websiteI have a functioning website for buying, selling, and exchanging surfboards. Users can filter based on location, price, size, and similar attributes.
We’ve accumulated over three thousand Facebook likes since we launched around two years ago, but I still only get thirty to fifty visitors per day.
I’ve tried running ads on Google and Facebook, but found very little success on either platform. I ran a variety of Google and Facebook ads. Some catered to buyers and some catered to sellers. I even went so far as creating a Facebook ad for each individual ad on my site to drive more traffic to the ad itself and to hopefully help the buyer sell their surfboard to show that the site works. The ads were targeted in Southern California with anyone interested in surfing between the age groups of 18-50.
We’ve been improving the site over the last couple years, and I’m finally happy to say that it’s at its final stage in terms of functionality, and I’m ready for heavy traffic to hit it, but I cannot for the life of me figure out how startups get so many initial users. I’m not really too sure where to turn.
What can I try to bring in initial traffic to my site and get users to post there surfboards?
For the record, the site is www.surfboardswap.com.
Your site is off to a great start! I suspect you need to find a way to differentiate yourself from amazon.com and ebay.com, so that people want to "buy" through you. The fact that you're doing ads and connecting people, instead of actually selling might be a problem.
You're getting some traffic. Do you know if any transactions have taken place because of the site? If so try and get some stories.
Related to that, you might find the book Platform to be helpful.
If you’ve had relevant traffic, but aren’t getting usage, that may be a signal that what you’re offering just isn’t of sufficient value to your community.
I can think of two directions you can go from here.
First, if you want to press further in to surfboard transactions, you could swallow your pride and bring in listings from Amazon, eBay, Craigslist and the rest. That would help you evaluate the hypothesis, “if only I had all the surfboard.
Second, you can go talk to the people who have liked your page or given you their details by whatever means. Find out what bothers them, not about the site, but about life and surfing. Where are they wasting time, or money? Where are they disappointed? It could be that your site is a great preparation for a pivot. That’s not a failure, it’s well-applied learning.
Most obvious way to grow the amount of real buyer and sellers on your website would be to find an existing market, create a reason for users to cross-post listings to your site; examples of existing markets might be: craigslist, boardhunt, etc.
Main issue with the above approach is it's likely a violation of the market's terms of use.
One thing I found interesting was that Board Hunt post data on their site's usage in the footer; here the data as of October 14, 2014:
Content options might include:
In general though, I'm pressed to find a reason to suggest spending more time on growing your market until you have a sold idea of how much a visit, buyer, seller, etc. is worth to you, since I'm guessing you're cost per acquisition is currently very, very high. To get a rough idea, take the time you've spent on the project, multiple it by your average hourly earnings, then divide it by the number of unique users your project has had over it's life, and you'll get a rough number.
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