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45 Comments

Post went viral on Reddit and got 40K users

Last week i was trying to find information on corona virus and its spread but as its distributed with different agencies, it was becoming difficult everyday to get a complete sense of whats happening. So i thought of building a website which aggregates the different sources of data and lets you stay on top of this global pandemic. It took me 24 hours to build and it now ready. I thought it will be very useful as i feel lot of us want to track this and stay vigilant. It has latest toll numbers for the Novel Coronavirus epidemic, see affected regions, stats, casualties and more. Its data is collected from WHO and other government agencies and updated everyday. I though this will be useful to people of Visa List and other who have some plans to travel, so i posted it on Reddit and it kind of went viral. I just thought it will be get more reach but oh boy, it went crazy.

First i posted a video of it and it made a comment on the link but it was hidden by their bot, after an hour and sending multiple messages to the mods, it got approved. Now things started looking good. Immediately it started pickup upvotes and comments. It reached 2k upvotes and after 2 hours everything stopped. I only realised this after an hour . It turns out my post was removed. I was dumbstruck but quickly messaged again to the mods. Fortunately, it was approved again.
After 19 hours, its around 23.5K upvotes and got me 40K users.

https://visalist.io/emergency/coronavirus

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f0qulq/i_made_a_website_to_where_you_can_visualise/

  1. 17

    Reddit moderation is ridiculously against creators, for some reason they much prefer regurgitated stale content. I can understand limiting self-promotion but this is barely that.

    1. 2

      Aren't people moderating their subbreddits by themselves? so it depends on specific subreddit?

      1. 10

        You'll find that it is a handful of 'power hungry' moderators doing everything across multiple subs in an industry.

        Post somebody elses link that's full of crappy advertising and spam then free pass. Post your own valuable content you worked hard on and is getting upvotes with even a hint of monetisation and you're shut down.

        It is a toxic place for creators that need to eat.

      2. 4

        I think it’s a running joke that most reddit mods are the worst.

    2. 1

      I guess i found the fine line between self promotion and useful content

  2. 4

    Nice marketing strategy, although unfortunate events.

    1. 1

      I hope we all get through this soon!

  3. 4

    Great idea and awesome execution. You inspired me to think of ways I can apply my products to current events.

  4. 3

    Cool, which apis are you hitting, and what does your stack look like?

  5. 3

    question what tech did you use for the site? I see nuxt.js and express server.

    1. 1

      NuxtJS, Vuetify, Firebase and MySQL

      1. 2

        awesome bro. Site is nice. Using firebase with mysql is very interesting? Why did you decide to go that route? I used firebase (w/ firestore) with react and mysql with my laravel and php stuff at work but never thought about using them together. Very interested.

        1. 1

          Just because of the use case to keep things simple and easy to build.

  6. 3

    I think recovery rate is overly pessimistic if not outright incorrect.
    As recovery takes weeks, the count is severely lagging comparing to infections.

    1. 2

      Yes you are right but that's what we have right now.

  7. 3

    Waooh..

    Nice product and super simple UI.

  8. 2

    Great work and amazingly fast execution which was key! How exactly are you parsing the data? Must be a lot of unstructured data coming through?

  9. 2

    Great use of technology for traction, I'm a fan 🤓

  10. 2

    where do you pull this info from?

  11. 2

    Nice! How are you converting/retargeting folks? I signed up for your email list but I didn't see much beyond that. Just going for some strong backlinks?

  12. 2

    Congrats on this!
    It's great that the mods ended up approving it, I had a similar story (I posted it here) but after lots of PMs, I couldn't help the mods see reason.
    It's sad that Reddit mods usually have that binary self-promotion/no self-promotion way of view posts, it's much more complex than that, for example in your case you are just bringing value on the table without asking for anything, so it makes total sense to approve it.

  13. 2

    That’s great! I was using some pre-made IFTT setting where I’d get an email about breakouts with data from WHO. This is much better and more comprehensive!

  14. 2

    I'll try to send a few hundred more your way. Hope you have analytics plugged in :) Should start coming through in a few minutes. Great idea!

    1. 1

      Awesome! Thanks a lot. Can i know how you will be doing that?

  15. 2

    The UI is great. You’ve utilise the google material ui very well. Maybe one day you’ll get an offer from google 😁

  16. 2

    This is awesome. So useful for understanding it and how it's spreading. Definitely bookmarking this.

  17. 2

    Using these "subprojects" is great marketing strategy. It's so smart, I love it. Great numbers, it has pays off, obviously. Looking forward to see more info about long term effects (active users, MRR...).

  18. 2

    Congrats! How were you able to get such an informative and intricate web app deployed in a day? And what was the tech stack you used, if I may ask?

    1. 1

      I have all the website ready with visalist, i just had to add another page with a map. I used NuxtJS, Vuetify, leaflet, firebase and MySQL.

      1. 1

        I see! Nice job man!

  19. 2

    You need to update us about the numbers

    1. 1

      These numbers are more or less the final numbers

      1. 2

        I was talking about how it will effect your MRR

        1. 1

          Got it, i will make another post soon! 👍

  20. 2

    Really friggin cool man. Physician here and someone showed me this at work- very cool to see this came from a fellow indie hacker!

    1. 1

      Nice! It's a small world indeed.

  21. 2

    I've been following this page in an effort to stay on top of the virus: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

    Smart effort! Well done.

  22. 2

    That is so funny and Great work!!

  23. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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