I've just reached the one year milestone of running my free online dating service at DiveIntoThePool.com and I wanted to just share that feeling of not giving up. Just before I launched I saw several posts about startups that gave up after a very short amount of time and I feared falling into that same category. All my research into competing free online dating services pointed out the same issue of the owners stopping promotion or administration after a very short amount of time.
I figure I don't have the budget to take over the online dating world in 3 months, I'm betting it will take another 2 years at the least to reach my own goals. I'm looking forward to another year, maybe I'll finally break into the organic search results and have users find me versus me coming to them first.
I posted a little overview of the past year on the sites blog here: http://diveintothepool.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/one-year-and-going-strong/
Thanks to HN for providing me very inspiring and helpful links to keep my own enthusiasm high enough to keep working and not give up!