How to get 1000 users in 20 days

(Or, alternatively titled: How Memes Become Dreams)

Published in

The Startup

6 min readDec 16, 2018

In the beginning of 2018, I set a New Year’s Resolution for myself. Before the end of the year, I would make something — anything, really — that would be used by 1000 people.

I wanted to get comfortable with other people seeing my work, and I also wanted to hold myself accountable for creating something that people actually would use. I needed to grow up and expand past the fun projects I made just to show myself that I could. I was ready to create real world impact.

Little did I know, I would be achieving my goal with the most useless and unimpressive thing I’ve ever built.

Imagine this:

It’s late-November, it’s Thanksgiving Break, and you’re a junior in college. That means you’re three weeks behind on lectures, you have major projects due soon that you’ve barely touched, and you have a fat midterm the Tuesday after break.

At the same time, you start seeing Christmas trees filling school parking lots and you think, holy shit, it’s almost December. How?! You think back to the goals you created for yourself in January and… oh, I haven’t made anything that’s gotten 1000 users yet. You realize that in addition to procrastinating on your schoolwork, you’ve also managed to procrastinate on your personal goals. So, to redeem part of your suffering self-esteem, you decide that you’re going to work toward your New Year’s Resolution.

Creating weirdflexbutok.org

I had recently watched a YouTube video by Casey Neistat entitled “weird flex but ok.” I was convinced that this meme-phrase had potential, and surely enough, I saw the phrase used more and more on Facebook and reddit. And this was where the vision was born, ladies and gents. This is where my weird flex began.

Some SFW examples of “weird flex” in action — and its close cousin, “odd flex”

I bought the domain weirdflexbutok.org from NameCheap, because it was on sale for $12 and also because weirdflexbutok.com was taken. I sketched out my master plan and set off to work. And soon, with a few files of mostly-boilerplate HTML/CSS and JavaScript, free configuration with GitHub pages, and some Google Analytics slapped in, it was done. The first version of the site was live, and it was a sarcastic little thing that looked like this.

How to handle the business side

Sure, I was convinced I had identified a promising market in the meme economy, but now it was time to prove that the need was actually there. I posted on reddit, and specifically on the subreddit, r/WeirdFlexButOK. The post didn’t gain much traction. So, I tried again, this time on r/OddFlex. My post got over 100 upvotes, and then my site got over 300 visitors that day.

I couldn’t believe that something that simple could drive traffic over so effectively. After a few days, however, my daily user count had dropped steeply and I was struggling to identify more subreddits that I could post on.

Shifting Gears

I then received a comment that caught my attention:

The idea of “reap[ing] karma the rest of [my] life” was enticing, so I decided I would incorporate this piece of user feedback in the very organized iteration cycle of my project. I changed the content of the site to lengthier, supportive, wholesome messages, which is the site you see today.

I posted to r/wholesomememes as suggested and also a few other subreddits in the following days. Although I didn’t get reddit-famous with any of them, I noticed a definite spike in my user count every time my post gained a few dozen upvotes. For further visibility, I also posted the link to the site when tagging my friends in relevant memes on Facebook, although that didn’t work quite as well as reddit did. But soon, I reached my goal.

In fewer than twenty days, I surpassed a thousand users. It felt great to see the numbers climb, and when I finally refreshed Google Analytics one day and saw a number over 1000, I did a little dance in my dorm. But, it also felt weird and almost like a lie to say that I had really achieved my New Year’s Resolution, because, as you might’ve noticed by now, the thing I made was kinda stupid.

Real things I learned

Regardless of whether I can truly mark my goal off as “done”, I did learn a lot of valuable things throughout this strange… experiment.

1. “Users” is a terrible metric

I made my New Year’s Resolution quite naively, as now I realize that the idea of a user count is inherently meaningless. I can objectively say that I made something with over 1000 users, but who cares?

Maybe monthly active users, a stickiness ratio, or some variation thereof is better. But still, in the age of social media and virality and rapidly decreasing attention spans, the long-term sustainability and usefulness of a product of something is so much harder to gauge. But it matters so much more than “how many people can we get to visit our site or download our app?”

2. Kill your darlings

For authors, “killing your darlings” means eliminating your favorite scenes, characters, lines, etc. from a story to allow it to grow. I started with the vision of having a snarky site that you could send to your over-flexing, humble-bragging friends, but I eventually scrapped it because there was no growth in that space.

But it was for the better! Without taking into account the comment I received from a nice redditor, my “product” would be less interesting than it is today. I’ve realized the importance of integrating user feedback and maintaining an openness toward transition, even if it goes against some grand plan that I make. Nothing is predictable, whether in meme sites, startups, presidential elections, or anything else.

3. The Internet is for selling things

That, and entertainment. But who says you can’t do both at the same time? My foray into publicity for the site made me realize that the best ads are the ones that don’t seem like ads.

For example, maybe my objective for writing this article was to get to 2000 users on weirdflexbutok.org! You’ll have to trust me that it’s not, but regardless, this experience has truly shown me the rampant duplicity of the Internet. Everything exists for a reason… or more than one reason. The selling power of the Internet should not be underestimated, and it’s right there for you to harness.

That’s it!

Thanks for reading! Hope you now have the inspiration to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions in the strangest ways possible.