4 Insights from a Hacker News Launch

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 :)

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.

Is the main site down for anyone else?

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

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