Cloudhiker

Almost two years after launching Cloudhiker, I reached a big milestone. The websites stored in Cloudhiker were viewed for more than ten million times. That's a huge number for sure.

At this point, I would like to thank not only the people visiting end enjoying Cloudhiker, but also the many contributors who submitted websites and got them approved - 393 users, to be exact. Having so many contributors is a honor and I deeply appreciate everbody taking the time to help Cloudhiker on its mission.

On to the next 10 million views.

After the successful launch and an ongoing stream of page views, user registrations and people contributing new websites, I decided to properly monetize the website. Until the introduction of a premium subscription, I paid for the domains, the server and email costs on my own, supported with about $350 in donations until September 2021.

The Premium subscription offers an advert-free exploring, unlimited collections (which are used to save websites in lists) and some smaller benefits. For $2.99 per month or $29.90 per year, users can become a premium subscriber.

I received a few subscribers in the first week.

A few days after the official launch, I thought it would be nice to share Cloudhiker (then called Stumbled) on Reddit - while I was with my family, having a wonderful weekend. Well, the launch post on /r/InternetIsBeautiful exploded, reaching over 18k upvotes. My small, innocent VPS with 2 cores and 4GB of RAM went down shortly after publishing the post. 😨
I immediately logged into the Hetzner control panel and upgraded to a 12-core, 16GB RAM beast. The rest of the day went on smoothly, receiving more than a million page views over the course of 3 days. Over 1000 users signed up. Up to this day, my most successful post on Reddit.

Launch day! After spending a few months building a first version of the product and collecting over 1500 websites, I added Cloudhiker to Producthunt. The launch was quite successful, reaching place #4, without having done any advertising or other marketing efforts. I just launched the site and shared it via social media and Producthunt.

The initial responses were positive, many people signed up and started to explore the websites I collected.

"I miss Stumbleupon". That was the Tweet of someone I follow in Twitter. StumbleUpon was one of the big players in the early days of the internet, when Facebook and Twitter were small and unknown. The idea was to "stumble" through a million websites based on your likes, chosen categories and so on. Unfortunately, the site was shut down in 2018.

When reading that tweet, I looked for sites similar to Stumbleupon. But all I found was more of less mediocre. Most had low quality content, or just a few websites, or just worked way different. I was not satisfied. So I decided to build a new version on my own. The site was called "Stumbled" initially.