Yout: Chapter 2, What is this, a tutorial for ants?
You could argue I brought this on myself. I cried about what I thought was a lot of visitors. Then again I am human, which means I was wrong. It was not a lot of visitors, visitors wasn’t the problem. It was how many actions visitors on the site were doing that was even more devastating.
I dreamed of being in the position I’m in. A over night viral success, one day waking up and thousands of people are seeing your work. Only took 16 years of failures. Launched on Dec 5th, my 30th birthday. You can read about that in Chapter 1. But that was launch day and this is the Internet so something posted yesterday is old, something 3 months old is antiquated.
This summarizes the past two months.
To put this into perspective let me explain what’s going on in the background.
On Dec 6th when Yout went to #1 on Product Hunt, it did 12,093 page views, think of that as a rough estimate of conversions.
Why is that a big deal? Well, transcoding on the fly is a high CPU bound and io bound task, which means it scales different than most apps. I have this obsession with user experience. Making sure that when some one uses something I made they talk well about it, and if they don’t that they let me know so I can try and make it right. It might come from the fact that I spent some time working with my dad after college. He bullet proofs car’s for a living. If a client isn’t happy as well as safe, they potentially die.
Now you might say, “Dude, this is converting to Mp3’s, not stopping bullets” and you would be right. But our past shapes our present.
When you have to stop bullets, you save a life. Business is built on relationships, human relationships. and that sort of bond is heart wrenching when you remember trying to tell a customer “You really should go with a level 4 or 5 since the people that might be shooting at you wont be using handguns, they will be using machine guns, and level 3 doesn’t stop machine guns”
There is no next time you see that customer. You see his son next time, when he comes in and asks if there is something higher than a level 5.
Clearly that user experience was fatal.
Fatal user experiences lead to loss of customers, or at least humor in light of death. And when your servers are on fire, you can’t put them out because that will stop them from working when you need them working the most.
So how does one scale? Simple, be rich.
Unfortunately I don’t have that liberty.
To go from a hosting bill of $100 a month to $1k not being near enough and only 100,000 page views, you break down. Thinking this is going viral and its only been a little over a month since you launched. Even though its now only ten times as big as when you launched. You then fear that your costs are going to go up by that factor too for each level of page views.
Now I could of simply thrown more hardware twords the scaling issue and been hunky dory, maybe. Except that hardware costs money, and yield is blocking function in python. Especially when you have $450 to your name because you where able to sell a domain to some domain investor in China. If not you would have $0.
Thankfully my mother at this point didn’t judge too much on the fact that she has a 30 year old, college graduate son who is completely broke, behind on his student load payments, and crashing in her extra room. Then again she always did promise me a roof over my head. And I fully believe she thinks I’m insane working on this “website that does what?”
Although even that hurts as if she can’t rent out that room she has to carry the mortgage payment. And here I had grandeurs dreams of paying off her mortgage.
So I did what any sane individual would do. Before I even though of how I was going to cover the server bills, I reached out to anyone who would listen in order to figure out why no matter how many servers I was adding things kept crashing. Just so happens some one did. His first piece of advice “You really should move away from python for this specific task”
I took it as if was someone telling me “So, you want to fix your problem? Well you know English, simply learn Vietnamese and defend your case in Vietnamese against the supreme court, hows tomorrow sound?” Trời oi.
Now most people would have you believe that in those moments of shear and dire stress that you prevail as a human. I mean fuck I finished a Ironman, I can surmount anything.
Nope, you break.
It’s very dificult to pinpoint the reason you break in hindsight. But just like when I did the Ironman, when I had 5km to go. I stopped. I couldn’t anymore. I was done. I still get emotional thinking of that exact moment. I didn’t even really train for it, but then I had something magical happen. A lawyer from Argentina walked by, because you are walking 15 hours in, and he said “que tal” now I had the good fortune of knowing Spanish. In that split second my brain switched from English to Spanish. The wallowing, the self pitty, the fear, the insurmountable failure, didn’t seem inevitable.
Sometimes it’s as simple as that, other times its not. Everyone needs a little push sometimes and it comes from the most unexpected places. Especially when you are in shock.
Just so happens the engineer I reached out too must of felt my stress or simply understood I was a lost cause.
He helped me, not only walk through the entire issue step by step, but helped port my code to another language. The site started working well, sort of.
Now instead of it crashing every 5 minutes, it was only crashing every hour. Progress! As I hacked away learning golang trying to fix issues, I slowly became more comfortable in it, another problem came. Server bills where due.
But as luck would have it, a server crashed, and it wasn’t my fault! What server you ask? The load balancer. Now as a programmer you typically don’t deal with problems until you experience them. Some how when I was trying to load balance my servers I set off a automatic spam filter due to the volume of requests or something and I got locked out of my server and it got taken off line. I didn’t have a backup because who thinks access to their load balancer is going to be blocked?
I got credited my month’s bill for that downtime till they resolved the issue.
Reality set in, I realized I needed to pay these server bills. I haven’t been sleeping much. I finally broke down and put up some hosting referral to drop hosting fee’s, and came up with a monetization strategy.
In the downtime of servers not crashing, me learning go, learning system administration, trying to juggle every aspect of this with little to no sleep, selling domains in hopes to be able to buy a dozen eggs because I’m too stubborn or stupid to litter the site with ads, I decided to make a gif.
Mainly because I was sick and tired of having to explain why Yout was awesome.
If a picture was worth a thousand words. Then a gif.. Well that’s worth 3 million views (and counting).
It went to #1 on imgur.
The title “So simple”
The top comment?
“What is this, a tutorial for ants?”
The one that made me laugh?
“Kids today won’t understand what it was like to give your computer AIDS for free music”
That gif lead to what I would consider a sort of tipping point in terms of visitors and traction. Over the next few days that GIF started getting shared on the internet, and at one point my site climaxed with 330,000 sessions with 1.9 million page views that day.
It let off over the next few weeks since my servers where still on fire. And I now had bugs I never dreamt off. From server bugs, sub-processes, to everything breaking that could. But after the fire, Yout stabilized.
And well, Google? Yeah they still seems to hate me
So now the work beings of actually trying to grow this and make it something that makes the internet a more awesome place.
If you enjoyed this, please press the heart below. And if you hated this? At least share Yout, and then we can be in heated agreement.
