
Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do? - benhowdle
I launched a side project ~5 years ago that does simulated API responses with fake data. Never checked analytics beyond launch but I&#x27;ve just discovered its received 4.5M unique visitors and 100M requests in the past 30 days. What would you do with this information?<p>Context for my question: I&#x27;m a developer who&#x27;s terrible at monetising, or even marketing, side projects.<p>The site: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;reqres.in&#x2F;
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raleigh_user
Don’t build anything right now. Put an option somewhere that makes sense that
says “like this? Upgrade to get even more features” or something similar. You
know the users/audience better than I.

And put some sort of analytics on that button you can track. Once someone
clicks it do a simple alert(“we don’t have a pro plan at this point but thanks
for showing your interest. We will follow up later when we do”).

Then, let it sit for a week. IF you get some non 0 amount of clicks, reach out
to the people who clicked it and ask what they’d like.

That should take you less than an hour to implement and be a great first step.

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muzani
lol I clicked this, but I wasn't really interested at all in paying. I just
wanted to know what extra features were available.

As someone who did a startup before, it was surprising to me when I first
learned how eager people are to throw money something that made them feel
better. A part of me just went "ooh API stuff" and hoped for more.

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jppope
Here's my $0.02:

You don't need to be good at "monetizing" to just ask people how you can
improve. Throw a little survey box in the corner, and the people that use this
thing enough will let you know what would make their lives better. Those
people will use that thing, and you ask them to contribute ($$$) a little bit
so that you can do more of that. Some of them will do it.

congrats on building something useful, most companies struggle to do that,
looks like you're about to kill it!

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NonEUCitizen
Don't rush into anything. If you form a startup around this, don't let any
business type convince you that he should be the CEO and you just take care of
technical stuff -- maintain control over the business side (and save money by
not rushing into hiring _any_ business-types). Make sure you keep majority
control over the board for a long time.

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muzani
I don't recommend putting google ads/automated ads in there. They normally pay
poorly and lower user experience.

Instead get a custom advertising deal. Tech companies often have a large
advertising budget and they can't spend it on billboards. You can try to
contact companies like Twilio, who want to target developers. Give them a rate
card (like $1000 for a top banner of a certain size for 1 month, $300 for a
bottom banner, etc). In the rate card also include how many unique visitors
you're getting and how active they are.

You can also put up some affiliate links. Like Triplebyte occasionally gives
out $5000 if you refer someone who gets a job through them.

A friend of mine had a blog with less unique visitors, but using these
techniques, he went on to build a million dollar company. You've got the
asset, now you just have to monetize it.

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FatalLogic
Because the content of your response data isn't critical, do you think you
could sometimes return a text string with a simple request for donations from
your API? I mean only in cases where a random text string is an appropriate
response. Perhaps you could also send one line sponsored text adverts as part
of the API response.

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prokes
Nice! Couple of ideas:

1) install basic advertising via AdSense. 4.5mm visitors will monetize

2) affiliate link to a useful, paid product that your users could also use. If
they click through the link and buy, you are paid a commission.

3) limit the # of API requests. Charge $X/mo for more than Y requests. Offer
an unlimited plan for a higher price.

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superasn
I think you should analyze the source of traffic first. Install Google
webmaster tools to get the list of top keywords your site is ranking for. GWT
tells you the exact number of impressions/clicks which first of all confirm if
the traffic is legit and second of all tell you exactly what people are
searching for coming to your site and the sites that are linking to you (also
a good indicator of what your audience is visiting)

Once you have that data you have a very clearly defined target audience to go
after via a product or custom advertising

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HHalvi
Do you want to monetize it ?

\- You can use it as an enabler aka Lever to get your next job, consulting
gig, projects etc.

\- You can run small ads that are contextual to your visitors and call it a
win - win

\- You can understand the type of use cases your visitors are coming in for
and depending on the kind of jobs they are doing/using you for start a Pro
(and Possibly Plus) Plan.

\- Or you can do a mixture of all of the above.

What should you do? Decide if you are excited about doing this and also the
time you want to spend doing all this. Depending on those you can choose to do
whatever you want to do. Hope this helps and best of luck :D

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hluska
You’ve already received some wonderful advice. So, I’ll just tell you to be
really fucking proud of yourself. Geez, 4.5M uniques making 100M requests is
damned impressive. That’s great!

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petervandijck
Spend time understanding your current traffic and users.

\- For the traffic: do the users just find it on Google Search, and then leave
immediately? What are they looking for?

\- For the requests: is it all from 1 or 2 users? Are there many users? Can
you talk to them (email, chat box, ...). Do they use it for personal projects
or for work? etc.

Once you have an idea of what's going on, you could start charging money,
potentially.

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gomox
The important business angle to the situation is: if you get 0.2% of those
visitors to give you $1/mo you will get a mostly passive income of around
$10K/month, which amounts to financial independence in most places.

Good job! It's time to start sucking just a little less at monetisation (0.2%
or more, ideally).

If you want to bounce ideas feel free to reach out, but there are good starter
tips in the other comments!

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howard941
Provided I didn't hose the query it looks like over a quarter of a million
pages link to your site. See
[https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fr...](https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Freqres.in%2F)

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yorwba
I don't think Google takes link: queries literally anymore. For example, on
page 2 of the search results I found
[https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html](https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html)
which seems to match because it contains "req, res" in the body.

~~~
Peroni
Correct:
[https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/819094559770738688](https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/819094559770738688)

~~~
howard941
Nice. Thanks for cluing me in. Bronx cheer for google.

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kehers
Advertise your other projects on the site? (ekko.site for example). You an
also build pro features that people can pay for; allowing creating custom
endpoints and responses for example. You need to be sure people it will be
what people want though.

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gshdg
You don’t need to be sure. It’s a better investment of time if you’re sure (or
at least have tangible evidence) tho.

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quickthrower2
Another option that might be worth considering is seeing if one of the
solarwinds, redgate etc. type companies want to buy you out. Or sponsor you.
It depends what they offer of course as to if it’s worth it.

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rajacombinator
In addition to other good advice here, I’d look carefully at those analytics
numbers and maybe check logs also. 4.5m uniques sounds like a lot for a
service like this.

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quickthrower2
Hold on, so I assume you are on a reasonably cheap hosting or cloud plan? Yet
it scaled up to this?

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benhowdle
Yup, $5/month DigitalOcean droplet + free CloudFlare tier.

~~~
quickthrower2
Nice, I guess CloudFlare is helping out a lot there by caching content so your
droplet can take it easy.

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quickthrower2
For me you are on the first google page for "API Test" nice.

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gesman
spam/robot hits?

Check stats carefully

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Fjolsvith
Sell ads!

