How long should we expect to get traction for a product?

We know that a product of a startup can not gain traction on the first release because basically people are still skeptical about a new product/website, but when should a product/website expect traction based on your experience? Until how long should we wait that a product should gain traction? Please share your experience on this.

EDIT The product itself is an opensource product for businesses. You can say it's something like MySQL, it's opensource but it is sold to businesses.

This sounds like a high tech product thats going through a product cycle. The best book i have read that would help you with this problem is called "Crossing the Chasm" You should look it up. It describes how to bring "traction" to your idea and product and hopefully make it go mainstream.

You should ask more specific questions of yourself and/or set goals for yourself. (e.g. 10 visits, 4 paying customers, 500 downloads, etc.)

"Traction" is a nebulous term and means nothing without specific details. You should also figure out what you will do with answers you get and if your question is meaningful. If I said "two weeks" what does that mean? If I said "two years" what does that mean? Does it have any bearing on your business? Is it relevant at all?

Focus on what results you want, not on nebulous things like "traction".

I'm not in a position to give a precise answer to your question, but some observations:

• Your blog and your Scrum8 site, as linked from your profile, have no content. If you're just starting out, and you have no incoming links from anyone else, then expect the first traffic to be quite hard to get. When you have no content and no inbound links, you're essentially in the www-limbo -- search engines won't include your site in the primary index, or at least they'll rank you pages very low for all search terms. You have 15 pages indexed by Google alredy, which is quite good, but they appear to have a PageRank of 0 in my quick look-through.
• The words "community effort" and "we already have" on your front to me signal that this isn't ready for heavy use yet. That would turn me away, I don't have the time. Consider your words very carefully.
• I went to Yahoo Site Explorer and looked for links (a.k.a. backlinks) to Projexionist. I didn't find any. Once you begin to have links expect 60-90 days before the major search engines have recalculated their rankings and have included you in the primary index.

• I think you should purchase some traffic via Adwords so that you have a usable volume of traffic to measure abandonment rate on, for A/B testing, etc. Otherwise any experiments you're doing will take a too long to get to a statistically valid sampling size.
• Get serious about link building -- engage with bloggers in your field, all your friends, trade associations in your area, anyone you can think of who can provide a relevant back link.

Good luck on you journey! :-)

Some good feedback here, especially from JM. Best advice is for you to recognize your own lack of business experience so you can get out there & accumulate some.

Your in a shark tank & you're not aware of it. Be careful, find a mentor & take your time. Do your homework & practice intelligent failure. For example, have you performed a feasibility analysis? Market research? Have you proved your concept?

Like most techies, marketing, selling, finance, etc. are foreign languages at this point & without those important skill sets it will be difficult to be successful.

Most businesses that have a solution (product) that's still looking for a problem to solve don't make it. Instead of seeking answers here try speaking to your customers or potential customers - that's where your real answer to "traction" lies.

Can you be more specific?
Is this a product for consumers or for businesses?
Is it something sexy like all those social media apps that are popping up everywhere, or very targeted and only interesting to a very specific group of people?
Does it have a free version of is it all paid? Is it cheap or expensive?

All these elements are relevant to figure out how fast you can get traction (from the product itself).

However, at the end of the day, you will need to push all the right buttons for people/companies to use it and promote it proactively.