In my previous gig we used to spend single-digit millions/year, and saw all metrics falling down like OP did, and we had a team of 6 experts with tons of experience in AdWords.
Not sure about this vertical, but in other (much more lucrative) ones such as travel, Google is pushing its own solutions at the expense of other websites.
For example, try looking for a hotel in new york and you will see Google Hotel Finder results, Google Map (which feeds from Google Hotel Finder), Google Places for Business, etc. Google Map will even stay fixed meaning that as you scroll down the ads are hidden by it.
There's much less value in positions that used to be profitable, especially 4+ (right-hand side ads).
My issue with this is that history teaches us that you don't need big money to reach scale, you only need the cash to support scaling up from a technical POV. Look at FB early days, Twitter, etc.
Unless they're going to pay users to join them, I don't see how raising so much money is going to solve their problems.
For technical reasons. We're waiting for a deal with a strategic partner to close, we can't technically start charging money or distribute our app before that.
Can't go into specific at this stage but imagine we're building an iOS app and waiting for Apple to approve it (not our case but close enough)
If you are available maybe we can do something together in Turkey. We will be very happy to get customers there and our product works perfectly for the type of customers you're describing (small and mid-size, shitty tech solution to manage their property, tech-savyy employees)
For us "launch" means the date that we can start charging money for our product.
We did the part of telling our friends/family when we had the closed beta ready, but there is a big difference for us between the closed (free) beta and an open beta that can accept paying customers.
We are a small team based out of Barcelona, Spain.
This tool is a public beta for our cloud-based hotel management software. We're trying to help the long tail of hotels to better manage their properties at lower cost.
The tool is built on Django for backend and Backbone.js/Bootstrap for frontend.
Upgraded the day it was released, last few days I feel that you could cook an egg on my MBP after 2 hours of working (nothing fancy, IDE and browsers open - no heavy GPU usage). Do more people feel that 10.8.x overheats the machine?