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Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

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Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#11

Post by patio11 »

varikin wrote: post #9
callmeed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. And the reason I look over my wife's shoulder now and then when she's on her computer. She's a craft/fashion/music/wedding nut and I've had more than a couple ideas for that half of the population.

Agreed. I am currently working on a site to fill a need that my wife, an artist, has. I found that the best way to find great ideas is to ask friends and family.

The downside with friends and family is that they want to help you. Regular people want to help themselves. Find regular people, ask what their problems are, solve them, make money.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#13

Post by kungfooey »

My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality.

I completely agree with patio11's comment about the other half of the population being under-served.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#14

Post by rsheridan6 »

patio11 wrote: post #4

I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views. Excuse me. Daily page views. But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the averag…

Definitely. My wife was a early member of ravelry, and watching their success made an impression on me. Before it existed, knitters were mostly members of some vbulletin-like board whose name escapes me. I suppose that a good way to identify these underserved markets would be to look for popular vbulletin/phpbb sites aimed at some particular hobby, and try to think of ways to make something more useful for those hobbyists.

Also, you don't have to limit yourself to the female half of the population. There are lots of industries with a significant male presence that use some crap software. I can't believe how bad some of the software is that I've used working for non-technical companies.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#15

Post by hopeless »

I recently introduced my wife (a crochet-addict) to Ravelry. The result? She's now a Ravelry-addict. I can hardly get on the laptop myself these days. She's taking photos, queuing up projects, checking out patterns and even going as far as entering her "stash" of wool so she can track it all.

The one problem is that there's no api so it's a walled garden... and my wife really wants a public portfolio site. If Ravelry could fulfil this need, I'd pay them money to get it off my todo list!

I often wondered about the business model but after seeing it in action, the advertising fits quite well.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#17

Post by caseyf »

kungfooey wrote: post #13

My wife knew about this site, and she tells me that for a long time growth was somewhat hampered by their inability to scale. They had to manually allow users into the site in chunks (you email them your info, they email you the following Friday when you can finally post on the boards). He obviously had some hiccups, but he managed them well and learned as he went. That's an admirable quality. I completely agree with…

We had an automated invitation system - the usual, "put in your email, wait a while for the invite" thing. It was true that were only adding a couple hundred people a day during the early days. We weren't ready for more. We were so not prepared for the interest - it's funny to think back on it now. When we hit 5,000 users we were amazed.

I think that we had actual performance issues for about a month (maybe a little longer?) when we outgrew our single dedicated server and hobbled along until we built a more permanent home. Luckily, people were very patient and understanding.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#18

Post by caseyf »

timdorr wrote: post #3

Pretty good setup, but Cogent? Eek! Those guys run the crappiest network I've ever seen. You certainly get what you pay for. And they're combining that with CloudFront? Seems like a weird combination that results in their not getting their money's worth (on Amazon's side).

I feel weird replying to all of these comments but here goes:

We were worried about Cogent at the beginning so we only used them for delivering some static files and for non-critical outgoing traffic. It was initially an experiment - to save on our in-datacenter bandwidth and to compare with Amazon (a very inexpensive experiment) and we've been very happy with it.

I think that we are doing about 20% of our traffic (+ offsite backups) over Cogent, 40% on our datacenter's fancy-pants bandwidth, and 40% on Amazon.

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#19

Post by caseyf »

hopeless wrote: post #15

I recently introduced my wife (a crochet-addict) to Ravelry. The result? She's now a Ravelry-addict. I can hardly get on the laptop myself these days. She's taking photos, queuing up projects, checking out patterns and even going as far as entering her "stash" of wool so she can track it all. The one problem is that there's no api so it's a walled garden... and my wife really wants a public portfolio site. If Ravelry…

http://www.ravelry.com/help/api isn't much but it should be enough to make a project portfolio. Post on the Ravelry board if you have any questions :)

Re: Ravelry - a very successful deployment of Ruby and Rails

#20

Post by blogimus »

callmeed wrote: post #7
patio11 wrote: post #4

I note that this has been mentioned in 5 comments before in the history of Hacker News. Which is approximately once for every terabyte of knitting patterns they have stored. Or once for every 100,000 registered users. Or once for every 700k monthly page views. Excuse me. Daily page views. But to look at how much attention they get among technically inclined people, you'd think they were less important than the averag…

Indeed. And the reason I look over my wife's shoulder now and then when she's on her computer. She's a craft/fashion/music/wedding nut and I've had more than a couple ideas for that half of the population.

A couple of days ago, I read the following article: http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/million-dollar-businesses-e...

One of the businesses is Jimmy Beans Wool, started in 2002 with $30k and had $2.1 mil revenue in 2008.

now boasts an average of 20,000 customers per month, mostly through the Web site.

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