The only reason you'll fail is because your product sucks, not lack of marketing or money.
You are trying to do too much too soon, making everything mediocre crap.
1) Simplify everything; figure out what the one thing your site does well is (whatever is doing most successful, which looks like contests/predictions). Get rid of everything that people aren't using, like yaNotes.
2) Don't do international, focus on building where you live and work. Nobody cares that theres international traders. I'd rather have 500 US traders then 25 traders from 20 countries. This is called the network effect.
3) Clean up your homepage after you've done accordingly. Users probably only need to see 3 sentences out of what you've written.
4) Make something viral a core part of your product (getting users to announce predictions on twitter to be part of a giveaway?).
I hate to say it, but you did it wrong (I did this too while trying to build a social network). You poured money into it thinking you could design the perfect community and features and just launch it. I see nothing that requires hiring graphics artists, mathematicians, or two outsourced dev firms.
You can still make this a success, just expect to lose a majority of what you have now. All the work you've put in will essentially be deleted and you'll have to let it go. Good luck.
Agree with the above. The problem is that by the sounds of your description your product has one killer feature - an algorithm to rate peers' predictions - but the website itsef looks like a generic consumer portal/network
Marketing spend itself shouldn't be an issue - you can drive traffic organically through blogging and even banging on the doors of your friends' old contacts.
You are trying to do too much too soon, making everything mediocre crap.
1) Simplify everything; figure out what the one thing your site does well is (whatever is doing most successful, which looks like contests/predictions). Get rid of everything that people aren't using, like yaNotes.
2) Don't do international, focus on building where you live and work. Nobody cares that theres international traders. I'd rather have 500 US traders then 25 traders from 20 countries. This is called the network effect.
3) Clean up your homepage after you've done accordingly. Users probably only need to see 3 sentences out of what you've written.
4) Make something viral a core part of your product (getting users to announce predictions on twitter to be part of a giveaway?).
I hate to say it, but you did it wrong (I did this too while trying to build a social network). You poured money into it thinking you could design the perfect community and features and just launch it. I see nothing that requires hiring graphics artists, mathematicians, or two outsourced dev firms.
You can still make this a success, just expect to lose a majority of what you have now. All the work you've put in will essentially be deleted and you'll have to let it go. Good luck.