I think SEO is the answer to that and I am planning on checking out resources or short courses if there are any since they might help me in the future as well. The reason I was curious about your process was whether you had tried something different which I hadn't tried (or thought of) which might help me avoid/improve on your feedback.
Hard to judge what is wrong/could be better as I couldn't gather what your actual project is. Maybe there are some obvious glaring mistakes on the landing page or something that scares people off?
Or it might just be trying to solve a problem that people don't actually have, or communicated poorly what problem it solves. I tend to see these being the most common reasons people don't even sign up.
Take for example, we frequently see Cursor, Aider, Windsurf, copilot, but rarely are there mentions of cline, roo and I think like only once or twice in very early days we saw mentions or Supermaven.
While Cursor runs babble from supermaven creator, many cursor users don’t know what supermaven is though they may know Aider or even cline.
Now draw your conclusion.
P.S. while I have no connection with supermaven, I do use it day to day personally as cursor/windsurf feels overhyped and crucial target to be acquired and enshittified anytime now(windsurf already got digested by oAI).
I wonder if there are opportunities for more call to actions. e.g. I scrolled the page and the only links to sign up are at the top (I’m on mobile).
Compare this to https://stripe.com/ and it’s super obvious how to “Start now” from anywhere on the page.
Our server bills are in EURO.
Our salaries are in EURO.
Our subscription for business operations are in EURO.
Our accountancy costs are in EURO.
It helps that our focus is on European customers, but that said, it is hard to justify going with USD pricing.
Is it painful in terms of accounting? Yes. Do I lose money on conversion rates? Yes. Am I making more money? Yes.
Unless you exclusively target a particular market, most people in US might not even know what EUR is. For them it might be the same as Zimbabwean dollars to you.
FYI we had USD pricing. When we dropped it we saw no difference in conversion.
USE CASES For a million reasons. Here's a few.
This is a common pattern ('We serve everyone!'), but you'd be well advised to actually pick a use case early on - you'll find that ecom, gaming, finance (especially), content, security, marketing all have their own specific needs and requirements, and they will want to see how you fit them before signing up.
This also makes your marketing efforts a little easier, as instead of having to spread thin across six different verticals, you can target for instance communities of indie gamers, bloggers, small shops who face this problem. when you've got validation from one of these, its easier to scale, but trying to go too broad too early in targeting is one of the most common errors founders make.
nicely designed site though and a lot of other stuff is on point.
EDIT: Your branding is also a little opaque. I wouldn't naturally associate "visitorquery" with what you were trying to do. Going for a domain like detectvpn even if you had to drop down to something like detectvpn.me feels like more of a direct match.
This would make them the last person to ask for recommendations (no offense intended).
It would seem preferable to seek advice/recommendations from people with a similar goal/situation to yours who are currently being successful at marketing their startup/product.
Depending on where your vendors are situated, you might avoid the conversion losses by having USD accounts AND EUR accounts.
We use two separate banks (for redundancy), each of which allows us to have incoming payments in EUR, USD, and a couple of lesser currencies (CAD, SGD) and we keep a balance in each.
And then we use the USD balance to pay, eg. DigitalOcean, and the EUR balance to pay eg BunnyCDN. So we mostly don't have to incur the conversion loss.
Please don't get me wrong: I also work in some spaces that are not highly valued by developers, so I empathize heavily. It's a pain in the butt trying to sell to programmers when this audience is literally one of the most difficult and obnoxiously inconsistently price sensitive. (Will spend thousands on hardware, scoffs at $1 apps.)
Smaller vendors in your price target might have the budget but not the mindshare to implement.
I’d be curious if you 100x your pricing.
Folks want to fit you into a neat bucket. If you don’t fit in, it causes emotional discomfort. This can be true even if strictly not the case in your pov - but customers perception and emotional response might explain some of your difficulties.
CloudFlare for example basically gives it all away, except to the people who make so much money that they want to pay a lot for a few niceties.
Game studios - a low touch way of getting around smurfing, botting and ban evasion, cheap farming accounts, and likely already think in terms of proxy/VPN abuse. Reach them through Unity and Unreal forums, dev groups, GameSec Twitter/LinkedIn
FinTech / Crypto compliance teams - position yourself as a plug in to KYC or KYB platforms. Behavioural analytics is a big play in fraud prevention, whether someone is using a VPN won't be the whole picture, but is part of it.
Deprioritise marketers, content teams - they're promising but ultimately false positives as no one but the very biggest players amongst them are losing sleep over this.
The key more than anything for both is going to be to emphasise in your positioning the ease of integration. Remember how Stripe had the exact code you needed to use on its homepage for ages? You've got to give the impression that integrating this is going to be super simple.
I feel like you spend quite a bit of time on your homepage selling why someone would want to do it, but not so much on the how and why you make it so easy fo them. Clicking into your docs it looks super simple, but the minute someone's had to click into your docs if they’re a non-dev audience, you're losing people.
You also absolutely must have a GDPR story. You’re detecting proxies and VPNs. This means you’re inspecting user connection data, possibly in real time, and possibly storing flags or identifiers. Even if you’re not processing names, emails, or cookies, under GDPR, IP addresses, device signatures, and behavioural data = personal data if it’s tied to a user.
Your GDPR story needs to cover data type transparency, what exactly what you collect: IP, device type, headers, connection method? If you’re processing requests in memory and returning results via API, that’s low risk. Highlight it. Offer EU hosting or at least say “data processed within EEA-compliant infrastructure." IANAL but you'll want to have a lawyer look at it.
But as someone already said, you maybe need to focus on solving a more specific problem or vertical, rather than being all things to all people. To find it, naybe think back about why you built this in the first place?
A more minor point : I would trust you more as a customer if you added an About page, to put a face on your product.
Your tactic over paying with USD revenue for USD bills is a good tactic.
Our policy is to avoid US vendors and USD subscriptions.
I won't comment on the project itself, but more about your mindset. I don't think "converting" is your issue, but your mindset is getting in the way of yourself. You see it as a no-brainer yet don't understand why people aren't buying, but you're 100% convinced you're right and solves the right problem in the right way. But clearly, if it did, you wouldn't even have to do sales, take a look at anubis for a project that is doing the very same but sells itself.
So I guess my best tip to you is to look inwards, be humble, be honest and try to enter a "learning" mode instead of "telling/convinced" mode that you seem to currently be in.
So, while I do get to keep the non-EUR in a dedicated account, I still record the transaction as if it was in EUR using, say, ECB rate. So it doesn't help with avoiding currency fluctuations (assuming my non-EUR pricing is fixed and not tied to latest exchange rate).
Obligatory: not an accountant; not an accounting advice.
I jumped back to the homepage and saw multi-accounting as a use case and that's actually something where I easily would pay 9$ as a starting point.
Do what you want with that information, but I converted at that point. It may still be correct though to raise prices and put something in the FAQ for low volume customers or maybe even say, 100 requests free per month and you go freemium and from there have it usage based.
Everyone always says don't do freemium, but honestly, this doesn't cost you anything and if sign-ups are your problem then this is exactly what freemium is there for
But... having to report numbers in EUR, doesn't mean having to convert to EUR. So you are *not* actually a victim of the currency fluctuation because the conversion didn't happen.
I could tell you right now that your 2024 revenue was 150 billion Zimbabwe dollars, and I could tell you next week that sorry, newsflash, 2024 revenue is actually 75 billion Zimbabwe dollars.
This wouldn't change your ability to pay your vendors (or yourself) in any way, because you don't really hold a ZWG account, so... whatever my spreadsheet says about that currency's fluctuations is immaterial to your actual business.
Cash power (ability to purchase the things you need) is what matters, so by keeping your USD and spending it on your USD purchases, you're somewhat shielded from the forex issue. (Though US inflation is another problem)
But on a more serious note - I've been where you are and the most helpful piece of advice I got at that time was to focus on one number (eg MRR or new lifetime deal sales) and focus each day on one action that could directly make it tick upwards. Indirect actions (eg "building in public on Twitter") do not count.
The other piece that was helpful for me at that time was learning what Paul Graham says about the Stripe founders [0]
> At YC we use the term "Collison installation" for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask "Will you try our beta?" and if the answer is yes, they say "Great, we'll send you a link." But the Collison brothers weren't going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say "Right then, give me your laptop" and set them up on the spot.
The day after I read this, I just started doing that. Everytime someone would ask me what I did, I would whip out my phone and have this 1 minute, before-and-after "elevator pitch" ready to show what my app did, and directly ask the person if they're interested so we can set them up for a free trial. I signed up a bunch of people over a few weeks just like that, with long free trials (like 1 to 3 months free) with an auto-rebill at full price (I'm talking $299/quarter).
It made a huge difference in the 1st year of going from 0 to 100 users.