America here we come!
I’ve had a good chat with my collaborator today and we now feel that the time has come to begin to target the USA market.
The UK side of the site is now on an almost exponential growth path and the main challenges that we have are to technically cope with the increase in traffic and to ensure our community is regulating itself. Almost none of the new members have anything to do with our efforts anyway, it is virtually all word of mouth.
It would be good to try again on the SEO and maybe also do a little bit of offline activity but I think that basically we’ve established the critical mass and it’s now there.
We are getting a bit of traffic from the US but we have the chicken-and-egg problem that the site is not of much interest because there aren’t that many members. On the positive side though the site is technically good, when we launched in the UK we had some pretty weak parts of the site (such as the chatroom).
I think it’s also pretty important for us not to view the US as a market anyway, we need to think about it in terms of states or even smaller areas. California is the largest state by population and also has the reputation for being the most liberal so that is where we are going to start.
The target is 10,000 new members in California over the next year. As soon as we hit this target we’ll start on another state. I think the free love message will go down well!