I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.
Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
41–50 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#42I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement ( http://duetapp.com ) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com . The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well. Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as…
Nicely done ! Especially when you did not use a framework for PHP/JS.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#43For Twiddla, I make a point of giving free accounts to teachers and students (or basically anybody who bothers to write an email and ask for one).
This leads to tons of word-of-mouth referrals, and I'll sometimes watch as an entire school comes on board, one class at a time, over the course of a few weeks.
People tend to write about this (and they like the product), so it finds its way onto the radar of companies who do Online Tutoring. We have an API they can use to create and embed our whiteboards for use as online classrooms. That's the bit that costs money. It's a tiny fraction of our userbase, but it accounts for nearly all the revenue.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#44My side project is gaining users slowly everyday.
It's called noteshred and it allows to you send people self shredding, encrypted notes with unique URLs, https://www.noteshred.com. I'm curious to know how you guys transitioned from a free tool to something that generated income.
I can't imagine advertisements wouldn't bring in much revenue, so how did you go about introducing a paid model?
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#45By pimping the projects in threads like this one, by the looks of it.
The traffic driving methods used are much more useful if you know the site/market they're being used for. I'd much rather people included the project URL than not.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#46Going to take this down later this week. My free micro-instance-on-AWS period is over. I get a constant drive of traffic from reddit. Could've thrown in ads, but I really din't want to keep it going. It's kinda stupid, but kinda cool? Memes As A Service http://maas.rohits.me/
Funny enough I build an app that is almost identical: http://memeifier.com/ Code: https://github.com/jkupferman/meme-creator
I see you are using Puma for your rack server, how do you find it performs compared to Unicorn?
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#47I get 750k+ visitors per month. Nearly all of it from organic search (aka Google). It took years to build up this traffic organically to User Generated Content.
Great Ask HN. Thanks for posting.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#48I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement ( http://duetapp.com ) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com . The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well. Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as…
I'm a bit curious though .... it is unclear, did you design the theme or was a 'pre-made' theme used ?
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#49I'm doing ok with the freemium model. My app is self hosted project mangement ( http://duetapp.com ) so I created a slimmed down version that I distribute for free - http://getsoloapp.com . The landing page for the free version has links to the paid version and there is a link within the settings panel of the free version. It's working fairly well. Almost every successful entrepreneur recommends content marketing as…
I'm a bit curious though .... it is unclear, did you design the theme or was a 'pre-made' theme used ?
Everything is custom. I designed the Duet and Solo themes, but I used a bit of bootstrap for some of the elements. Both landing pages are custom as well. The Duet landing page uses Foundation and the Solo landing page uses Bootstrap.
Re: Ask HN: How do you drive web traffic to your successful side projects?
#50I have a side project http://racemetric.com for simple athletic race registration and credit card processing (just released). It's all written in Haskell and brand new. Any ideas about how to specifically drive traffic would be extremely helpful. The idea is to accept credit card registration payments within minutes instead of having to talk to sales people, get a merchant account, build a custom web page, etc.
As an active runner/triathlete, I can't stress enough how f*cked-up online registration processes for races are, and this app almost seems solve this. All I can wish you is the best of luck and I hope to signup to races via your app soon.
my 2 cents: I suggest you contact your local running clubs/athlete associations, and race organisers to help them out with this + remove the need to signup (give the user the option to do so during registration, but not before). This sector needs an Eventbrite for sport events. Best of luck.