The downsides of going viral 📈
Hey IH 👋,
I want to talk about going viral.
But not in the way you usually hear about it.
It feels like the dream of everybody that's just starting out is to go viral because supposedly it's such a good thing.
From my experience, it's not.
Let me tell you why (TL;DR)
1. It made our servers explode 💥
2. It made us prioritize the wrong things
3. It attracts the wrong crowd
Let's dig a bit deeper below 👇
Background
Back in 2016-2017, I was the CTO for a dating app called Hater, "the dating app that matches you based on what you hate".
We "got" launched on Product Hunt a week before we wanted to because someone saw a Sticker we randomly placed in NYC.
We didn't have time to load test the application and it showed in the next two weeks.
Pure chaos ensued, we hit a million downloads within a couple of days and had a bunch of problems keeping the service running.
Why is it bad?
Let me go into a bit more detail about why I think it's much better to grow your business sustainably, taking a normal course from early adopters to mainstream users.
It made our servers explode 💥
Going from 0 to 1 million users in a week is no joke. At times a segment would air on national TV and we would hit 10k concurrents mostly hitting the same API routes as they all came in more or less at the same time.
We also hit limits I didn't know existed, with the AWS Load Balancer and other things.
Our account had 0 histories so they didn't think anything was going bonkers any time soon I get it.
It made us prioritize the wrong things
We did 2 things that cost us a lot of precious time:
-
- Listened to feedback from the wrong people
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- Tried to just keep the service running instead of improving
Neither of those helped us move the product in a direction where it was actually the best at what it could have been.
People had a lot of feedback but most of them churned even if they think the app is great.
It's just a lot harder to filter through all the noise if you have a lot of users from the start.
It attracts the wrong crowd
A common startup credo is to launch before you are ready, well we weren't.
That might be ok if you get on early adopters that pay more attention to the potential value of your solution than where it is right now.
But we attracted mainstream users who are used to apps of the quality of Instagram and any other app they use on a day-to-day basis.
And those have been polished for a long time.
Needless to say that we got a lot of hate (coincidence 🤔) from people when the servers went down or they encountered a bug.
They just have 0 chill 😱
And as a response, they churn.
The problem is, it's hard to understand that churn, hard to follow up with these users because they're not very likely to respond, etc., so you're missing out on a lot of learnings you want to have in the early days.
Conclusion
In the end, it was a valuable learning experience and paved my path to other things.
Going viral can also be a beautiful thing but only if it's built on top of a solid foundation, it can happen later down the line but shouldn't be your initial goal.
But I also learned that while "going viral" is cool it's not a sustainable way to build a company.
Things that go viral often fizzle out just as fast as they appeared and our app was one of those.
What I'm up to now
I started transitioning from consumer mobile to SaaS like 2 years ago and am now bootstrapping niche products with my friends at Niche Mates
I'm trying to apply the learnings that I made over the last 10 years in VC-backed startups to launching and growing sustainable businesses.
I'm also picking up marketing, sales, and more product stuff as we speak to become a more holistic entrepreneur.
If you want to hear more of my useless rambling feel free to follow me on Twitter
Like what you're up to Stefan, how did you come up with idea for Stoic quotes?
Long story haha.
It's an area we're passionate about and think that it can be hard to get started with stoicism for beginners.
We have a couple of ideas in that space of actually monetizable products but quotes are an easy way to dib your feet and are highly sharable.
Also super high search volume with low competition, so we're trying to build up a list that we can leverage to seed new products.
It's definitely more of a side thread for us right now tho, we started building a bunch of things at the same time and realized that it's better to double down on one at a time then go to the next one once the old project is mostly automated.
Glad you were able to go not let this one odd experience ruin your experience as an indie hacker. You were able to do what most can only dream, launch and have people actually care about your product to the point you had too much attention. Most people here, by comparison, only get a few downloads, if any at all, when they launch. So I'm sure you must have some innate talent for picking markets and marketing which will carry into you current product.
It's wild to see, too, that someone randomly saw your sticker and this led to a viral moment. That proves to me the power of physical marketing.
I can't take sole credit for that we were a team of 4.
We definitely managed to ride the wave there and we also had some PR launch lined up that added fuel to the fire because we had an embargo that they broke when the PH launch happened haha.
The point here is that I think what a lot of people glorify or dream, how you call it is not always a good thing.
Much better to bootstrap and take it one step at a time on your own terms