

Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails - colinprince
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/09/02/Ravelry

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patio11
I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of
Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every _terabyte_ of knitting
patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once
for every 700k monthly page views.

Excuse me. _Daily_ page views.

But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people,
you'd think they were less important than the average URL shortener.

There are a million and one underserved markets in the other half of the
population, gentleman, and no one you know has any interest in competing with
you if you slice off one of them.

~~~
callmeed
Indeed. And the reason I look over my wife's shoulder now and then when she's
on her computer.

She's a craft/fashion/music/wedding nut and I've had more than a couple ideas
for that half of the population.

~~~
varikin
Agreed. I am currently working on a site to fill a need that my wife, an
artist, has. I found that the best way to find great ideas is to ask friends
and family.

~~~
patio11
The downside with friends and family is that they want to help you. Regular
people want to help themselves. Find regular people, ask what their problems
are, solve them, make money.

------
adamhowell
"If you listen to Paul Graham and whoever else, then you’ll be working on your
startup while you have a day job."

Funny how he kind of got that backwards. pg says go fulltime. 37signals are
the 'keep the dayjob' crowd.

~~~
caseyf
heh. Oops.

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kungfooey
My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was
somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow
users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the
following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had
some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an
admirable quality.

I completely agree with patio11's comment about the other half of the
population being under-served.

~~~
caseyf
We had an automated invitation system - the usual, "put in your email, wait a
while for the invite" thing. It was true that were only adding a couple
hundred people a day during the early days. We weren't ready for more. We were
_so not_ prepared for the interest - it's funny to think back on it now. When
we hit 5,000 users we were amazed.

I think that we had actual performance issues for about a month (maybe a
little longer?) when we outgrew our single dedicated server and hobbled along
until we built a more permanent home. Luckily, people were very patient and
understanding.

~~~
randito
Cool! Thanks for the info. It's nice reading about people's efforts to scale
mid-to-large sites. All the press is on how the "giants" (Twitter, Facebook,
etc) do it.

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hopeless
I recently introduced my wife (a crochet-addict) to Ravelry. The result? She's
now a Ravelry-addict. I can hardly get on the laptop myself these days. She's
taking photos, queuing up projects, checking out patterns and even going as
far as entering her "stash" of wool so she can track it all.

The one problem is that there's no api so it's a walled garden... and my wife
really wants a public portfolio site. If Ravelry could fulfil this need, I'd
pay them money to get it off my todo list!

I often wondered about the business model but after seeing it in action, the
advertising fits quite well.

~~~
caseyf
<http://www.ravelry.com/help/api> isn't much but it should be enough to make a
project portfolio. Post on the Ravelry board if you have any questions :)

~~~
hopeless
hmmm... interesting.

It looks like you can only get info for in-progress projects though. Really
she wants a public version of the projects page to show off to
family/friends/non-ravelrers and ravelry is a much better interface for
building this content than her current Wordpress solution.

Edit: ok, I've checked out the raw JSON data and looks quite possible. Thanks!

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puredemo
Excellent article about creating a niche community within an underserved
market. I'm not sure the success here is as much about the platform as it is
about the brilliant utility of the site to its members.

~~~
silencio
Agreed, although I don't know about niche (a _lot_ of people knit...) or
underserved. There are _numerous_ resources and communities for knitters and
crocheters out there. The only reason why I love Ravelry over them all is
because it manages to wrap everything up into a nice user-friendly website
that (if one cared for them) is packed full of all sorts of useful features
that other sites couldn't even begin to offer. Try to find another knitting
community online where you can look at a pattern done in another yarn without
attempting to knit it (and possibly wasting a lot of time). It's a lot harder
than you think. On Ravelry it's a single click away.

Ravelry doesn't even _replace_ half of these resources out there - most of the
patterns are still going to be in books and magazines or on other websites,
all the knitter bloggers will keep on blogging on their own sites, people will
still go on other forums for, say, a specific yarn brand to ask questions
there. But it is the glue that holds it all together in a single place so you
don't have to go searching in Google and half a dozen sites to find patterns
and talk to other fiber arts enthusiasts.

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flooha
900 new users a day. For a knitting and crochet site. Absolutely amazing.

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latortuga
700,000 members and still 'beta'?

~~~
spydez
Google Syndrome. "Beta" is meaningless now.

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timdorr
Pretty good setup, but Cogent? Eek! Those guys run the crappiest network I've
ever seen. You certainly get what you pay for. And they're combining that with
CloudFront? Seems like a weird combination that results in their not getting
their money's worth (on Amazon's side).

~~~
caseyf
I feel weird replying to all of these comments but here goes:

We were worried about Cogent at the beginning so we only used them for
delivering some static files and for non-critical outgoing traffic. It was
initially an experiment - to save on our in-datacenter bandwidth and to
compare with Amazon (a very inexpensive experiment) and we've been very happy
with it.

I think that we are doing about 20% of our traffic (+ offsite backups) over
Cogent, 40% on our datacenter's fancy-pants bandwidth, and 40% on Amazon.

~~~
showkiller
When you wanted customer input, what was the most effective way of getting it?

~~~
caseyf
Input from users? Our forums - lots of time talking with our people in the
forums. I wrote a little post about how we collect feedback here:
[http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2008/06/29/beta-testing-and-
be...](http://codemonkey.ravelry.com/2008/06/29/beta-testing-and-beyond/)

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rmoriz
Check out BurdaStyle.com - also a very successfull DIY site that's built on
Rails.

