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Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

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Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#1

Post by benhowdle »

I launched a side project ~5 years ago that does simulated API responses with fake data. Never checked analytics beyond launch but I've just discovered its received 4.5M unique visitors and 100M requests in the past 30 days. What would you do with this information?

Context for my question: I'm a developer who's terrible at monetising, or even marketing, side projects.

The site: https://reqres.in/

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#3

Post by NonEUCitizen »

Don't rush into anything. If you form a startup around this, don't let any business type convince you that he should be the CEO and you just take care of technical stuff -- maintain control over the business side (and save money by not rushing into hiring any business-types). Make sure you keep majority control over the board for a long time.

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#4

Post by kehers »

Advertise your other projects on the site? (ekko.site for example). You an also build pro features that people can pay for; allowing creating custom endpoints and responses for example. You need to be sure people it will be what people want though.

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#5

Post by yorwba »

howard941 wrote: post #2

Provided I didn't hose the query it looks like over a quarter of a million pages link to your site. See https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fr...

I don't think Google takes link: queries literally anymore. For example, on page 2 of the search results I found https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html which seems to match because it contains "req, res" in the body.

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#7

Post by Peroni »

yorwba wrote: post #5
howard941 wrote: post #2

Provided I didn't hose the query it looks like over a quarter of a million pages link to your site. See https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fr...

I don't think Google takes link: queries literally anymore. For example, on page 2 of the search results I found https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html which seems to match because it contains "req, res" in the body.

Correct: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/819094559770738688

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#8

Post by jppope »

Here's my $0.02:

You don't need to be good at "monetizing" to just ask people how you can improve. Throw a little survey box in the corner, and the people that use this thing enough will let you know what would make their lives better. Those people will use that thing, and you ask them to contribute ($$$) a little bit so that you can do more of that. Some of them will do it.

congrats on building something useful, most companies struggle to do that, looks like you're about to kill it!

Re: Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

#10

Post by FatalLogic »

Because the content of your response data isn't critical, do you think you could sometimes return a text string with a simple request for donations from your API? I mean only in cases where a random text string is an appropriate response. Perhaps you could also send one line sponsored text adverts as part of the API response.
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