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Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

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Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#151

Post by jimboyoungblood »

jackowayed wrote: post #99
jimboyoungblood wrote: post #81

1) 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 f…

Agreed that it looks a lot like formspring.

But according to Crunchbase, formspring raised a $10MM series B just over a month ago (well after the decline was obvious). I wouldn't be surprised if some of that went directly into the founders' pockets.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#152

Post by pdx »

jjoe wrote: post #138

It looks like it's already been moved to EC2 and switched to Varnish cache and Nginx for static files. I think the decision to tie the "user" view to the main FQDN ( http://threewords.me/joe ) will come back and bite hard if this project turns into a large user base. It would have perhaps been better to setup a wildcard DNS/vhost and set it as http://joe.threewords.me . It can still be done but the earlier the better…

Can you help me understand how this helps with scaling? I prefer this url format myself and noticed it's used rarely by the big guys. If there's a scaling advantage it provides, however, it's not obvious to me.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#153

Post by jjoe »

pdx wrote: post #152
jjoe wrote: post #138

It looks like it's already been moved to EC2 and switched to Varnish cache and Nginx for static files. I think the decision to tie the "user" view to the main FQDN ( http://threewords.me/joe ) will come back and bite hard if this project turns into a large user base. It would have perhaps been better to setup a wildcard DNS/vhost and set it as http://joe.threewords.me . It can still be done but the earlier the better…

Can you help me understand how this helps with scaling? I prefer this url format myself and noticed it's used rarely by the big guys. If there's a scaling advantage it provides, however, it's not obvious to me.

DNS is much easier to scale out than HTTP. By having full FQDN for users, you have the capability to easily scale out without needing a load balancer in front of say, threewords.me.

So in your DNS zone you can tell it to route all accounts that start with the letter 'a' to server with IP 1.1.1.1, letter b to IP 2.2.2.2, etc. Server with IP 1.1.1.1 will not only run a headless web app but also route SQL queries to a db shard (all relational data for users starting with the letter a).

This level of "user" partitioning can be deeper. So it's not just the first letter of the user but two or three more letters/numbers. So joe.threewords.me would be on a different server than j4mes.threewords.me (That's j.o.threewords.me vs j.4.threewords.me).

Regards

Joe

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#154

Post by revorad »

dotcoma wrote: post #104
dotcoma wrote: post #91

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...

make fun of twitter, and you get down-voted. I know, I know, Google will buy them for 4 billion in 2011, but that is the only exit strategy they have. No biz model there, sorry.

Have you seen this? - http://business.twitter.com/

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#155

Post by ivankirigin »

Consider adding a revenue stream immediately. Let users pay to see what others have said about friends. Charge 1 facebook credit. Also let users pay to block that access: 10 credits. Also pay to let others ignore the block: 100 credits. Etc...

You'll need to redirect to a facebook page to use credits because they aren't available off facebook.com yet. They don't have many good examples of offsite apps using credits, so they could streamline the approval process I bet. Email me with questions.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#156

Post by getsat »

dotcoma wrote: post #135
steveklabnik wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to let you know why I've downvoted you twice: Twitter has millions in revenue a year.

Thanks for cheating (down-voting me twice). 10 million, or something like that. From ONE customer. who could well drop them. So, they're breaking even (for now). And all this while they have raised 360 million in VC money (crunchbase). And nobody has a clue how they will make REAL money. Or do you?

Twitter's been profitable since their Google and Bing search deals lit up around last November.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#157

Post by bertil »

ivankirigin wrote: post #155

Consider adding a revenue stream immediately. Let users pay to see what others have said about friends. Charge 1 facebook credit. Also let users pay to block that access: 10 credits. Also pay to let others ignore the block: 100 credits. Etc... You'll need to redirect to a facebook page to use credits because they aren't available off facebook.com yet. They don't have many good examples of offsite apps using credits,…

I'm not sure all your users are familiar with Facebook credits; I'm not sure you want to set up barriers before you know what you have.

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#159

Post by dotcoma »

getsat wrote: post #156
dotcoma wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for cheating (down-voting me twice). 10 million, or something like that. From ONE customer. who could well drop them. So, they're breaking even (for now). And all this while they have raised 360 million in VC money (crunchbase). And nobody has a clue how they will make REAL money. Or do you?

Twitter's been profitable since their Google and Bing search deals lit up around last November.

yeah, "profitable". Let's say at break even.

And yet somehow they needed 200 more million, for a total of 360 million sunk into that ship. Do you have a clue of how profitable a company in which 360 million dollars were invested needs to be? Do you really see them ever getting even close to being that profitable? How?

Re: Ask HN: I built a site that just went ridiculously viral. What do I do now?

#160

Post by dotcoma »

code_duck wrote: post #147
dotcoma wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

make fun of twitter, and you get down-voted. I know, I know, Google will buy them for 4 billion in 2011, but that is the only exit strategy they have. No biz model there, sorry.

I don't know, someone made a comment in reply to me the other day that said "Twitter could be another Digg" and everyone seemed to love it.

I sure do :)
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