This morning I've submitted our project to HN.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099054<p>Got pretty helpful feedback. But that wasn't the only thing.<p>478 people requested invite out of 755. 63% conversion rate. Almost 9K unique visitor visited our website. At some point in the morning I was seeing 400+ active users on the website. Unbelievable. 35 people registered without telling them how to register. ( You cannot register directly, there is only a login form - but they figured out a way :)
http://imgur.com/Kbf9J<p>6K people visited directly from Hacker News, 1K from Twitter ( I guess Popular Hacker News post )<p>I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up, but that was not the problem. I wasn't ready for it! Stuck on my chair from 08:00 am till 02:00 pm. I am still feeling anxious.<p>People tweeted about us without using our application. https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/followords (even in Spanish)<p>Today another lesson learnt: So if you are working on a project. Release it. Ship it. Let people tell you how much your project, website or tagline sucks. Embrace it. Think about it, thank them and move on.<p>I need some sleep, tomorrow is another great day.
Thank you all for your contributions.
"I was afraid that Nginx might not hold up"<p>Seeing articles get nuked by a sudden spike in traffic tends to give one unrealistic assumptions about what servers can handle. Most can take quite a bit if you're serving mostly static content.
I didn't see it this morning, but seeing this now and just signed up for the beta. I'm <i>still</i> not entirely sure what it does, even after reading the linked thread, but I try to do whatever I can to support all the 'Show HN' threads, so even if it sucks, you've got my registration (and I'm not presuming that it will suck.)<p>Nginx is almost certainly not going to be your failing piont, and can certainly scale to beyond 400+ active users, assuming that it's configured correctly and on decent hardware. Your database could crash, or one questionable join could tear the whole thing down, but Nginx is probably the least likely component in your stack to fail.<p>As for the lesson learned, that's spot on, and one that I waffle on every now and again, even though I've done it and know it to be canon.<p>Best of luck. It's a space I've got a lot of experience in, and 'interestingness' vs. 'importance' isn't really gotten <i>right</i> anywhere yet. Hopefully you've nailed it.