

Ask HN: Was almost published on Mashable, what now? - wesleyzhao

Last night we (@dshipper, @ajaymehta, and myself) almost got on Mashable with this app: http://wheremyfriends.be<p>For the past couple of weeks we have been hacking together web projects from our dorm rooms (two of us go to UPenn one of us NYU.) Yesterday, after an all-night coding session, we released a new app called Where My Friends Be that takes all of your FB friends and puts them onto an animated Google Map for you to look at and share on FB. We had some immediate success with our personal friend networks and generated over 57,000 friends "added" and a little over 260 actual sign ups on the first day.<p>Last night in an effort to publicize the app past our immediate friends we emailed Mashable and started to correspond with one its Senior Editors. The editor that told us he was writing an article about us, but wanted to make sure that we would be able to handle all of the traffic they were going to send us. Then we got some more emails back saying he ran into some possible bugs. Then said he will keep doing some research and maybe post later this week. He told us to keep him updated.<p>We are assuming that if we update him later this week with a story of continued good traffic he will be more likely to publish.<p>So at this point we have two main questions:
1) How can we continue to get exposure and gain traffic?
2) How can we make sure we will be able to handle the traffic from mashable.<p>RE 1) We submitted to HN earlier this week, but it didn't get much traction because for some reason Facebook deleted our app and it caused some errors. We've fixed that now. 
But how else can we get some traffic? Other blogs to show? Listservs to email? Ideas?<p>RE 2) We are currently on a virtual dedicated server and have faith it in. We are also very prepared to migrate to either a dedicated server or managed cloud hosting on Rackspace. What other options do you see that will be seamless for us?<p>Thanks for the advice!
======
michaeldwp
A few thoughts:

\- Just a quick thing on the hosting: If Mashable is planning on covering you,
you may want to invest in a dedicated / cloud server, and just downgrade later
once the traffic wears off. I'm guessing that other blogs will write posts
based on Mashable's recommendation, so your virtual server may not be able to
handle it...

\- One other thing on your homepage: Consider putting a call to action right
in the center of your picture, saying something like "Get started now" or
something like that.

\- Take a look here to see what they did with their image in their A/B test:
[http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/how-
to-...](http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/how-to-increase-
online-sales/)

\- On the page with the live map, maybe have a popup / overlay after a few
seconds that says something like "Connect with Facebook to see your friend
map."

\- Do you have any viral sharing features in there?

\- You should try and make sure your site can convert before Mashable writes
their article. It would also be good if it could be shared / spread virally
somehow.

\- Also, by "keep him updated," I don't think he meant that he was looking for
increased traffic, he's looking for a story. You guys getting more traffic
probably isn't the most interesting story in the world.

\- Are you able to add something new and even cooler to it for later this
week? If so, that could be your story.

Sorry that this comment is a bit of a mess. Hopefully this makes sense, and
helps you some how.

~~~
wesleyzhao
Thanks so much this all makes sense! We were on the phone with GoDaddy and
Rackspace at the same time last night trying to figure out our options and we
think we will probably go with Rackspace if we get published.

RE call to action - will do, will implement that tonight. But what do you mean
by adding a connect to facebook to see your friend map on a live map? While
your own one is loading? Also awesome article! Very helpful.

RE viral sharing features - what do you mean by that? We tried adding share
buttons with fb,twitter, and stumble upon on every page. But is there more you
know we could easily do?

RE Cooler features/making a story - If not big traffic, maybe something
tremendous will happen? We will keep our heads on the grind stone and try to
think of something that could possibly make it even cooler. If you have
suggestions though, we'd be glad to take them :)

------
jonathanjaeger
Wow congrats! I had one news story go particularly viral and drove 20K uniques
in a day, handled just fine with our VPS. I'm not sure what kind of traffic
Mashable sends (20K? 100K? More?). Seems like you made the switch to Rackspace
though, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for more coverage. Exciting stuff.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Ok, already at over 1K tweets and the top story (didn't notice until now).
Looks like the traffic spike will be very big, once again great job!

