A sudden 100x increase in traffic, and what we learned

Hi! We're a team building a lightweight webpage builder.

We recently had a sudden spike in sign-ups and visitors, and the effect was so impressive that I thought I'd write about it.

About a month ago, we were working on features and fixing bugs as usual, when suddenly one of our sites started getting a lot of visitors. Over the course of a few days, it grew and grew and grew until it was up to 100x the usual number of visitors to our other sites! When we tracked it down, we realized that a large entertainment company was using our service as an event page. We were surprised and puzzled because we hadn't contacted them first, or done anything noticeable yet (we hadn't even launched yet).

As we were celebrating the increased traffic, we noticed that some of the event participants were behaving strangely: some people were signing up with dozens of similar usernames to increase their chances of winning. We had found abusing!👾 They had identified and exploited a weakness in our service, but the client (an entertainment company) didn't know about it, and we were worried. We thought it was something we could see happening again in the future, and we decided to let the customer know, but we also gave them as much raw data as possible so they could make their own judgment, not ours (of course, we're very privacy conscious!).

As it turned out, they were able to interpret the data well enough to weed out the abusers based on their criteria, and the winner of the event was determined fairly. We were relieved to see it go well. While we haven't yet seen the client hold another event, or convert all those visitors into new customers for our service, this serendipitous event gave us a chance to learn from it.

• Improvements to the signup process
• Ideas about what our service could be used for
• tons of incoming data
• An idea of what we could do to improve retention.
• And other small bugs that came with a lot of visitors!

I'm so glad we got to experience this kind of traffic before we officially announced our service to the world, and I wrote this post because I think every small service should experience it, whether it's accidental or artificial. Thanks for reading, everyone. :)

(By the way, our service is SlashPage.com . Let me know if you're interested or have any questions! ☺️ )