what do you do? stick ads all over the place!
what do you think, you have a business there?
like twitter? yeah, sure, raise another 200 million...
Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
91–100 of 195 posts
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#92Why did you build it? What was your motivation? I tried it, and I have no idea why would I spam my friends with link so they would describe me. I have absolutely no interest in that, and I would feel really stupid sending anyone link like that. Did you actually felt the need to have such a website? Or you just figured people will like it? How did you figure that out? Please, share.
Most people have a strong interest in how others perceive them, including yourself: "I would feel really stupid sending anyone link like that." You're probably part of a culture where publicly asking others what they think of you is frowned on.
It's not the culture. I care about what people think about me, but not as much as asking my friends to describe me it three words.
I think I understand it now. People use this, because they wanna hear people saying good things about them. I think most people would send link to their friends, because they don't feel very confident about themselves.
It's the basic principle of Facebook (or of whatever Facebook turned into) - people post things so they would get positive feedback and they would feel better about themselves.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#931) In general, the database is always the bottleneck. It's easy to throw up more webservers- can't do that with db's. 2) Throw up an ad or two, with the goal of having the ad revenue pay your server costs. This will allow you to not worry about the financial situation while you're fighting fires, so you can defer thinking about investment etc until later. (now after you have the servers tamed...) 3) Make sure you are…
Not so sure about incorporating, but that's because I spent my day writing up notes on Camz's talk on incorporation. He gave the three reasons to incorporate:
1. You have significant profits or net income. 2. You have high liability. 3. You're getting funding.
I doubt this meets any of those criteria, unless someone offered to fund him.
Here are the relevant links if you want to see what I'm talking about: HN Story - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2047818 Podcast - http://cameronkeng.com/podcast-ep-1-incorporation/ Summary/Notes - http://pastebin.ca/2033868
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#94About monetizing: you could show the first 2 words only, and charge a small fee for the third ?
I guess people would pay to see what is said about them at least.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
^ This is reason why I love this place and never believe the occasional "hacker news is going to shit" posts.
To be fair, Reddit has a noted capacity for charity and generosity, but I do agree.
>To be fair, Reddit has a noted capacity for charity and generosity
Understatement of the year.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#96http://markbao.com/about You're 17/18? Kids these days. Geeze. Fine work sir, though I don't have much advice to offer beyond what has already been stated.
Yeah, and I met Mark 3 or 4 years ago and he had already started at least one and maybe 2 successful startups.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, Reddit has a noted capacity for charity and generosity, but I do agree.
>To be fair, Reddit has a noted capacity for charity and generosity Understatement of the year.
>Understatement
Entirely necessary here, even a hint of hyperbole and the pedants come out of the woodwork.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#98Heroku.
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#991) In general, the database is always the bottleneck. It's easy to throw up more webservers- can't do that with db's. 2) Throw up an ad or two, with the goal of having the ad revenue pay your server costs. This will allow you to not worry about the financial situation while you're fighting fires, so you can defer thinking about investment etc until later. (now after you have the servers tamed...) 3) Make sure you are…
I'd say it has a high chance of being c. At least where die == level off/decline.
I see a lot of parallels to formspring, whose pagivews/month graph looks like this: http://www.quantcast.com/formspring.me
So you either want to sell as it nears the that peak, or you have to be ready to stick out the trough of sorrow and invest a lot of time into finding a way to grow and monetize it.
So if you have some great vision for how you can turn this into something awesome, super-popular, and monetizable and you want to invest the time in it, you should go for it.
But if not, you're probably going to get some very good offers over the next few days--especially compared to how little time you've invested. If I were you and wasn't totally in love with the site, I'd get out while the offers are good and invest that money into your other businesses. Then when your next site goes viral, you'll just have to wonder how to get it back up ASAP, not how to afford doing so :)
Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?
#100What does MVP stand for?