How I got 20,000 users for my product in one day

In the past I've been guilty of spending too long getting my side projects to MVP so I decided to give myself the challenge of completing my next project in just a few days. As everyone says, the sooner you can validate your idea the better.

I'd had an idea floating round in my head for a simple concept - rank a random subject once a day, every day - and thus Rank a Day was born!

For the first few days I did a soft launch by just sharing it with a small group of friends who helped me iron out any bugs and tweak the UI. Then when I felt confident the site was stable I submitted it to /r/InternetIsBeautiful.

Normally when I submit my projects to HN, Reddit or Product Hunt, I just walk away from my laptop for a bit after hitting submit so I don't just sit there refreshing the page constantly.

To my surprise when I came back the post was getting a load of traction

There's no better feeling than getting positive comments on your work. At the end of the day I had over 20,000 users on the site in a single day

It just goes to show sometimes it's best to keep it simple and not over engineer anything. The hard part now will be keeping users coming back to the site but I'm looking forward to that challenge.

I've been completely blown away with how well Rank a Day has done especially when I consider it's essentially just an index.php file with a bit of JavaScript