In a little less than 2 years I've been able to develop a web application/community that has been continuously but slowly growing.  With little more than word of mouth I've been able to gain over 4000 registered users most of which are very serious contributors to this community.  At the beginning of last year I was able to add a product to the community plus, based on a freemium model, was able to attract ~100 members to sign up for a premium account in just the last 10 months.  Sales of the product (which is produced by the community) and sales of the premium memberships have added up to a modest $4K gross.  So quick math tells me I've earned about $1.00 per registered user.<p>Now this project has been part time.  Sometimes it takes up all my nights and weekends and other times I don't touch it for weeks.  So the other day I realized if I could seriously scale up membership the business could be earning anywhere from 100K upwards to 1M / year.  But here lies the problem.  I am not business guru and I mostly depend on the community to do the marketing for me by word of mouth, links to the site, tell a friend, etc.<p>What I need to know from some of you startup gurus out there is what would you do next?  Simply stay the course?  What should be my goals at this point of the game be?  Growth or conversion?  I have the product and service in place which is really where I've spent most of my time during the project and it has been finely tweaked now.<p>Just a side note, what I have found is that whenever my service/product does pick up a blog post or some outside exposure my membership numbers go way up in very big spurt, then levels off when the smoke clears so I do know that the conversion rate of the right people seeing the site and joining is pretty good.<p>I'm looking for guidance or mentorship especially if you've been involved with some past successes.<p>Regards
Looking for advice from other successful startups.