Ask HN: Project is inexplicably receiving millions of hits. What would you do?

[benhowdle]

I launched a side project ~5 years ago that does simulated API responses with fake data. Never checked analytics beyond launch but I've just discovered its received 4.5M unique visitors and 100M requests in the past 30 days. What would you do with this information?

Context for my question: I'm a developer who's terrible at monetising, or even marketing, side projects.

The site: https://reqres.in/

[raleigh_user]

Don’t build anything right now. Put an option somewhere that makes sense that says “like this? Upgrade to get even more features” or something similar. You know the users/audience better than I.

And put some sort of analytics on that button you can track. Once someone clicks it do a simple alert(“we don’t have a pro plan at this point but thanks for showing your interest. We will follow up later when we do”).

Then, let it sit for a week. IF you get some non 0 amount of clicks, reach out to the people who clicked it and ask what they’d like.

That should take you less than an hour to implement and be a great first step.

[muzani]

lol I clicked this, but I wasn't really interested at all in paying. I just wanted to know what extra features were available.

As someone who did a startup before, it was surprising to me when I first learned how eager people are to throw money something that made them feel better. A part of me just went "ooh API stuff" and hoped for more.

[jppope]

Here's my $0.02:

You don't need to be good at "monetizing" to just ask people how you can improve. Throw a little survey box in the corner, and the people that use this thing enough will let you know what would make their lives better. Those people will use that thing, and you ask them to contribute ($$$) a little bit so that you can do more of that. Some of them will do it.

congrats on building something useful, most companies struggle to do that, looks like you're about to kill it!

[NonEUCitizen]

Don't rush into anything. If you form a startup around this, don't let any business type convince you that he should be the CEO and you just take care of technical stuff -- maintain control over the business side (and save money by not rushing into hiring any business-types). Make sure you keep majority control over the board for a long time.

[muzani]

I don't recommend putting google ads/automated ads in there. They normally pay poorly and lower user experience.

Instead get a custom advertising deal. Tech companies often have a large advertising budget and they can't spend it on billboards. You can try to contact companies like Twilio, who want to target developers. Give them a rate card (like $1000 for a top banner of a certain size for 1 month, $300 for a bottom banner, etc). In the rate card also include how many unique visitors you're getting and how active they are.

You can also put up some affiliate links. Like Triplebyte occasionally gives out $5000 if you refer someone who gets a job through them.

A friend of mine had a blog with less unique visitors, but using these techniques, he went on to build a million dollar company. You've got the asset, now you just have to monetize it.

[FatalLogic]

Because the content of your response data isn't critical, do you think you could sometimes return a text string with a simple request for donations from your API? I mean only in cases where a random text string is an appropriate response. Perhaps you could also send one line sponsored text adverts as part of the API response.

[prokes]

Nice! Couple of ideas:

1) install basic advertising via AdSense. 4.5mm visitors will monetize

2) affiliate link to a useful, paid product that your users could also use. If they click through the link and buy, you are paid a commission.

3) limit the # of API requests. Charge $X/mo for more than Y requests. Offer an unlimited plan for a higher price.

[superasn]

I think you should analyze the source of traffic first. Install Google webmaster tools to get the list of top keywords your site is ranking for. GWT tells you the exact number of impressions/clicks which first of all confirm if the traffic is legit and second of all tell you exactly what people are searching for coming to your site and the sites that are linking to you (also a good indicator of what your audience is visiting)

Once you have that data you have a very clearly defined target audience to go after via a product or custom advertising

[HHalvi]

Do you want to monetize it ?

- You can use it as an enabler aka Lever to get your next job, consulting gig, projects etc.

- You can run small ads that are contextual to your visitors and call it a win - win

- You can understand the type of use cases your visitors are coming in for and depending on the kind of jobs they are doing/using you for start a Pro (and Possibly Plus) Plan.

- Or you can do a mixture of all of the above.

What should you do? Decide if you are excited about doing this and also the time you want to spend doing all this. Depending on those you can choose to do whatever you want to do. Hope this helps and best of luck :D

[hluska]

You’ve already received some wonderful advice. So, I’ll just tell you to be really fucking proud of yourself. Geez, 4.5M uniques making 100M requests is damned impressive. That’s great!

[petervandijck]

Spend time understanding your current traffic and users.

- For the traffic: do the users just find it on Google Search, and then leave immediately? What are they looking for?

- For the requests: is it all from 1 or 2 users? Are there many users? Can you talk to them (email, chat box, ...). Do they use it for personal projects or for work? etc.

Once you have an idea of what's going on, you could start charging money, potentially.

[gomox]

The important business angle to the situation is: if you get 0.2% of those visitors to give you $1/mo you will get a mostly passive income of around $10K/month, which amounts to financial independence in most places.

Good job! It's time to start sucking just a little less at monetisation (0.2% or more, ideally).

If you want to bounce ideas feel free to reach out, but there are good starter tips in the other comments!

[howard941]

Provided I didn't hose the query it looks like over a quarter of a million pages link to your site. See https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fr...

[yorwba]

I don't think Google takes link: queries literally anymore. For example, on page 2 of the search results I found https://expressjs.com/en/guide/routing.html which seems to match because it contains "req, res" in the body.

[Peroni]

Correct: https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/819094559770738688

[howard941]

Nice. Thanks for cluing me in. Bronx cheer for google.

[kehers]

Advertise your other projects on the site? (ekko.site for example). You an also build pro features that people can pay for; allowing creating custom endpoints and responses for example. You need to be sure people it will be what people want though.

[gshdg]

You don’t need to be sure. It’s a better investment of time if you’re sure (or at least have tangible evidence) tho.

[quickthrower2]

Another option that might be worth considering is seeing if one of the solarwinds, redgate etc. type companies want to buy you out. Or sponsor you. It depends what they offer of course as to if it’s worth it.

[rajacombinator]

In addition to other good advice here, I’d look carefully at those analytics numbers and maybe check logs also. 4.5m uniques sounds like a lot for a service like this.

[quickthrower2]

Hold on, so I assume you are on a reasonably cheap hosting or cloud plan? Yet it scaled up to this?

[benhowdle]

Yup, $5/month DigitalOcean droplet + free CloudFlare tier.

[quickthrower2]

Nice, I guess CloudFlare is helping out a lot there by caching content so your droplet can take it easy.

[quickthrower2]

For me you are on the first google page for "API Test" nice.

[gesman]

spam/robot hits?

Check stats carefully

[Fjolsvith]

Sell ads!