My big break! 10x users in 1 week!

After getting crickets on Medium, I decided to cross-post my recent blog article about system design to dev.to: https://dev.to/dezhango/system-design-is-more-important-than-you-think-g0e. I expected nothing.

Fast forward a week and it's gotten 80 reactions, 12 comments, and is one of the top 7 posts of the week! My site (https://systemdesigndaily.com) went from 6 users to 65, and I've maxed out the free tier of Vercel's analytics platform.

65 users might not seem like much, but to me it's completely mind-blowing. I've been making random side projects for years now, with each one only ever getting a handful (we're talking <10) users. Though I'm totally over the moon about this, I'm also really anxious about what to do next.

I'm a complete social media noob and introvert, so getting this much attention so suddenly is a new and slightly uncomfortable experience for me. I also felt like I needed to move quickly to capitalize on all the new sign ups, so I started emailing random users asking for feedback.

But then I remembered that GDPR and data privacy laws were a thing, so I became paranoid about whether I was even allowed to do that. I read and re-read my privacy policy like twenty times just to double check, and while it SEEMS fine, I'm still pretty hesitant to just go balls to the wall start mass emailing people, or better yet set up some kind of email platform.

Unsure of what to do next, I made a post on IndieHackers itself: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-should-i-reach-out-to-new-users-5ac016e66a and got lots of great advice from fellow indies telling me to just go for it. So I did and now 10 emails to my most active users are in flight.

Anyways, that's the main thing I've been trying to figure out - how do I move forward now that I actually have some traffic on my site. There are some other things on my mind as well:

• What new analytics platform should I migrate to now that Vercel is making me pay for stuff?
• What new features should I build for the website?
• How do I follow up this banger of a blog post and catch lightning in a bottle again
• How do I stop sleeping at 2AM every night and waking up at 8? (Impossible)

But this blog post is getting too big already so I'll save those for next week!

BTW, this is a cross-post of my weekly update that I write on System Design Daily's project page: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/system-design-daily.