Ask HN: My web app is going viral. Now what? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: My web app is going viral. Now what?

18 pointstheli0nheart13 comments

Here's the backstory:

A few months back, I wrote a small web application called "Cheer Me Up" (http://www.cheermeup.info/). In a nutshell, it's basically FMyLife with a far more positive aspect (which is that you can cheer up random strangers, and not just revel in their misery).

Over the past few months, visits have hovered in the 10-15 day range, but for some reason, in the last 15 hours, the site has seen 15,000 visitors (and its growing, quickly).

Now, I'm asking you all because I'm certain a fair number of you have experienced this before. How do I take advantage of this situation?

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Do this and feel good about it:

  * Create a leaderboard for your 'cheerleaders' (ie. the most cheery people).

  * Let them send eachother virtual gifts. Make all but a few of them free.

Do this and take a pill in order to sleep at night:

  * Automate the creation of 'sad' entries. (Just enough to make your 'cheerleaders' feel important, but not too much, or they will feel spammed)

  * Automate the sending of free gifts, send to lots of 'sad' people. Basically, here you're trying to seem like a vibrant gift-giving community.

  * Automate the sending of premium gifts, send to only a few 'sad' people. To set a precedent for paid gifts. Be sure to show this on your front page, and somewhere in your app.

  * After a real-life user posts a 'sad' entry, immediately redirect them to Facebook to share their sadness, thus increasing the spread.

Find a few "cheery" books and products on Amazon and put them on your page with an affiliate link.

I would suggest putting the current banner below the forms and buttons because a) it makes the site look much better and b) people might click it by mistake when they go for the 'Find Someone to Cheer Me Up' button

I did this and it upped click-throughs tremendously.

Make the site as best as possible, given your concept is sound. Check out: http://www.thathigh.com/ Maybe have a follow up section, where users can build a story, leading hopefully to a shared resolution.

In your header banner, remove the .info from the clickable link. It looks spammy.

Put a small border around the paragraph below it so that it looks as if the page has structure to it.

After you cheer someone up, you're sent to a page saying thanks. Make that page automatically redirect the person to the home page after a few seconds.

Get Feedback from your users. Find ways for them to play more with your site, for example even though reddit is a text only place there are lots of games users play like ITAP or GoneWild or AMA, what you should try to do is find ways for your users to play that kind of games.

Another good example is also Chatroulette where users play games like Tilt your head, Play you a song, show you the bird, etc.

I should be able to read interesting posts without having to sign up. Many people lurk before getting engaged in a site, if they ever do so at all.

I'm sure many people read FMylife for the schadenfraude -- there will people who may just wnat to read, without contributing directly

High unlikely your app is going "viral". It's probably on the front page of something big. Uhh, can't you look at the referrer logs to find out where?

I am. Most of the visits are direct.

Are they hits to the front page? Direct would suggest something like a Twitter client or email. But I don't see much mention of your url on Twitter. Perhaps it's been shortened. Really annoying that there's probably no way to figure out what's going on in that case. What's the network distribution of your visitors? Does it look legit?

Direct would suggest something like a Twitter client or email.

Or a mention in a newspaper, magazine, or on TV. Even mentions in backwater publications or channels can have a big effect traffic wise.

Any updates on the number of visitors?

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