My site went viral on Reddit last month and I had no idea 🤦

Well technically it’s not my site anymore, but I built it and ran it for the past 8 months or so. Here’s the backstory:

Backstory

About 9 months ago on July 4th, 2019, I made my first ever post on ProductHunt — ReadShitFaster, which was a speed-reading web-app — and you could probably tell that by its name 😉.

I check back a few hours later — only a couple upvotes, I really didn’t think much was going to come out of it, especially since there were other sites like it, so I went to bed.

I woke up the next morning and it was featured and in the #5 spot, eventually working its way up to the #2 spot throughout the day (and now has nearly 500 upvotes)! I saw it being shared around on Twitter & Facebook — even a few technology websites like Lifehacker & Gizmodo picked up on it which was crazy!

All in all it had gathered about 10k unique visitors that day alone — not too shabby for only a few hours of work 🙂 I later released a Chrome extension for it and added keyboard strokes, but that was really about all I felt like doing. So I left it at that.

Over the next few months, it started to die down (as expected), but would still get anywhere from 10–200 unique users on any given day.

Now that you’re up to speed —

Someone had reached out to me a couple weeks ago asking to buy the site off of me. I didn’t really care to update it or add any more features as I wasn’t generating any sort of income off of it (not that it was even the point), but I still did want to keep it online for the hundred or so people that continued to use it regularly. I’ve never felt compelled enough to sell anything I’ve ever made, yet I stupidly agreed on impulse here namely because I wouldn’t have to continue paying to keep it online with no return.

However, I still had access to the site’s analytics so I randomly decided to check it out today and saw this…😮

I figured that somebody with a large following must’ve just shared it somewhere, but luckily I had also been tracking stats through Google Analytics and did a bit of digging and was eventually able to figure out where exactly all this traffic came from: this Reddit post garnering almost 9k upvotes!

To this day, I still don’t really know why people use it knowing that there are superb alternatives out there. I guess people were just attached to the name over the app itself 🤷‍♂ 😂.

If I sound a bit salty, it’s because I am. I’ve never had much luck on Reddit myself, but it’s amazing to see how much a single reddit post can do and how much fuel it can add to a dying fire.

But I’m not mad about any of this at all either — I’m just super stoked knowing that over 100,000 people from around the world have used a site that I just made for fun out of boredom.

I do have my regrets though. There’s a couple things that I wish I had done differently: 1) acknowledge the full potential that this had as a service and 2) figure out how to effectively monetize it without jeopardizing its existing user-base. It just never felt right in my mind to charge people for anything I’ve built as I’ve developed this weird mentality that “money is the root of all evil” and vowed to make anything I build available for free. But I’ve come to realize that “free” doesn’t pay the bills, money does 😉

I also still get frequent DMs on Twitter/Reddit asking for “xyz” features. I’m pretty tempted to make a better and even more practical version now considering that I’ve got a lot of time on my hands and receiving kind messages like these are pretty motivating 😃

But regardless, if there’s anything I’ve learned today, it’s that you should never be shortsighted and let go of your project if it still has some sort of potential (and even if you’re bored of it). I learned that the hard way.

And don’t rub salt on the wound like this guy 😭

Cheers,

Feel free to check out other projects that I’m currently working on.