Newsletter #32 - To 24,000 visitors and beyond!

TLDR:

​RandomAirport reached 24,000 visitors in 28 days.

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2 weeks ago, on Wednesday evening April 12, I open my RandomAirport Google Analytics, to show my spouse how it works.

To my astonishment, I had 29 users in last 30 minutes.

That is a lot more than the 3 or 4 I had on average since the two weeks I launched on Hackernews.

Traffic was coming mostly from Argentina.

The funny thing is, I don't know where it came from, and I'll probably never find out.

It seems the main channel was email, but which email?

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Then, four days later, Sunday evening April 16, another burst of traffic. 155 users in last 30 minutes.

This time, the source was Substack.

(it took a lot of digging in the Google Console to figure this out).

I Googled if I could find the newsletter.

I checked Substack's search function.

I submitted a ticket to Substack

But still, I don't know which newsletter mentioned my website.

(Substack replied after two weeks asking if I still wanted this ticket to be solved. I said "yes").

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It triggered my vanity, I wanted to know who was talking about my website.

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Then on Monday April 17, the floodgates really opened.

RandomAirport got featured in Morning Brew, a newsletter with 6 million subscribers according to Google.

Traffic starts really jumping:

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At this point, I'm feeling excitement, anxiety and proudness in a weird mix.

It's also causing a type of stress. A kind of "responsibility" to make sure these visitors have a good experience.

But there is not much I can do to impact their experience, except hoping the site doesn't go down. And adding a feedback form. Capture the feedback while it's hot!

I remain in this state of high excitement until Wednesday morning.

Then the traffic falls back to a handful of users per 30 minutes.

I can breath again.

I just realise my hobby project had 24,000 visitors in one month

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Actions

The feedback form keeps collecting ideas. I start steadily working through them.

I built my app pretty haphazard, and it does 2 API calls to Google Maps while it should need only one. Due to that, I again am incurring costs, but not 1,200 USD like last month, but 12 USD up to now.

I'm keeping adding airports. I'm also trying to enable keyboard controls (though not working on Safari yet somehow). It now doesn't show duplicates anymore. And I want to hide the map. The rest is backend work

Side-note 1

Overnight, I got an email from Google Cloud again. Having incurred 1,200 USD in costs on my previous peak, I was afraid something went wrong again.

On the contrary, it was a message telling me they'll reimburse me for that previous incident.

Every Google Cloud email still makes my heart jump a little.

Side-note 2

I also almost bumped into the daily quota I've set for myself after that previous costly incident. Fulminating about Google again: once again no warning emails when I almost reached it :(

Luckily I didn't!

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Side-note 3

It's great to document these things on Twitter so I can easily write a newsletter about it later!

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