Ask HN: Need advice on growing my 2 month startup

Hello friends,

I've always received good feedback from this board, so I'd like to ask for your help! My partner and I are a couple months full time into our startup, Howl.com. Its a social bookmarking/linkblogging service. Growth has been slow and steady, we have a few hundred users.

We've made some improvements to increase retention a bit, such as adding "reputation score" (basically game mechanics), a leaderboard, email notifications for comments/reblogs/subscriptions, and lots of little things.

However, we aren't getting much exposure to new people. I don't think our idea is "novel" enough to get blogger attention. We think moving into more of a game type of site may help with that. But otherwise, we need to increase traffic and signups, but its hard to do on zero budget.

Particularly hard is getting some sort of viral loop going on. Right now, we prompt them to share their new page with friends immediately after signup. We also allow them to cross post to facebook/twitter whenever they post on our service, linking back to our site. I'm not sure this is enough. Where else could we become more viral and get people to show off their accounts?

Getting fresh exposure to new source is difficult. Occasionally we get a nice blog post, which is really helpful for driving signups. I'd like to get more blog coverage, but again, I don't think we're buzzworthy enough yet to get attention. Should we implement more game-like features in order to differentiate, as well as make ourselves more attention worthy for bloggers?

Thanks a ton for your help, any tips/advice/comments are appreciated!