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1884 visitors visit my site, but only 56 people registered, and finally only 3 willing to pay for my service. Is that a bad business?

Here is a problem. I am creating a dating website and hope I can make a decent money with my business idea.

But it is too hard. There are 1884 visitors visited my site, but only 56 people registered (everyone can register for free), and finally only 3 people willing to pay for my service.

So, generally the cost to advertise is much higher than the income. I can make a little $ if 10 people willing to pay.

I have just started my website for 2-3 week

So, my question is that

Is my idea bad? Should I continue to invest in it or stop it completely?

Answer 1768

If the model works in other countries and you country doesn’t have another startup using that model, I don’t think the idea is bad. The execution is bad. Each markets have different types of needs and you can not figure this out without talking to your users and getting feedback.

Bad parts in your execution:
Get familiar with AARRR!
http://500hats.typepad.com/500blogs/2007/09/startup-metrics.html

Acquisition:
1884 people aren’t the size you acquired. It is probably much lower. Only track people who spent more than 10 seconds in your website. Some of those people were actually looking for something else and decided that your site isn’t what they are looking for in 3 seconds and close it. For 1884 people who visited your site and didn’t register: Find out why they visited, what they didn’t like, why they didn’t register. Maybe talk to the registered users why they did it and you might probably get a hint from them too.

Activation:
56 people activated your product. How can you make this higher? Well from my research these days everybody hates signing up to places, they just leave the site when it asks for signup info. Maybe instead of signing them up in the spot, let them do some actions with a temporary user account, fill their profile, ask interests, polls etc.. after the user spent some time they will be more likely to activate their email.

Retention:
What do the users get when they visit the site again and again? Give them some value.

Referral:
Datings sites aren’t usually good on referrals because people just don’t share to their friends: “hey I am on this dating site”, so you need to figure out a way to have people refer users. Maybe give them free premium stuff when their friend signs up and completes a profile.

Revenue:
3 people are paying for your service. How can you make more of them pay? How can you make the paying customers spend more money?

Notes:
Creating businesses are hard work. You should not expect to have a positive cash flow for at least 6 months. After that you may be getting a good traction or failed completely. Thats the risk of startups. But if you split these problems and focus on them individually and if you are committed, I see no reason to fail.

Answer 3229

With only one try, it’s way to soon to kill the project. Nobody gets it right the first time, there is a million possible reasons why so few people got onboard.

Wording, design, confidence, fear, trust, to many forms, not enough forms, who knows.

You need more feedbacks : either as Dennis said by asking them (get their phone numbers) or with quantitative metrics like A/B tests.

In my project, I also had a very low conversion rate but I improved it over time. Good luck !

Answer 1763

Without more details, it’s hard to know or tell.

One point is worth highlighting, though: if you’re into dating sites, you’re in a market with desperate buyers. You can actually tell from the stats you gave, in fact, even if your sample is too tiny to do any meaningful statistics:

  1. A pitiful 0.15% of your visitors bothered to sign up. That probably means your marketing copy is inadequate, with the result that your visitors do not trust you the slightest bit.

  2. Of those that did sign up, 5.5% turned into paying users in order to reach out to one another. Either this means you’re doing a reasonably good job at onboarding them, or it’s not much better than the marketing copy and you’re seeing first-hand how desperate a desperate buyer’s market can be.

So, per the comments, do your market research homework. Get a feel of who your prospective clients are, what their pains are, what convinces and converts them, etc.

In plain English, this means asking them. (Or surveying them, in the case of random visitors.)

Again. Don’t guess. Don’t use proxies like competitor sites or random blog posts. Ask them.

Once you know, you’ll be able to articulate your marketing copy so it’s compelling, how to weed out objections and the impression that there’s a risk involved, how to improve and optimize your onboarding experience, and so forth.

Answer 3857

On the face of it your business is not viable in its current form.

However - there are ways to remedy this.

  1. Where did your traffic come from? If you’re paying for traffic then you may well find that the visitors or not of a “good quality” and therefore not likely to sign up or even look into your site in any detail. You can check this by finding out your “bounce rate” ie how long visitors are spending on the site. This should be lower than 50%, the lower it is the better, if it is high then look at how you are acquiring traffic and see if it can be improved.

You can also see where your visitors are coming from, is it from email marketing, links on other websites etc - if you’ve got some kind of stat software installed on your site such as Google Analytics or Statcounter etc you can find this info out quite easily.

You need to really understand who is visiting your site so you can work on improving the quality and quantity of visitors.

Is the trend for visitors going up, down or stating steady, hopefully it’s going up!

  1. You may find the website is not easy to navigate, or the site looks unprofessional, or any one of a number of reasons that people might not hang around or go as far as registering and paying etc. Get someone to have a look at the site and give you feedback on areas that could be improved. Did you build the site yourself or was it done professionally?

Make the sign up process as easy as possible, ask the minimum info required, you can ask for more data later on when required. People hate filling in forms but if it only asks for 5 pieces of info they are more likely to proceed compared to being confronted with a form asking for 20 items. People are lazy!

  1. I don’t know what your data is like but I wouldn’t join a dating site unless it had a lot of people already registered, what’s the point if there’s nobody to date? This may be causing your audience to be less inclined to register and pay money, you could get around this by offering free memberships to the first x people to sign up. Alternatively you could look at reducing the sign-up costs as a temporary “special offer”.

  2. You have a lot of competition in your chosen area, can you do anything to differentiate or make your offering unique? For example a dating site for ginger haired people (I am joking but you get the idea).

Finally don’t lose hope just yet, new sites need time to get established and if you put the work into it you can certainly improve on what you’ve achieved so far. I don’t know your costs so I cannot say if it would ever be a viable business but from what you’ve said so far it is certainly worth investing a little more time at least.

Good luck with it!

Answer 3861

My recommendation is to find a way to receive feedback to know why people don’t want to pay:

Good luck!

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