
Ask HN: What to do when your side-project takes off? - amerf1
Very curious to know how things change when you have hyper growth. How do you deal with priorities? Do you reach out to get seed-funding? Who do you speak to? Do you sell?<p>I am asking because I read a lot of stories of people getting #1 on HN or PH and suddenly their servers are down because of heavy traffic. What do you do after that? It seems super crazy
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ezekg
For B2B, HN and PH users rarely convert, so you would do nothing, because it's
not "taking off" \-- it's being flooded with tire-kickers. I think people put
too much focus on launching on HN, Reddit, PH, etc. And you also shouldn't
expect "hyper growth." I went nearly a year without a paying customer. Growth
is a slow thing, not an overnight thing (I know, I know, you hear about these
romanticized stories a lot and it's hard not to expect it for yourself).
Expecting hyper growth from these channels will result in you giving up early
due to unrealistic expectations of bad marketing channels. You're not going to
get seed funding because you got a sudden spike in bad traffic.

For B2C, I'm not sure on conversion rates, so I won't comment on that.

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jermaustin1
The death hugs I have seen have usually been products that are on shared
hosting, which is never a good thing, even when testing an idea. The few that
are hosted somewhere like DigitalOcean or Linode, they didn't scale the VM
before getting hugged.

Based on the small handful of times a post of mine has hit #5 or higher, you
can expect between 20k and 40k visits. How many conversions you get completely
depend on your product.

My blog has had 4 posts that have taken top marks. A total of 150k visits
(during those days) and I have had 0 newsletter signups, 0 contact form
submissions, $0 in advertising revenue, and $0 in attributed business.

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amerf1
You know its funny this reminds me of one of the videos I posted on YouTube
which went viral and got 2 million views ($0 from advertising)

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muzani
It's a "good problem". At that point it's easier to raise money at a good
valuation.

Everyone is energized. Strap on, put it the fires. If you did your
architecture right (e.g. put it somewhere like AWS), scaling up the servers is
no problem.

We were so energized that we built the whole customer management system in one
day, something that takes others weeks to build.

If this is happening, customers usually need whatever you're selling and are
much more fault tolerant. At peak, we had 10 crashed a day per user. But it
was a good sign that they kept logging on despite the crashes. If you have too
many customers to handle, a rule of thumb is to deal with the latest ones
first because you've likely already lost the ones who were in the queue for a
week.

The biggest threat IMO is that you can actually overestimate yourself. We
tried to push at a valuation that is too high, because we got our hockey stick
early, but it was much more than investors were willing to take.

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amerf1
This is very valuable info. Never thought of focusing on the latest ones first
thats a new perspective

Thank you for your post!

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buboard
HN traffic is not sustainable

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LifeQuestioner
build a side project you think is good. Then worry about this.

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tudelo
I don't think OP is asking so that they can get hyper growth, they are just
curious about peoples experiences.

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amerf1
That is correct I was mainly referring to peoples experiences

