What a crazy launch: 1.8M pageviews from Reddit in one day

Where I detail how MixedName got ~6200 concurrent visitors, serving in one day 438,136 uniques and 1,866,162 pageviews from a single $3 VPS.

Launch of what?

MixedName is a site for finding bilingual baby names — names which appear in two languages. It is designed to help international couples find a name for their baby, and I wrote it to name our Japanese-Finnish son.

At first it was a personal tool only supporting Japanese and Finnish. Then 5 years after our son was born, I was looking for a new project to start, and figured others might also want to look for names for their kids, so I continued on the project.

Attempted launch

After it felt polished enough and supported the most spoken languages in the world, I put it online and did the usual things: I submitted it to Product Hunt and Hacker News. The result was as I expected: complete silence. I know this is the nature of projects, silence is the default outcome.

I mostly gave up on the site in my mind at this point, but kept it online for the off-chance that Google might still index it and send traffic later. In any case, I started working on the next project right away since I knew that search traffic probably wouldn't pan out either, and would take months to materialize even if it did.

Reciprocal tip

While procrastinating a bit on the next project, I discovered a new chat site on Hacker News called Kardius. It lets you find like-minded people by matching you based on opinions and interests, and I was having a good time chatting to interesting people there, and liked the site enough to stick around even after most new users had left.

With not many others around, I ended up talking with the admin of the site a lot. I wanted to help him grow it, but I was failing hard on coming up with workable ideas for him to promote it. We also talked a bunch about improvements to Kardius features.

Then much later he asked me if I had any sites of my own, and immediately after mentioning MixedName he told me about a Reddit community I had never heard about before, one solely focused on names!

I hadn't even searched for such a subreddit, as it just seemed too niche to exist. The subreddit is /r/namenerds. So my attemps to help grow Kardius instead ended up mostly helping me instead.

The real launch

I tried posting to /r/namenerds and the response was phenomenal. Everyone was interested in the site, and it very quickly became the most upvoted post there. I received tons of fantastic feedback that truly helped me improve the site. I coded for two nights trying to fill as many of the requests as possible.

The suggestions ranged from requesting new languages, to inventing two completely new sections (reverse search for finding which languages use a name, and a top list of most compatible names) for the site that I wouldn't have thought of myself.

Then someone on the subreddit made another suggestion: why not try posting it to /r/internetisbeautiful? Now that was a community I was well-aware of, but I hadn't thought my site would be good enough for posting there. But the suggestion received so many upvotes that I figured I'd give it a shot anyway.

Traffic!

That was like igniting a box of dynamite. Boom, the site was suddenly getting so many visitors that I felt very fortunate for having made it entirely static. Had there been any slow dynamic elements, with the single $3/month VPS I was using it would have been hugged to death immediately.

Upvotes kept racking up, and MixedName ended up being the third-most upvoted post on /r/internetisbeautiful this year. And because the subreddit is one of the default ones on Reddit, the link also made an appearance on Reddit's front page!

Although you had to scroll to around page three on the main page to see it, with Reddit being one of the most popular sites on the Internet, that still meant that at peak I had about 6000 concurrent visitors. I forgot to take a screenshot of that, but here's one from a little bit before.

Almost breaking the site

I would have been totally glued to the Google Analytics realtime screen, except people kept sending me so many suggestions about the site that I kept improving it as well (while terrified I'd make some mistake to break it). Continuing to work on it ended up helping me in a surprising way.

I made some small change to the site and tried to push it live. But for some reason the push wouldn't go through? I had ran out of disk space!

Once I knew about the issue, solving it was easy. The reason was the first one that came to mind: I had mistakenly kept the nginx debug logging enabled, accumulating close to ten gigabytes of logs. After deleting the log and reloading nginx settings with debug turned off, everything was fine again.

More traffic!

Now on top of all this Reddit traffic someone reposted it on Hacker News, and it quickly became the most upvoted post there as well.

The crazy part was that the additional traffic was just a little stream compared to the Reddit torrent, even though on any other day I would have been jumping for joy over it. For perspective, after the top HN post I had perhaps 6200 concurrent visitors, compared to 6000 before from Reddit alone.

Interesting how Reddit clearly helped with HN, as my post there failed originally, but with now so many people aware of the site it seemed the HN upvotes were coming in more easily as well. That probably would have been the case with Product Hunt as well, but it was too late for that as I had already burned my chance there.

Afterwards

Now the party is over. Things are more silent again — currently at 27 concurrent visitors. The current residual traffic is from mainly three sources.

Firstly, as the Reddit attention resulted in a few other sites covering MixedName, those helped Google decide to start properly indexing the site. Secondly, many people seem to have shared the site on Facebook, and those shares are still sending traffic. Lastly, the now off-frontpage posts are still bringing a little bit of visitors from HN and Reddit.

Thanks for reading

So that's my launch story. First silence. Then a roar. Now a pleasant hum. I doubt anything I'll ever build will top this one-day record: 438,136 uniques, 1,866,162 pageviews.