nope. not for free :)

Find some customers before building the product. Make sure you build what they think they need.. not what you think they need.

Sorry, by "resources", I meant "experienced ROR developers" and thats a statement specific to my city- Kolkata, India. Wish I was in Chicago or San Francisco. :) Indeed, online help is available, but its time consuming if the developer doesnt have sufficient experience. All large tech companies in India have Java practice, so Java developers are in abundance, and usually have better coding habits too. This may not be true in some other places.

I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D and posted on CL and various free online classifieds.

How well did the advertising work? Was it worth it in your opinion?

I think FB Advertizing was awesome. It is expensive for USA/Europe but you can target Asia for less than 10 cents/click. We were converting close to 30%. So it wasnt bad at all. But the problem with Mingle Trips is that it is not viral. so I could only get people as long as I paid for it. That was not a great model for a bootstrapped startup. Also, it works much better than listing on Craigs List since you get much fewer perverts. From CL, etc, we were regularly getting prostitutes and guys who only wanted to get laid and were pretty crude. This may not be the general trend. It is only my limited experience.

Thanks!

I did some basic FB Advertizing and also reached out to bloggers - some of whom have written about us. I also spammed some travel sites a bit :D So we have around 6k users and 500 fb likes so far. Thanks

Thats right. I do have more enthusiasm than money :) Thanks. I have reached out to bloggers on Linked in and gotten them to check out the site and recommend to their readers. I also contacted hostels in Europe but they didnt seem much interested so far. I will send many more mails now and see what converts. Thanks

Thanks.

Thanks Gee. We are currently on Linode. But now Im experimenting with PHPFog. Looks good so far.

Thanks Playhard. Any clue how I can see if any of my submissions were also marked as "dead"?

hey Sullichin... morgue file is not free.