the character and timeline continuity, the things a general chatbot can't do because it doesn't hold your novel, but I clearly haven't made that the center of the product experience. Why people cancel, as best I can tell: Money. My users are largely amateur and semi-pro novelists. A writing tool is a discretionary line item for someone who isn't earning from writing yet. This is the most common stated reason and I'm never sure how much of it is real vs. polite. The AI isn&#3

  • 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：2026/9/15 05:23:36