We took cool, refreshing Italian Ice into the desert and tried to give it away for free and found that first we had to explain to people why they would like it. 

That is the closest way that I can find to explain our current frustrations.  

Don’t get me wrong, we always knew that introducing a new product to people (even a free one) would take time, effort and money.  But I also thought the viral aspects of our site would be a bigger booster for those efforts than they have been. 

The hard truth is, our target audience is difficult to pin down online.  Moms have built systems that work for them in organizing their households - whether they be via paper calendars in their kitchen or some other means, and the difficulty is to convince them to take a small amount of time to pivot away from those methods and try our site.  As moms ourselves we know how precious our time is - and maybe that is why we can already feel that convincing women to take the time to rebuild their organizational efforts will take a lot of work.  

Its frustrating.  Because the minute we talk to people about our site, and the tools that it offers people get excited.  There is almost an audible click when a woman sees her family calendar all set up and color coded.  So all we need to do is travel around and visit a million homes and help people see how HATCHEDit can help them.  :)

However, I don’t want to make this sound like I am dejected or not excited about where we stand today.  With no real marketing push at all we have already passed our first 1000 members.  And those members who have found us because they are looking for a solution to organize their lives better are really using us.  

Now that we finally have the first phase of our Android app released (and are waiting impatiently for the iPhone app to be done) we can begin our first real steps for a marketing push.  The goal is to double our user base over the next month.  I will let you know how that goes.