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Comment by danielsamuels | Hacker News Reader

I built Rocket League Replays[1], a website which analyses the replay files generated from matches played in Rocket League. I took my inspiration from GGTracker[2] which is essentially the same thing, but for StarCraft 2. I was looking through the replay files and noticed that there was some human readable content in them, so I wrote a parser[3] and built the site around it. Eventually I started a Patreon which allowed users to support the site in return for more advanced analysis. I get around $200/mo from that which covers the server costs etc, so I'm more than happy with that.

[1]: https://www.rocketleaguereplays.com/replays/

[2]: http://ggtracker.com/landing_tour

[3]: http://danielsamuels.co.uk/words/2015/07/27/rocket-league-re...

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Tell us more about your skills before starting the project and after starting the project. Were you basically a front end or back end guy before starting the project. What technolgies did you choose and why. How long did it take to complete. How many hours did you invest. Did you invest time consistently in smaller chunks or large chunks at one shot.

Sure, so I've been a full stack developer for 11 years. Started in PHP, now working in Python (using Django). I've been the lead developer (now technical director) at a top 4 digital agency in the UK, so I've got a lot of industry experience.

The MVP was built in 2-3 days, I think I started it Friday night and launched Sunday morning, the initial version didn't do a lot, but it was good enough to get it live. From there I then worked on it most weekends for a period of perhaps 4-5 months? Since September-ish, it's been pretty self sufficient. I update it every now and again when new updates are released to the game or the parser (which is now written by someone else), and I sometimes work on new features, but for the most part it's in a good spot and I'm happy with it. It's on Github[1] so you can get an idea of the effort put into it (the version which is live isn't the same as the public Github repo, I have a few private repos on Github due to some NDAs, hopefully I'll be able to publish the latest code soon).

[1]: https://github.com/rocket-league-replays/rocket-league-repla...

The details regarding time managment would be great.

However, I personally would be much more interested in any info on how he got the word out and attracted users. That's the part most developers are missing in the "that makes money" portion of the equation.

Reddit and Twitter were big things for me, I announced the initial release on the Rocket League subreddit[1] and then announced updates whenever they were released[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. I automated daily posts to reddit and Twitter[9] for the "match of the day" (calculated based on a variety of factors). I engaged heavily in the community on Twitter, other fan sites and got my name out there. I gave away the extra (paid-for) features to the top teams to get them using it. I added support for features which users asked for.

One of the biggest sources of traffic for me now are the Rocket League analysis / training subreddits[10]. It's become _the_ location to upload your replays if you want to share them with other people. Making it easy to share (no account required) was a big part of this.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/3et5yx/after_...

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/4f3jq2/rocket...

[3]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/4d1kpe/rocket...

[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/4a9s44/rocket...

[5]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/44xp8j/rocket...

[6]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/3yws8d/rocket...

[7]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/3pra3u/rocket...

[8]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeague/comments/3gtulm/rocket...

[9]: https://twitter.com/RLReplays

[10]: https://www.reddit.com/r/RocketLeagueAnalysis/

Wow, you've done a great job making this a useful product with meaningful value.

There's a user in the Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard moba, same engine as SC2) that did the same thing, except went the completely opposite route and riddled the site with predatory ads (the kinds that produce popunders and play audio on load). The paid option was to get rid of the ads. Most updates to the site lately seem to be to combat ad blockers instead of add new things.

The community went from being extremely open and excited about the site at the beginning to now begrudgingly having to use it since it has no competitor.

Props to you for engaging the community and keeping them on your side.

To be fair I do have ads as well, but it's just Adsense so there shouldn't be any of the bad stuff. Removing them comes with the Patreon membership too.

(Also, thanks!)

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