Congratulations! I admire your tenacity and commitment.
However,
> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition
Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.
I see so many great products on HN that take years to takeoff simply because the founders refuse to market it.
Good products deserve to be more widely known so more people can use them. A founder not investing in marketing is doing their own products a disservice.
As someone with similar project growth, I've played around with things like Adwords and generally failed or had a negative experience, wasting money with no results. Marketing seems... hard, and I don't really gave the funds to hire a professional.
My main project is ad supported, rather than subscription, so that might make it harder.
That's the key - you can't just "experiment" with paid acquisition. You have to spend a little to gather enough data on what actually works for your audience.
It might take $1000 in failed ads before you "get" your audience, but you might quit after spending $100. But the $900 in supposedly "wasted" ad spend will help you understand enough that you can make 10x higher revenue.
If you approach software development as an iterative activity, you should approach marketing the same way too. Expecting great results at first try is akin to expecting completely bug free software at first go without any tests.
However,
> We have not spent much on paid user acquisition
Why not spend on paid acquisition? A bit of marketing and sales focus would have gotten you to $8k in 2 years, not 10.
I see so many great products on HN that take years to takeoff simply because the founders refuse to market it.
Good products deserve to be more widely known so more people can use them. A founder not investing in marketing is doing their own products a disservice.