4 Insights from a Hacker News Launch

http://filepicker.tumblr.com/

by tagx • 14 years ago

55 24 14 years ago

filepicker.tumblr.com

dyim• 14 years ago

$0 in donations? I'll bring a couple beers over tonight

Pkeod• 14 years ago

More proof that asking for donations is not a business model.

prawn• 14 years ago

While I don't disagree, I think it could be a bit early to judge in this case given that people were probably mostly kicking the tyres.

dasil003• 14 years ago

I'm all for supporting IE8, but it's suspicious that someone on HN would notice that you weren't supporting it.

Smirnoff• 14 years ago

People in financial industry unfortunately still have to deal with IE

natep• 14 years ago

IIRC, it said so right on their front page "Doesn't support IE"

RexM• 14 years ago

Is the main site down for anyone else?

tnash• 14 years ago

Yeah, down for me, wanted to find out more about their product, didn't pay attention the other day.

tagx3• 14 years ago

Yeah, for some reason our load balancer isn't establishing ssl connections. We're looking into the issue.

tarr11• 14 years ago

Thanks for this detailed information. It's great to know what kind of traffic to expect from an HN launch.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

it wouldn't hurt to make the "Filepicker.io" in the banner of your blog go to Filepicker.io, not filepicker.tumblr.com. We already know where that is.

brettcvz4• 14 years ago

Done! Good call

philgo20• 14 years ago

Would be more interesting to know how you go to #1. Great headline? Luck? Friends?

brettcvz4• 14 years ago

Luck, Friends, probably in that order. Also giving people a demo, releasing on a slow(er) news day, releasing right about the time people get off work, making something for developers and giving it away for free.

tagx3• 14 years ago

Sorry for the downtime on the main site but our Heroku/Amazon ssl load balancer died. I temporarily reverted to Heroku's piggyback ssl so the site will work but with an invalid security certificate. We are trying to resolve the issue with Heroku now.

tagx3• 14 years ago

Heroku has now acknowledged issues https://status.heroku.com/

brettcvz4• 14 years ago

Fixed. The cloud giveth and the cloud taketh away

abcd_f• 14 years ago

"Launch" ... a file selector widget. Awesome. I bet it's a startup too.

nmcfarl2• 14 years ago

This was my problem with file picker.io as well.

The blog entry mentions donation - but I did not see that option. What I did see was a hosted service, that has a very startup-y feel. Which means to me that charging for this service is probably in the works.

And paying for a file picker is not something I want to do - it’s just a little to critical a function to have an external dependency on.

app3602• 14 years ago

It will be real helpful if you can share the time of launch and the headline you used. Where can I find the thread for it in HN? sorry for being a noob :)

brettcvz4• 14 years ago

3:00pm Thursday.

Headline was: Show HN: Filepicker.io - dead simple file uploads

app3602• 14 years ago

ok cool! It's so simple it's hard to believe :) Thanks for sharing man!

nmcfarl2• 14 years ago

Show HN: Filepicker.io - dead simple file uploads - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3864615

illdave• 14 years ago

Congratulations on launching - I've been in a similar position with getting a HN spike and hitting email caps, but that's why I love Heroku (and SendGrid) for easily scaling things up, especially when I didn't really know what I was doing.

Do you guys have anything in place to alert you if you get another spike in traffic? If not, I'd recommend using Chartbeat and setting up alerts so that it emails/notifies your phone when you get a flood of traffic - you might find that press mentions pop up here and there and knowing about them straight away can help you fan the flames a bit. It's also pretty useful for when your site goes down as it instantly alerts you. Well done again - great job with launching.

4 Insights from a Hacker News Launch

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