Show HN: Made a virtual spinner that now drives 40% of my startup's web traffic

by ngthatsme • 5 years ago

13 4 5 years ago

ngthatsme• 5 years ago

A few weekends back I wanted to build something creative...so thought I'd try and make the most realistic, satisfying, virtual fidget spinner.

I know the fidget spinner craze was a while back but I still use my physical spinner, so wanted to see if I could replicate it online.

I also thought it could be a way to drive traffic to my other project, which is productivity app, so it kind of fits with the theme of fidgeting and attention.

So I made the fidget spinner and put a link to my other project in the nav bar.

It was a win-win. I learnt a lot making the spinner, and now it accounts for almost 40% of the traffic to my other website.

The spinner has been spun around 32,000 times so far!

It's using React, React Spring and a cool library I found called Propeller to create the inertia effect.

To make it feel even more realistic I added a spinner sound effect from freesound.org (a great resource for sounds!) and made the volume increase as it spins faster.

Would love to hear what you think!

https://fidgetpage.com

_hyn3• 5 years ago

Great job! Looks great, and smooth animation in Firefox on Linux.

codingdave• 5 years ago

Sure, it is a nicely done job. If it is driving 40% of the traffic to your startup, I'm assuming that is from the link on the top of the page?

Have you measured whether that traffic is actually driving any conversions? Or is it just traffic?

jotato• 5 years ago

Well done! I've been seeing your project around Twitter and IndieHackers lately. Very smart to cross-link it over. Even if is doesn't cause conversions now, it might be the seed to a few later.

Show HN: Made a virtual spinner that now drives 40% of my startup's web traffic

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