[EGreg]

This is great advice. But I wanted to briefly mention an alternative perspective. We did things very differently.

Now two years later we have 250,000 monthly users, and we're getting ready to roll out our technology to them in a few months.

When you are building an app for people, businesses, or whoever, you have to go where they congregate. Pick an existing social network with a messaging channel that people haven't grown apathetic to. Then you have to have an onboarding process that's simple. Then you have to develop a sales process and maybe even incentivize your existing users to sign up others. Viral coefficients decrease your user acquisition cost. And so forth.

That's why we built our framework. We spent two years solving the problem of "how do you build the next generation of successful, useful apps? And soon we will see if we were right.

I wrote this back in 2008: http://luckyapps.com/blog/?p=12

[wslh]

I remember the cofounder of Dropbox also talking about this in an Stanford video. He was talking about promoting it, with ads, in Reddit. I think this kind of advice is the one where we need to put more focus instead of dev issues.