

4 Insights from a Hacker News Launch - tagx
http://filepicker.tumblr.com/

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illdave
Congratulations on launching - I've been in a similar position with getting a
HN spike and hitting email caps, but that's why I love Heroku (and SendGrid)
for easily scaling things up, especially when I didn't really know what I was
doing.

Do you guys have anything in place to alert you if you get another spike in
traffic? If not, I'd recommend using Chartbeat and setting up alerts so that
it emails/notifies your phone when you get a flood of traffic - you might find
that press mentions pop up here and there and knowing about them straight away
can help you fan the flames a bit. It's also pretty useful for when your site
goes down as it instantly alerts you. Well done again - great job with
launching.

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abcd_f
"Launch" ... a file selector widget. Awesome. I bet it's a startup too.

~~~
nmcfarl
This was my problem with file picker.io as well.

The blog entry mentions donation - but I did not see that option. What I did
see was a hosted service, that has a very startup-y feel. Which means to me
that charging for this service is probably in the works.

And paying for a file picker is not something I want to do - it’s just a
little to critical a function to have an external dependency on.

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Pkeod
More proof that asking for donations is not a business model.

~~~
prawn
While I don't disagree, I think it could be a bit early to judge in this case
given that people were probably mostly kicking the tyres.

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dyim
$0 in donations? I'll bring a couple beers over tonight

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tarr11
Thanks for this detailed information. It's great to know what kind of traffic
to expect from an HN launch.

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tagx
Sorry for the downtime on the main site but our Heroku/Amazon ssl load
balancer died. I temporarily reverted to Heroku's piggyback ssl so the site
will work but with an invalid security certificate. We are trying to resolve
the issue with Heroku now.

~~~
tagx
Heroku has now acknowledged issues <https://status.heroku.com/>

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app360
It will be real helpful if you can share the time of launch and the headline
you used. Where can I find the thread for it in HN? sorry for being a noob :)

~~~
brettcvz
3:00pm Thursday.

Headline was: Show HN: Filepicker.io - dead simple file uploads

~~~
app360
ok cool! It's so simple it's hard to believe :) Thanks for sharing man!

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noonespecial
it wouldn't hurt to make the "Filepicker.io" in the banner of your blog go to
Filepicker.io, not filepicker.tumblr.com. We already know where that is.

~~~
brettcvz
Done! Good call

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RexM
Is the main site down for anyone else?

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tnash
Yeah, down for me, wanted to find out more about their product, didn't pay
attention the other day.

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philgo20
Would be more interesting to know how you go to #1. Great headline? Luck?
Friends?

~~~
brettcvz
Luck, Friends, probably in that order. Also giving people a demo, releasing on
a slow(er) news day, releasing right about the time people get off work,
making something for developers and giving it away for free.

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dasil003
I'm all for supporting IE8, but it's suspicious that someone on HN would
notice that you weren't supporting it.

~~~
natep
IIRC, it said so right on their front page "Doesn't support IE"

