How I got my side project's first 3500 users

Whoops, TIL. Sorry about that.

Just Excel for the line graph, image-maps.com to avoid doing all the map <area>s by hand. I was actually wondering if there's some way to do this that's less... 90s.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/3fs6kl/my_...

Thanks. A big part of my strategy was to build up http://reddit.com/r/ottoplay, which is up to 130 subscribers – I've been pushing it in all my posts so far. (At first it was just me talking to myself so there'd be something interesting for the first viewers to read.) I'd like to make that more of a self-sustaining community, to encourage people to stay involved and share it with their friends. Right now I'm working on a much-requested feature (customizing channels) – my plan is to roll that out with private beta invites to help keep people engaged.

Once that's rolling I'll try for another, bigger round of press coverage. Up until now things have largely not been in my control – the first two articles' authors approached me after my reddit posts, the later ones never bothered interviewing me, and it got Product Hunted by a power user who noticed my failed Show HN. (I actually didn't even realize it hit PH until the next day, took even longer to get commenting access.) But that's probably not going to last – I expect I'll have to do much more actively reaching out to journalists.

I'm starting to run out of new reddit communities to reach, but there's some smallish ones I still haven't hit. Maybe I'll try another Show HN. Mostly though, I think I need to focus on the core subreddits/communities that like this sort of thing, figure out exactly what they want and build a loyal following who'll bring it up when a tangential topic comes up. This already happens occasionally, which is beyond awesome: https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/3fc0h0/netf...

Longer term, I'd love to get this on some sort of ChromiumOS stick. Nothing useful on the market for that yet, so I'm chatting with some manufacturers in China. Seems like a good product for a Kickstarter, hardware's more interesting than browser extensions, and it solves the real problem of the app being too hard to get onto a TV if you're not already used to HDMI cabling it.