[BobWarfield]

Less than 1000 visits and we're already going to start chalking up the wisdom that's been learned? This is way too early and the traffic achieved is well down into the noise.

CPC is mildly interesting, but what was the real conversion rate to something that yields revenue? That's the only one that matters, at least unless your site is going to be an ongoing destination for repeat visitors that will allow you to sell them at other times ones they get hooked.

And that's your next step: figure out how to make this site a destination for your intended audience that they come back to again and again for the great content you're publishing there. Don't count visits unless they buy something or sign up for your email list and become repeat visitors.

Building the MVP is the easy part. Establishing a sustainable growing level of traffic that matters is the hard part. Before I'd even bother with an MVP, I'd focus on a blog and see how successfully I could grow traffic for some audience along the way. The area you're interested in, photography, is ripe with content marketing opportunities.

What sort of content will attract the kind of people who want to rent your products? What other products will they sign up for? What are the SEO parameters needed to get you that audience for free instead of via paid advertising?

Those are among the key initial questions to answer.

[derwiki]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, it's too early to chalk up wisdom learned -- but the main point of writing this was to get a discussion started and see what feedback people had. In my experience, blog posts do better if you offer something in them. In this case, I was sharing what the first two weeks of launching a site and trying to get traffic were like, for all the readers who haven't done it yet but want to do it some day.