[johnrob]

"Out of 350 or so visitors, we got 4 sign ups"

The ycnews crowd may not be your target audience. Perhaps they they are too busy hacking their own stuff to bother researching other startups :)

[sspencer]

This is dead on. A site has to be extremely innovative and useful for me to sink even the time to register into it. Conversely, even a decently useful-looking site with an overly complex registration process usually gets bypassed as well.

Extremely fast-registering sites (like Hacker News, for example) have spoiled me. ;)