Ask HN: When to pivot/optimize and when to abandon ship?

5 points

16 years ago

I recently finished the beta version of my website (soundkey.com) and started attracting visitors using Google AdWords, just to see how "sticky" the website is and to get some data on users' behavior (using Google Analytics to track usage patterns).

The results, while prelimnary, have been quite dissapointing, and I wanted to know from the collective experience of HN readers, if this is something I should just learn from and soldier on, or take as a sign that I'm not offering a useful service and abandon or at least scale down this effort.

Stats: There were about 2,000 visitors over several days, with about 1 min avg time on the site and 2.3 pages/visit, which may or may not be decent, but only had a handful of submissions (less than 10).

It's likely that AdWords is not the best way to attract my initial user base, but even so, I expected at least some non-negligible user involvement.

Have any of you had experience with web apps that you put up, and initially got negligible traction from visitors, and then, after the right steps had that increase significantly?

I could hire a professional designer to improve the look, do customer development, find and target early adopters, pivot & adapt the product, do marketing, PR, SEO, etc, but I'm concerned that if out of a couple of thousand users only a handful found it useful enough to use (for free and without the need for registration) maybe I shouldn't be trying to "put lipstick on a pig".