It has been going back and forth between 100% running itself and investing a couple months of effort into it. I discovered I really don't enjoy marketing/promotion, so it has languished for sure. It's up to a bit over $1,000/mo right now which I'm fairly happy about but I feel it could easily be x2-x5 of that with some sales effort commitment.
I'll write down some lessons I learned in hopes that I'll take my own advice in the future:
1) Avoid big-effort partnerships.
Briefmetrics was a partner in an app store launch for one of the biggest domain registrars. This required integrating with their single-signon and payment system and coordinating with their team in India and altogether what looked like a week of work turned into ~3 months of hell. A year later, all this effort yielded approximately 0 customers. The target audience fit was not very good (new domains is the worst time to get analytics reports) and the sunk cost of effort kept me going far longer than it should have.
I finally pulled the plug last month and I sleep much better. (Even pulling the plug took weeks longer than it should have, ugh. Never again.)
2) Commit effort to marketing/sales.
This is definitely advice I need to take for myself. I launched a bunch of new features to upsell existing customers (mobile reports, ecommerce, etc) but none of this is advertised anywhere for new customers. In fact, I've had a professionally-done redesign mockup sitting in my Dropbox for over a year now that I'm yet to implement. I have a half-dozen related blog post ideas I need to write about, audiences to target.
I'm seeing a lot of similar issues with other people here, "I built this but they didn't come." I feel you.
3) Seriously, do marketing/sales.
I built Briefmetrics because it's something I needed and my friends needed. I instantly had a set of initial paying customers, but organic growth from a small seed of users is slooooooow.
Meanwhile I see great salespeople grow to tons of customers on what amounts to a product cobbled together in a few hours. This totally makes sense to me, and we all need to respect it more.
I'm allocating a couple of weeks on the calendar to just focus on this. If you built something you're proud of, you owe it to the world to do a better job promoting it.