TrafficTicker
Monitor real time traffic and get alerts on unusual traffic
This is just amazing. I built TrafficTicker last year and only launched it on ProductHunt. With over 700 users, we have 50+ established brands and over 500 MAUs.
Over the last 10-11 months or so, I have had 4 people requesting to delete their data which we did.
Now, server deals with just 70,000 requests a day on a small DigitalOcean instance.
As promised on the privacy front, I do not store any traffic data about our users. Meaning I've absolutely no idea of how many active users there are for any of my users. I feel happy about this 🙂😇
Over 300 brands and 200 individuals.
Very happy with this because I have not done any marketing in the last year on this project. I only monitor it every week and fix any error sentry tells me about.
MAUs - 360
No paid users. That's fine though 😊
This is the next step for TrafficTicker. I have not worked out the pricing yet, but watch out for this space
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How's your existing income/revenue going? Are people liking what you have atm?
TrafficTicker has silently earned the trust of 500 customers. This includes some major brands and a lot of bloggers. I am glad to say almost 50% of the total audiences are just brands. That's neat.
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All this with no marketing so far.
TrafficTicker started the day as #2 Product of the day and ended with about 300 upvotes as #3 product of the day.
The analytics was insane. I was being too modest perhaps hoping for 20 installs after PH because on September 7th i had more 250 users and installs including some amazing brands and individuals from USA, India, Italy, France, UK, Chile, South Africa, etc.
This was insane. I had not expected this response at all. Thank you PH. 😍
I was tinkering on previewhunt for quite some time before posting on ProductHunt. I made new images for PH - something that tells the visitor in a glance of what TrafficTicker does.
I was expecting about 20 to 30 installs. Little did i know it would burst open my servers and i am so happy it did.
The day 10words.io feature us, i got 10 news users including 2 brands. Yay !!
At this point in time, TrafficTicker v1.0 was live and i had just released the alerts feature.
Traffic alerts - receive browser push notifications alert when the traffic crosses a certain number or say unusual traffic.
Both the brands chose to use alerts. This was all happening because i wanted alerts to be a PRO feature. However, for the early adopters i wanted to give the pro plan for free and so i did.
Releasing was a pain because i wanted to upload decent pictures of the extension and i decided to design them myself. Bad Idea!
I learnt the basics of Figma in a day and got started with it.
The initial designs didn't look good but they did convey what the extension does.
I targeted Indiehackers and /r/sideprojects for more users.
Chrome extension is the first thing i wanted to build. I got to this conclusion because -
a. I wanted to find something easy for everyone to install or signup with &
b. Something i can build myself within no time.
c. Chrome browser's adoption rate is very good.
After having built the extension, i gave it to fellow friends and their friends and started receiving my first feedback.
The last time we launched a marketing campaign at work, it didn't really kick in much traffic. However, a week into the campaign one day our traffic just doubled within 15 minutes.
This was uncanny.
We were at work but we still missed this surge. That is pretty much the time when i thought of building a solution to solve this problem !!
2 Comments
Is it ok to ask how large your DigitialOcean instance is, and the architecture of the app to support that many requests a day?
Thanks :D (I was thinking about using Digital Ocean, but was concerned about scalability with my current architecture)
Hey @bradtaniguchi,
The DigitalOcean server is 2GB RAM with 1vCPU (costing $10/month) and incidents are obviously managed with https://spike.sh. I use it for alerts on CPU percentages, Memory Utilization and Network I/O, it sends an email to Spike which internally creates an incident and calls me, especially during critical times.
My 2 cents -
I do not encourage anyone to ever think about scaling from the get-go. I bought this server and it has served me very well. Never been a single problem.
Very importantly, I think what helps is the SIMPLICITY of TrafficTicker. I do not store any user data at all for privacy concerns. So, since i am not storing, there is no need to 70000 writes on DB or anything.