AmplitudeJS
Open Source HTML5 Web Audio Player
I know $250/mo isn't a lot, but it is the most exciting $250/mo that we've ever collected. It's really cool to see that people are willing to believe in your project, even when you offer it for free and release it as open source.
The power of the Internet and community can do some amazing things!
I was extremely shocked today to stumble upon that our CDN is getting over 18 million hits per month: https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/amplitudejs
Thankfully we use jsDelivr (at no cost to us), but it is pretty crazy to think that your software is being loaded that many times in that short of a period.
Are we monetizing over those hits? Not really because AmplitudeJS is all open source, but it is really exciting to see that people enjoy your work that much.
Although running an open source project is a lot of fun, structuring it to put food on the table for you the next day is extremely difficult.
We're very proud of the compliments and exposure we have gotten with AmplitudeJS, but it has matured to the point where we are letting the community dictate where it goes next.
This release focused on putting the future of AmplitudeJS into the community's hands. Adding features to AmplitudeJS takes a lot of time, so we made everything transparent on how it is operated.
We spent a lot of time cleaning up documentation and organizing everything into "community" and "professional" support.
We are not abandoning the project, but we're just being very clear that we need food on the table in order to keep development moving.
At this point, the stars keep growing all on their own: https://i.imgur.com/7uEW5Ch.png
We are excited to see AmplitudeJS cross 3,000 stars. All of this has been organic growth and it all started with just sending an email to a number of web design blogs.
We didn't even try to get listed on this. All we did is publish a new major version with a lot of cool new features.
We noticed another spike in traffic on our end to the site and figured out that Github put AmplitudeJS on their blog for their "release radar": https://github.blog/2019-02-05-release-radar-january-2019/
The momentum from the social sharing kept continuing. Without even doing much, AmplitudeJS started getting picked up on a number of blogs and podcasts.
The momentum never stopped. Most shockingly, our efforts were more successful in Europe compared to the United States. It was really neat to see the full power of the Internet and how your code can be instantly shared around the world.
It sounds dumb to say that... but it is truly strange when you first experience it 😀
Louis Lazaris of CSS-Tricks listed AmplitudeJS as one of his favorite finds of 2017: https://css-tricks.com/front-end-tools-favorite-finds-2017/
He embeds a CodePen that pulls MP3s from our servers. It generates so much traffic that our monitoring sends us alerts in the sudden spike in bandwidth. Since our Google Analytics isn't being loaded (because the MP3s are being directly streamed), our first assumption is that we are under a DDoS attack.
After some Googling, we find the article and now finally understand that all of the traffic is legitimate 😅
We submitted our marketing site with a quick blurb to a handful of design blogs. We put a very brief and polite message and sent it around to a number of sites.
The responses were a little shaky, so we didn't know where it was going to go.
Next thing I know, I am standing in the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, drinking a Blatz beer. I look down at my phone and see that Smashing Magazine (which had 1M+ followers at the time) tweeted our product and it took off like wild fire.
We were amazed to see that AmplitudeJS was in the Top 10 Trending JavaScript projects on Github.
We were blown away to see our name trending just underneath other names such as AirBnB, Microsoft, VueJS, etc: https://i.imgur.com/bdJcfOB.png
The stars are starting to pile on now...
Working on an open source project is difficult. It takes A LOT of time and you don't get any money to feed yourself with.
At this point, it was tough. A lot of work, a lot of sweat, and no feeling of "return on investment".
We kept pushing forward to make this the best web audio library on the Internet.
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