Ask HN: What should I do with my project?

[killthisacc]

I have a personal side project (startup-ish) which I work on for almost a year now(maybe a few months less). The project is not monetized, as I try to build kind of a brand first. I have already spent around $3000 and there is just me working on it. I only have 500 sign ups so far, around 3k twitter followers (~90% are real) and the page views are very low.

Here is the screen shot from Google Analytics. http://i57.tinypic.com/59y9dz.png

As you can see, there are a few spikes. They happen from time to time when I work really hard. 2-3 days per month page views may reach to 20k visits a day. But then, the next day, the traffic goes all the way down to 400-500 visits. Today, there were something like 10k page views, but only 4 sign ups! I feel crushed and not sure if its worth to keep the project going. Do you have any advice? What should I do?

p.s. of course, I'm using a throw-away account for this question.

[bbcbasic]

Hard to day without details about what the project is, how you get traffic, what you spend the $3k on etc.

Is there any chance you can give a bit more information?

Based on what you have said I would try to talk to some of your end users. There are numerous JS plugins that allow your users to give feedback, chat to you in real time, track mouse movements.

In addition you can email your list of subscribers with a personable and friendly email asking for help. Maybe something like this:

>>>

Hi Dom

It is James here from coolwebsite.com. Just seen that you have been a member for 7 days, and wondered what your experience has been so far? Anything I can do to improve?

<<<

The general point is gather information from your user base. Work out who they are, where they hang out. You may figure out better ways to market your site based on this to get better conversion rates and more subscribers.

Also check that the free version is positioned right so there is incentive to upgrade. Patio11 wrote a good blog post about this topic once - I can't remember the url but somewhere in here: http://www.kalzumeus.com/blog/

[killthisacc → bbcbasic]

Thank you for your reply. I spent $2k for high-quality content and $1k for designs. I expect users to generate content, but right now all of them are just readers. I get traffic from reddit, twitter, etc. Basically, people read articles and that's it. They share content, like it on facebook, etc, but never actually comment nor produce its own content.

[bbcbasic → killthisacc]

So you need to find out why they are not commenting or adding content. Can you reveal the url?

Or if you don't want to post here, email me the url on my profile (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bbcbasic)

[webstartupper]

1. I would suggest you look at options to monetize first. Even if you do not plan to implement it right away, knowing what kind of monetization the project can have will give you good idea of how, where and what is the cost to market.

2. If your project is centered around user generated content, I would suggest reading up on how websites like reditt overcame the chicken and egg problems (they seeded content till they had enough users who would generate content for them)

3. From your screenshot, you seem to be getting 5 to 10K visitors. You can start collecting user emails by offering something of value to them. (its never too early to start building a mailing list)

4. Check the pages that users visit using GA. Check the bounce rate with relation to source of traffic. This would give you a good idea of what traffic sources to promote, what kind of users find value in your site and what type of content gets your user's attention.

If you'd like some more custom feedback for your website, feel free to drop me an email.