Getting our first 1000 users in one day

December 10, 2020

Yesterday we launched Typefully, a write-only interface for Twitter, after weeks of work and refinement. I documented the whole story on Twitter @frankdilo.

Not much deep work happened on launch day and for good reasons. It was a bigger launch than Mailbrew's.

Here the numbers:

  • 16,400 Pageviews
  • 1,432 Signups
  • 1,843 Drafts created
  • 256 Threads published
  • $155 Revenue (more on this at the end).

The traffic breakdown reveals what happened:

  • Hacker News: 6.3k
  • Twitter: 2.1k
  • ProductHunt: 1.9k

Yeah, we finally managed to hit the Hacker News frontpage.

The perfect formula was:

  • interesting product
  • no-bullshit title
  • sparking a controversial discussion in the comments.

When it comes to Twitter, we have been building a following there for some time, so it was a matter of publishing the right tweet, at the right time, and getting the right people to retweet it.

For Product Hunt, we partnered with our friend Chris. His followers got a notification when he hunted us, but we also did our part and emailed our lists. That helped to get fast on the front page and to kickstart the discussion.

Once we were in front of enough people, the product did the rest.

Servers did hold up without a sweat.

It's crazy what you can do these days with a couple of well-configured dynos on Heroku and a Django app! We peaked at 8 RPS when we hit the HN frontpage.

Typefully was born as Fabrizio's personal side-project. I jumped in to make the editor crazy-fast, and write the server-side code. When Ali helped us refine positioning and copy, we knew we had a winner and promoted it to an official Mailbrew project.

Plans for the future? Implement all the great feature requests we got, and monetize this thing.

We launched with a tip-jar system where people could become patrons by tipping us, but with $150 earned after a crazy launch day like this, it's clear that this is not going to pay the bills.

We are thinking of adding some paid features. What's free is gonna stay free though, because this was first and foremost a labor of love.