Ask HN: I built a side project. How do I get people to use it?

4 points

5 years ago

At the start of the pandemic, my girlfriend and I decided to work on a side project to keep ourselves busy. We ended up creating https://www.mynamefairy.com/. It's like a tinder for names. It's been a fun project to work on, and its accomplished the technical growth goals that I wanted to get out of it (I learned how to do more modern css, how to setup a FE build with webpack, some vue.js, how to dockerize and deploy a django application, how to use postgres instead of MySQL), but at this point it's been released for over a year and gets maybe 1-2 people a day. Those people are spending time on the site (avg time is 4 minutes, some spend up to 30-40 mins per session), but there just aren't very many of them.

I'm not so much interested in trying to monetize it (although that would certainly be nice), but it'd be great if we could get more people using it. I've shared it on a few of subreddits. (r/django[1], r/python[2], and r/webdev[3]). When doing so, I tried to balance the self promotion aspect with information about which classes I took and found useful, tools I worked with, and various lessons along the way. Those posts did provide a nice little bump for about a week or so, but traffic dropped again afterwards. At this point we're trying to brainstorm what would be the best use of our energies to try and get more people using the site.

Some ideas we've had: * Focus more on SEO. If I google "tinder for names", we don't even show up. A lighthouse test gives us 100%, but clearly that's not a good enough benchmark for how discoverable we are. We've even thought about paying some SEO expert to help, but so many of the services we find seem scammy. * Try and find more parenting/expecting mom forums online and posting there. * Trying to find places around town we could leave flyers (we're based in Amsterdam). * Just keep on hammering away at features to try and make the site more useful/compelling.

Has anyone else faced a similar quandary and, if so, how did you go about getting more exposure for your project? It's still just a hobby, but we're willing to pay a bit of money if it helped us get some traffic and momentum on it again.

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/kync31/side_project_i_built_using_django_and_what_i/ 2: https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/kz8uxu/side_project_i_built_using_django_a_tinder_for/ 3: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/l3dior/side_project_i_built_using_django_a_tinder_for/

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