For me, it's a case of "You Have Launched, But No One Noticed", I launched TradesAlerts (http://tradesalerts.com) in Nov 2010, the first few days got a few users from HN and Facebook... in short -> no sign-up.
Looking at my Analytics stats, most of my visitors are from the USA, but my site is more Asia focused. So now, I'm working on a variation to make it more localized.
Did you mean "Nov 2010" ? If so, I'm surprised you only gave it a few days before giving up and putting a "This is now a Closed site, consider joining the Forum instead." message up...
O... I'm not giving up, instead I'm working on a variation which overcome these issues;
- Target Asian traffic instead USA traffic.
- Try to convince users I'm not selling snake oil. It is not easy especially when the service can help investors make money. A common question I get is why then am I giving it away. People might think I'm trying to Pump and Dump the stocks.
So now, I am focusing my efforts on my friends and WOM instead. I hope by helping them, they can recommend potential customers to me. I feel that this approach might be more appropriate for this type of service.
Hopefully that was a typo, otherwise you launched a maximum of 10 days ago? It's hardly time to give up yet.
Work on getting posts up on hn, reedit and maybe digg, pro ote and be patient!
I am beginning to notice "Patience is a key ingredient when you launched a startup." Point taken. I am also drafting a series of posts for the site. Hopefully they will make Reddit in due course.
This is why, when I get a web server for a project I pre-pay for a year rather than going month to month. If after 3 months I get bored of the project, or discouraged, I can just leave it alone to go on autopilot for the rest of the year- rather than seeing that charge on my credit card every month.
I am thinking of setting a server in Amazon AWS for this purpose too. Once I completed the low traffic/CPU utilization projects, I move it to AWS, reserved instance are cheap for 3 years and domains is only like $8 per year. Very affordable.
Wow - I had never done the math before but a reserved micro instance works out to $7.39 a month (not counting future price decreases) for 3 years. That's a great idea, thanks!
Looking at my Analytics stats, most of my visitors are from the USA, but my site is more Asia focused. So now, I'm working on a variation to make it more localized.