Progress in America
Visits from USA (which is really just California at the moment) are now 2.7% of the UK total, up from 0.2%. Of the first ten-fold increase is much easier than the second ten-fold increase as we started out with such a small amount of traffic.
We’ve still got another few months of hard slog before we’ll see any organic growth but it’s good, steady progress.
Growth in the UK has been the best we’ve ever had. The secret seems to have been stopping all marketing! In reality, I think the growth is through word-of-mouth and a natural function of the site maturing. There have been quite a few champions/opinion leaders who have become fans of the site and brought 30-40 people each with them from pay sites. And of course the 30-40 people tend to bring their own friends too.
We’re still some way from this happening in the US though because we just don’t have a big enough membership for the site to work completely, features like the chatroom don’t work at all with this number of members and even the basic feature of finding lots of interesting people nearby isn’t quite there yet either.
So it’s just question of time and keeping on with it.