Sharing the website online
by jafloI posted Mofi on Reddit on the 23rd and on Hacker News on the 26th. The posts were fairly well received with the Reddit posts both getting to the hot page of their subreddits and the HN post making it to the front page first place!
How did I do that? I don’t think there’s a secret, I would attribute it to some degree of luck. But it helped get a lot of traffic onto the website (~14k visitors) and caused ripple effects of the website being picked up by other newsletters, news, and aggregators which are still proving small spikes of traffic now, two weeks after.
When I first posted the site, I just wanted to get the word out and hadn’t implemented monetization yet which might have been nice in retrospect, but also might have looked too aggressive. In my case, the costs to run everything were low enough that I felt comfortable eating them to focus on getting traffic.
Something I’m glad I did was having analytics and diagnostics in place from day 1. This allowed me to quickly detect issues as the traffic rapidly went up. My services didn’t go down, but did at one point some instances did run out of disk space (forgot to clean up temporary files, whoops) which I got an email alert about. If you are thinking of posting to HN or another website with a lot of traffic I would highly recommend adding some tracking so you can “babysit” remotely as the site scales up.
