A few months later I do a Google search to see if anyone had said anything about it and lo and behold, one of the notable poker training sites had done a full hour long video on how to use ALL IN Expert to improve your game. They had found out about the software, either because of my initial marketing or just randomly through Google, and wouldn't you know it: they found it useful. Now its downloaded a dozen or more times/day. Not much, but who knows what would have happened if I had kept promoting it.

It can be hard to tell when to give up and when you should push just a little bit harder. When I stopped working on it, I started working on a new project, Domain Pigeon, which will likely prove to have been a good decision.

My 2c: Leave your site up, make a few changes every now and then, keep promoting it even if only an email or forum post every few days, and re-evaluate in a few months. There's not really a good reason to take it down, even if you do choose to devote your time to something else.

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/business/features/shareprof...

I'll warn you in advance: some of it is trite. But there is some value in the other stuff: marketing success, for example, is not something that just happens to a product. It is something which is the predictable result of a strategy designed to produce it. Your submission indicates that you tried a few things to get users, which is good, but I wonder if you thought about that issue in a systemic manner. (Was there a plan in place? With boring things like predicting the chicken-egg issue before it happened, and multiple avenues for solving it? Which you then checked against reality as you encountered reality? These are opportunities for improvement in your current project and in how you approach future projects.)

As for when to give up: you'd be really, really surprised how far you can take projects with persistence. That said, if my little brother said "Hey, I've got an idea, first you take gamers and then you..." my first question would be "Why will they pay for this when they hate paying for just about anything, including the games which define their identity?" and I would not have a second question until I got a satisfactory answer to the first question.

To answer your question someone would have to know what those original reasons were. As some say, what's your "secret sauce".

It looks to me like a twitter for geeks. The problem is that being twitter is already for geeks, and I don't see any benefit in being in a more exclusive communication channel.

When you say "fair chance" to me it sounds as though you think there's a community of intelligent people who give websites scrutiny proportional to the effort the authors have put in. This kind of attitude is almost always going to lead to disappointment.

The internet is more like a herd of lazy, selfish people looking for ways to do less boring stuff and more fun stuff.

You might do better optimizing for that scenario.

edit: I originally had a critique of your site here but it wasn't strictly relevant and this post is too long.

http://www.noobindex.com/

Clean design and layout and I dare say it looks a little inspired from the HN design.

However the site really doesn't tell me what it does, issit like twitter?

"Noobindex is a hangout for noobs, nerds, dorks, and gamers.

Register your handle and make your own page »"

Doesn't tell me what the value is, or why stay. 18 or 19 words, 25 syllables, and I don't know what's going on here. I click on the first profile I see (Juicebox). I see a picture of Mr. T flexing wearing gold chains, some messages (latest: Juicebox is like omgsh pwnin noobs), and a Bio page with generic contact info.

At this point, I've investigated the site, and seen no reason to stick around.

Now, if the tagline were:

"Noobindex: l33t gamers only, for celebrating games and laughing at n00bs", then a search box below that with "Enter your favorite game and see who is playing right now" then... maybe that'd work better some? This is all just quick and dirty in my mind, but you need to get people's attention with something that makes them say, "Yeah, I'd dig that!" and then get them to interact with your site somehow.

Also, if you live in the U.S. and follow typical diurnal sleeping patterns, I recommend waiting until a more sane time in the morning to think your thoughts through rationally.

Caveat Emptor: I do not speak from experience.

However, as the other posters say, it sounds like you'll attract a bunch of 13 year olds. May want to steer the site in a more professional direction.

i haven't seen the site and have no idea of the specifics, but based on what i'm imagining, i would jump ship. the chicken-egg issue is hard for anything social (especially when bootstrapped w/ no marketing $), and gaming is a saturated space, so it'll be hard to get the user base to critical mass.

that said, if you're still excited about what you're building, that carries a lot of weight.

It's key you get some proof of concept (is this valuable to anyone? who is going to pay me? why?). Once you've got proof of concept and you're behind your idea, you then hustle like a motherfucker until you win. If your general concept is a winner, and you hustle like a motherfucker, you win eventually.

"If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape."

When do you know when to move on to a new project?

Ah, 2 completely different questions.

Moving on to a new project is not giving up. Especially when you use everything you learned from the previous project in the next one (which, of course, all of us hackers always do). Just think of it as Me 2.0 and move on. Never give up.

What % of blogs respond to your product? If you've only emailed 5 or 10 blogs, you don't really know yet - that's a pretty small number, and you might've just had bad luck. The rate of success really depends on a lot of factors unrelated to your site itself (subject matter, the blogs themselves, how you approach them, etc.), but I wouldn't be surprised to get a 10% response rate for an average product. I haven't really done this enough to go into more detail, or to have a winning formula, but I would expect the success rate to be relatively low, which can get discouraging.

What percentage of your visitors are sticking around? Again, if you've only received a few hundred visits, it's hard to tell. The best way to iterate is to have a steady stream of traffic, make changes, and see how they affect stickiness.. but getting the traffic is the tricky part to start with, right? I'm not really counting Digg/Reddit/Stumbleupon traffic here, since those visitors typically have the attention span of a fruitfly.

How much search engine traffic are you getting? How feasible is it to get on the first page of Google or Yahoo for some combinations of relevant keywords? (use the Adwords Keyword Tool to research keywords, see how much traffic they could potentially get you, and how competitive they are). Search engines can bring you thousands of visitors a month who are actively looking for something like your site. Don't ignore them.

Can you think of any other domain-specific promotions? You mentioned game forums and guilds, I don't know how far you took that. Is there any angle under which game developers or publishers might see an advantage to promoting your site or collaborating with you? What about game magazines or review sites?

These are all the cost of giving your site a chance to succeed. Weigh that against the reward of success - how badly do you want your site to grow, and how much effort are you willing to put in to "give it a fair chance"? (you're the only one who can give it a fair chance, by the way - no one else cares enough).

But for a gaming site to be simple is just wrong...look at your competition, all of them have extremely visually appealing designs. So why would a person register for something that looks like crap(pink background..really?) when they can register for a site that looks good.

If you suck at visual design hire a designer to build you something that is visually appealing. Probably will run you something like 500 bucks on one of those freelancer sites.

You haven't even included a link to your app! :)

a) If you can't see how to make this work, quit.

b) Beware of rationalizations for quitting when you're just in a local trough emotionally. My heuristic: I don't stop doing this until I find something better to do. That forces me to find a constructive reason to quit.

c) The worst possible outcome isn't failure and quitting but ongoing mediocrity. Either because you lack the courage to quit, or because you get just enough feedback to keep you interested. This can be arbitrarily hard to detect, but for starters keep monitoring your metrics and looking for opportunities to revise.