Nice. I'm remodeling a place now. Observations from trying the flow:
Fell off the flow when I had to rasterize our plans, when I tried to add multiple rooms, and again during checkout. PDF support should be a must, ideally multiple room support. Making sure checkout works is also a must.
Path was Navigate to Roometron.com=>create account=>create new project=>go to upload my plans=>couldn't select my plans=>saw site didn't support pdf but did webp=>google "pdf to webp" converter=>found some suspicious sites to upload pdf's to=>went to chatgpt to write a script to convert pdf to webp=>saw the script was converting to png anyways=>went back to the roometron site and saw png was supported=>brew install poppler webp =>`pdftocairo -png plans.pdf page`=>upload page 1=>can't find where to upload the rest of the pages for multiple rooms (also my plans have multiple rooms per page)=>exit out=>seeing as this is a "shown hn" decide I'll try again and push through with just the first page of plans only=>see I need my square footage for the first page=>see its only listed for the floor=>manually measure my square footage for the uploaded page=>convert to square meters=>go to checkout=> enter in my credit card info=>can't scroll down to click "complete purchase" because of a rendering error presumably because the info was autopopulated=>quit the credit card flow=>attempt the paypal flow despite absolutely loathing paypal=>sign into paypal=>receive a payment request for $50 not $17=>think this doesn't look right=>quit the flow=>try to find a different payment option=>exiting the payment flow deletes my project=>completely give up here.
This is why releasing as early as possible to get customer feedback is key. The app clearly gives enough value to pay, but there's a problem in the payment flow that's a showstopper. That's the sort of thing you need to understand before you start scaling.
This is the opposite, fixing payment flow is something can be completely done without customer feedback. It’s q&a work.
You would want to test the response of customers on your product as well as your acquisition strategy, this is something you can’t fully predict, but still can get close if you spend a lot of time in that market
No one is going to bother with your side project if the first chance they attempt to use it, they simply can't. They'll say to themselves "oh well, I guess it's still a work in progress" and move on and forget about it. Posting a Show HN project is like an elevator pitch, you've got to capture the interest of your target audience quickly and be able to deliver at least a viable product. Not supporting PDF isn't a huge issue, that's just a future feature but not even allowing someone to use it is a failure even if the tech is sound.
This thing looks cool and if I was in real estate or apartment management, I'd probably be interested in trying it out. But if I can't, I'm just going to forget about it since I've probably already got a solution for 3D renders. At the very least, the emails are collected so OP can send out a blast saying it works now and hopefully some people give it another shot.
Sorry for making you struggle, I will try to make the order process more straightforward.
Please let me know about the refund, I guess I did message you on gmail.
FYI I also bailed when the price went up from 17$ to 50$ after I had entered my credit card.
Also it was very unclear to me what is the minimum quality of the floor plans on my side (i.e. is what I have good enough for your system?).
Fell off the flow when I had to rasterize our plans, when I tried to add multiple rooms, and again during checkout. PDF support should be a must, ideally multiple room support. Making sure checkout works is also a must.
Path was Navigate to Roometron.com=>create account=>create new project=>go to upload my plans=>couldn't select my plans=>saw site didn't support pdf but did webp=>google "pdf to webp" converter=>found some suspicious sites to upload pdf's to=>went to chatgpt to write a script to convert pdf to webp=>saw the script was converting to png anyways=>went back to the roometron site and saw png was supported=>brew install poppler webp =>`pdftocairo -png plans.pdf page`=>upload page 1=>can't find where to upload the rest of the pages for multiple rooms (also my plans have multiple rooms per page)=>exit out=>seeing as this is a "shown hn" decide I'll try again and push through with just the first page of plans only=>see I need my square footage for the first page=>see its only listed for the floor=>manually measure my square footage for the uploaded page=>convert to square meters=>go to checkout=> enter in my credit card info=>can't scroll down to click "complete purchase" because of a rendering error presumably because the info was autopopulated=>quit the credit card flow=>attempt the paypal flow despite absolutely loathing paypal=>sign into paypal=>receive a payment request for $50 not $17=>think this doesn't look right=>quit the flow=>try to find a different payment option=>exiting the payment flow deletes my project=>completely give up here.