I'm not the one to talk, because you've built at least one more small online business than I have...
But it could be that it's time to build something else. You've built your product. You've tested the market, and it's not there. You've got a pretty good theory as to why: You're up against sites like Flickr and Apple's MobileMe and SmugMug and Facebook.
You have the data; now you have to let them speak to you.
Build a completely different product. You'll be a lot more efficient on your second try. You've obviously learned a lot already.
Or (if you insist) build a product built on the same engine but with a completely different marketing plan. The generic photo-sharing space is tough. Specialize more. Build (e.g.) a site for deer hunters ("IShotThat.com"), or baseball fans ("ViewFromTheBleachers.com"), or model railroaders ("TiedToTheTrack.com"), or quilters, or something.
I don't think it matters whether you've built a business or not. What makes a difference is how many photos you have and what kind.
If you have 3 photos, go ahead and use flickr. Three photos look better on flickr than on OurDoings.
If you have 200 photos that are individual works of art, Smugmug is the place for you.
If you have 200 photos that hang together to tell a story, whether it's of kids growing up, travels, or some other activity, then OurDoings is just plain better.
When a lot of people have uploaded 200 photos each and then abandoned OurDoings, I'll feel like I have some data. But right now I just think not enough people have tried it.
Plus, I need to learn more about early adopters. It's easier to attract them with a fleshed out site like OurDoings than with a new bare-bones idea. OurDoings will be where I put my own photos, both private and public, until something better comes along, so it's not going away any time soon.
I do have other ideas. But I still think this is the one to focus on for now.
"if you have 200 photos that hang together to tell a story, whether it's of kids growing up, travels, or some other activity, then OurDoings is just plain better"
why exactly is your service better when someones uploads 200 pictures?
you've said it yourself, the mainstream user uploads average 3 pictures
Well, okay then. Having issued the obvious warning, here's my two cents (which are not to be confused with scientific data or anything -- remember: test, test, test):
-- The home page is too wordy. Go look at Flickr's homepage. Count the words.
The reason not to be wordy isn't just that it's quicker to read, it's trendy design, etc. It's to avoid looking like a brochure. Your site right now reeks of "I'm desperate to sell something" and not of "We've got lots of nice pictures to share with you; come share some of your own". If I visited your site I'd probably click away before I read more than three words -- I'd see it was about photo sharing, I'd think "Flickr clone, by someone who writes brochures!" and off I'd go.
-- Put some content front and center. Design a fairly large widget that displays content in a way that emphasizes the special OurDoings[tm] format -- e.g. with the date and caption at the top or the bottom, or superimposed, and the photos fading one into another, or displayed as a gallery, or sliding right to left slowly...
The reason you need a special widget is that you want to show the content without making the user scroll the home page. You also need to make a clear distinction between a user's home page and the site's home page, and you want to be able to showcase a selection of different users on the home page.
Then write code that takes some of your users' most recently uploaded public content and puts it in the frontpage widget. Make sure that, if an interesting photo pops up, the viewer can click a big obvious link to go to the user's home page and see their "doings" in all their glory.
-- Include a list of links to recently updated home pages on the site home page.
-- All this content display will serve to highlight the fact that your content is both sparse and old, old, old -- the most obvious content, the demo, is from 2005! You can't create customers out of thin air, but you can get more out of the ones you already have -- particularly yourself. Get out there and take some pictures. Take pictures night and day. Make your friends take pictures. Put 'em up in public OurDoings pages. Make those pages easy to find from the home page.
-- So, suppose I've yielded to their superior marketing and created a Flickr photostream. Can I sign up for OurDoings, press one button, and get your software to suck down my existing Flickr photos and rearrange them into your nifty format? Flickr photos have timestamps, right?
If this feature already exists, it's a crime that I don't know it at a glance. Put a huge link marked "TELL A STORY WITH YOUR FLICKR PHOTOS" on your home page, because that's a great way for folks to test-drive your site. The thing about my Flickr set is that it's already on the Web, and I already know that it's got nothing except what I'm willing to share in public, so I don't have to do any work, or have any particular trust in OurDoings, in order to let the site play with my existing Flickr photos.
UPDATE: Hey, wait a minute. If you had a Flickr-processing feature, could I pipe all of the Flickr photos which were tagged "xkcd meetup boston" into an OurDoings album, click on the ones I want to keep, and rearrange them into a story with captions written by me? Suddenly OurDoings becomes an online widget for building stories out of multiple people's Flickr photos...
Obviously you've got to be clever with the design of such a thing to prevent griefers from DDOSing you to death. Flickr feeds can potentially feed a lot of photos...
I can't believe I'm the only one to upmod your comment. Detailed feedback like this is the most valuable thing on HN and should be encouraged.
I made the front page less wordy. Adding some animated feature to it is something I'll have to mull over. Flickr showcases individual photos; I showcase stories. I have to think about how it would work.
Importing from flickr is now 2nd on my list after Picturesync support. Picturesync is probably the best plugin for Mac people, and a lot of early-adopter types are on Macs.
You should put this sentence, with something like the edits in brackets, right at the top:
"Just take pictures [with your digital camera as you normally do] when busy with real-life doings, then upload the whole pile weeks or months later and it [will be] automatically organized [for you]."
"... It doesn't get much better if you keep reading ..."
No you are wrong.
The article is a good one because this is a generic problem that has to be solved by each and every Startup. The question is how? The reason for lack of users in my view is the founder might have been too late to hit the digital photograph craze and got knocked down by the big sites like flickr, smugmug and zoomer and the founder should have either found a niche or failed.
A timely lesson get to market fast and fail early.
he is asking for a (hopefully positive) evaluation by early adopters, so that they may use the site and eventually recommend it to some late adopters outside his immediate family.
Brian, I have been following your progress for a long long time. After all this time, I feel I should be blunt. I think your product is interesting, but your execution is very poor.
There are a lot of things you are bad at. Your copy, design and interface are inadequate. Most importantly, your name does not work. For a consumer product, these failings are deadly.
You need to find someone who can do those things for you.
You also need to stop using Lisp. I could build your product in a weekend using Python or Ruby. It would take me four years to do it in C. It took you four years to do it in Lisp...
But it could be that it's time to build something else. You've built your product. You've tested the market, and it's not there. You've got a pretty good theory as to why: You're up against sites like Flickr and Apple's MobileMe and SmugMug and Facebook.
You have the data; now you have to let them speak to you.
Build a completely different product. You'll be a lot more efficient on your second try. You've obviously learned a lot already.
Or (if you insist) build a product built on the same engine but with a completely different marketing plan. The generic photo-sharing space is tough. Specialize more. Build (e.g.) a site for deer hunters ("IShotThat.com"), or baseball fans ("ViewFromTheBleachers.com"), or model railroaders ("TiedToTheTrack.com"), or quilters, or something.