For a Sustainable Web startup, what is the minimum amount of traffic it should have after 1 year of launching?

I made an effort to create a website 5 years ago.

At the beginning, after 1 year, not spending any coin for advertising, there only 1 or 2 people visit my website, so i understood that my Web startup failed.

Now, the website is still existing but almost like 1 or 2 visit it a week.

So, if you did a similar Web Startup, based on your own experience,
what is the minimum amount of traffic it should have after 1 year of launching?

Do you spend lots of $$ for advertising? Facebook didn't even spend any coin for advertising but but there thousands of people register it a day in its early time.

The website about dictionary. All $$ from AdSense. Ex, someone click on the Adsense ad then i can make like 10 to 30 cents.

Seem it's very hard to get a successful startup, it's like a lottery. Don't you think?

There's not going to be a single correct answer to this in the form of "If you have 300 visitors per day, you'll be sustainable." It just doesn't work that way. If you're in a niche market, and each sale nets you $1K, and you have a 10% conversion ratio (visitors becoming customers) having 50 visitors per month could be enough. But if each paying customer equates to an average of $3, and you have a 3% conversion ratio, suddenly, you need 50000 visitors per month to pay the bills.

This can be calculated from an equation like the following:

Visitors = SustainableIncome / (ProfitPerSale * ConversionRatio)

 

• Visitors: # of people who need to visit the site to be profitable.
• SustainableIncome: The minimum amount of money that you and any other employees/cofounders need to survive, or better yet, to not just survive, but feel like it's worth it.
• ProfitPerSale: The amount of money your company collects from a single sale. (We assume here each customer will only buy once, not a recurring payment or a periodic purchase.)
• ConversionRatio: The percent as a fraction (on the interval [0-1]) of visitors who become paying customers.

It's easy enough to sit down and figure out the required income. That's dependent on the cost of living in your area, and what you feel is a sustainable minimalist lifestyle. (Doing a personal budget works wonders here.)

You can usually set the profit per sale, so that's trivial. It's a known value from the get-go. (Though if you can't seem to be able to make the math work otherwise, you can consider adjusting the price. Obviously, the product's cost and the conversion ratio are not completely independent of each other.)

The hard part is coming up with the conversion ratio. With you having so few visitors, you probably can't accurately gauge this. In the early stages of a startup, people will do their best to estimate this, possibly after doing some market research to see the conversion ratios of competitors or similar companies.

Plug all those numbers in and you'll know how many visitors you should need.

In short, though, you'll almost certainly need far more than 1-2 visitors per week to survive for all but a very limited set of scenarios. Like by two or three orders of magnitude. Thousands or tens of thousands per week. Plug in your information, as best as you can, to the formula above and see where that takes you.