Ask HN: Was almost published on Mashable, what now?
For the past couple of weeks we have been hacking together web projects from our dorm rooms (two of us go to UPenn one of us NYU.) Yesterday, after an all-night coding session, we released a new app called Where My Friends Be that takes all of your FB friends and puts them onto an animated Google Map for you to look at and share on FB. We had some immediate success with our personal friend networks and generated over 57,000 friends "added" and a little over 260 actual sign ups on the first day.
Last night in an effort to publicize the app past our immediate friends we emailed Mashable and started to correspond with one its Senior Editors. The editor that told us he was writing an article about us, but wanted to make sure that we would be able to handle all of the traffic they were going to send us. Then we got some more emails back saying he ran into some possible bugs. Then said he will keep doing some research and maybe post later this week. He told us to keep him updated.
We are assuming that if we update him later this week with a story of continued good traffic he will be more likely to publish.
So at this point we have two main questions: 1) How can we continue to get exposure and gain traffic? 2) How can we make sure we will be able to handle the traffic from mashable.
RE 1) We submitted to HN earlier this week, but it didn't get much traction because for some reason Facebook deleted our app and it caused some errors. We've fixed that now. But how else can we get some traffic? Other blogs to show? Listservs to email? Ideas?
RE 2) We are currently on a virtual dedicated server and have faith it in. We are also very prepared to migrate to either a dedicated server or managed cloud hosting on Rackspace. What other options do you see that will be seamless for us?
Thanks for the advice!