How can I make some money?

[cdhstarz]

I posted this on reddit earlier but I'll repost it here (since it's getting no traction there). The following is a copy/paste of that post.
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So the first thing I'll admit is I'm not super great with games like this.

I've been really in the weeds with this game. I'm enjoying it. I'm having fun. But it's a lot of struggle for me also.

I run a shopping platform.

I'm in the second office. I have

13 employees.

1 HR
3 Managers
3 developers
1 Lead Developer
1 Researcher
1 Sales Executive
1 Designer
1 Devops
1 Marketer

Our website uses the second lowest framework.

We have 2 FastClouds Mini Cloud Servers and 3 FastClouds Pro Cloud Server

Our website has a Landing Page (level 70), Image Upload (level 10) and Payment System (level 1) for features. I'm sure Image Upload isn't super important for a shopping platform but I got that early on before I got into it more heavily and understood more.

I struggle so hard with the money. I've googled around trying to find anything to put me on the right track. Someone was asking questions about loans and the reply said basically "by day 100 you're gonna have so much money don't worry about loans" (I'm paraphrasing but that was the point). I'm on day 154. I'm constantly having to keep doing contracts just to avoid bankruptcy. I've always got a loan out. By the time I earn enough to pay it off before long I've got a fresh loan again.

So please help me. How can I turn this around? How can I make this lucrative and not be at the mercy of the loans and contracts? Bonus points if it helps me pay off the initial investment.

[cdhstarz]

I had to log into my game to see if the features were actually switched on. They are. I am making a little money like $96-$120 give or take a day but that's obviously not nearly enough. The landing page can handle over a million people. The payment feature cannot, do I need that to be able to handle roughly equal traffic to the landing page?

[jhovgaard]

Originally posted by cdhstarz:

I had to log into my game to see if the features were actually switched on. They are. I am making a little money like $96-$120 give or take a day but that's obviously not nearly enough. The landing page can handle over a million people. The payment feature cannot, do I need that to be able to handle roughly equal traffic to the landing page?

Are you playing the game with or without an investor? It sounds like you're playing without which makes the game much harder.

Investors will take care of your expenses until you're making so much profit that you don't need them.

Best,
Jonas

[Seed]

You need to look at the marketing tab of your product and use it. The income from your product depends on the amount of registered users that your product has. Server capacity and potential users mean nothing if nobody knows your site exists and uses it.

At the moment, there is no word-of-mouth or natural user fluctuation, that will only come back with the next patch. So until then, you need to use the marketing tools to lure people to visit your website. A percentage of the users lured in by advertisement will register as user, and thus increase your income. Once you have a sufficiently large user base, you can stop doing contracts.