The story of Hoodmaps.com

Original: Building a startup in public: from the first line of code to the frontpage of Reddit

Intro

If you are living in a big city or traveled a bunch, but haven't visited Hoodmaps.com. You should have a look at it first. It will probably give you a few laughs.

The maker of the website, Pieter Levels, chronicled the process from building to reaching a hype in only a few months, plus some unexpected troubles he encountered. What is especially interesting is the launching/marketing part, which most technical makers lack the experience or tend to ignore.

Highlights

First Pieter had a frustration:

... every time I travel to a new place it’s hard to figure out which parts of the city to go.

Later he made a half-jokingly map for Amsterdam. And then (actually 2 years later) he decided to scale this idea into a website.

Once he built the first version, he used his existing audience from NomadList, a website giving people ideas about being a digital nomad, as the earliest seed users. (Obviously, having well-received projects helps the following ones.)

This gave it some basic early traction, and more importantly would pre-fill the data over a few months. P.S. whenever you have a previous product WITH traction that you can use to give your new product traction, do it!

Before hype and fame, you first got spam 😂

I tried reCAPTCHA, but it would clog up the interface too much. So I wrote my own cryptography magic in JS. It simply makes sure it’s actually a human who is writing it based on many human cues. It’d be hacked within minutes if I was Facebook, but since I’m just a small site nobody really cares.

The domain name is always a pain.

When I launched Nomad List as nomadlist.io in 2014, I had to negotiate down nomadlist.com from $8,000 to $2,000! It took ages and was still a lot of money. So, whatever, I’ll pay.

Preparing Launch!

The launch is THE most important thing. In some ways, it’s more important than the product. You can have an average product with a great launch and everyone will be talking about it.

Hmm... interesting. But I got the point. An official Launch gives you a legit reason to do some above-the-average marketing stunts. So why not take the advantage of it.

Launch can be intense:

Product Hunt’s vibe is happy, positive, a bit marketing-y. So let’s adapt to that.

I submitted on Sunday at 1 minute past midnight. As that’s the best time to launch. The ranking is then refreshed and you have most odds to reach the top of the charts. Having a good start in the top of Product Hunt’s ranks is half the work, the other half is maintaining it for the next 23 hours. Yes, this means I didn’t sleep for about 36 hours. Sacrifice.

I quickly jumped into the comments section to introduce the product, tell its story and immediately answer any questions (and fix bugs) that people commented on.

And different platforms have different expectations.

Hacker News’ vibe is distinctly sceptical, intellectual and highly allergic to marketing and getting sold to.

Reddit also hates sales tactics and is highly critical of your product. If what you’re posting has ANY bugs or doesn’t work as expected, it will NOT get upvoted but instead get DESTROYED in the comments section. Reddit is a spoiled child, it gets the best content on the web, and it’s all competing for the frontpage.

Launching to Reddit is notoriously hard. It. Has. To. Be. Perfect.

After reaching Reddit's front page, his server started crashing.

Do you know the secret to getting to Reddit’s frontpage? Keeping your server up. 99% of sites can’t keep their server up when Reddit floods them. Redditors know this because they’ll see a site on top of a subreddit and then nothing happens when they click the link. They’ll just skip it (they’re used to sites crashing cause of the “Reddit effect”), and won’t upvote it.

His fix is gracefully downgrading the service, which is very practical.

We now had 1,000 HTML files and changed the server config (NGINX) to load the HTML instead of the PHP. This has severe limitations because your content can’t be dynamic anymore. In my case, whatever people would draw on the maps now would be saved but not shown up on the city page as the page was static. But who cares. You can temporarily decrease functionality if it means keeping the page up!

Went fully static now, AJAX requests disabled, all writes disabled, to keep server up for awhile

Next stop: 4Chan

Of course, any site you make where anyone can post anonymously, 4chan loves

Luckily, my spam filters worked. But some racist stuff showed up. So I added this word list which instantly banned people who used them

If you write racist stuff on https://t.co/WFo1SUwkzU, it's replaced by 🐱 Kittens and you're made to watch a video that brings you euphoria pic.twitter.com/ZQa0lGorHy — Pietz @ 🇺🇸 (@levelsio) July 19, 2017

Oh, this is so smart. Be playful even when people are not nice. It avoids provoking the trolls.

In the end, he got 200,000 people to visit the website in 2 weeks.

Of those 200,000 people, about 29,566 (or 7%) actually interacted and drew on the map.

Despite the hype, the author had a hard time finding any way to monetize the website. He had tried selling posters, ads, and even laminated cardboard maps, but no luck.

I’d prefer finding a business model that’s software-based here. Selling the data would be cool, but I have no idea where to even start.

In the end, he summarised:

For now it’s looking good. Generally there’s 25 to 75 people on the site at any moment and it’s been 2 weeks!

The fun part of building it in public was that with every point where I was stuck I had 100 people watching with me to help solve a problem. It also made me accountable, I couldn’t slack off, there was people watching me build.

Closing Comments

• Hoodmap.com doesn't earn any money for Pieter directly, but it's fine. First, he only spent a limited amount of time and then moved on to others. Second, the project gained him a lot of social capital (or say a big audience). It helps later projects: writing a book, online recruiting, and so on.
• I never used 4chan and didn't spend a lot of time on the other three platforms, either. Knowing how different online communities work is useful if you want to market your product. It's nice to see the summary from someone with first-hand experience.

Bonus

Chris wrote a blog post talking about the reasons why Pieter became a very successful maker: https://blog.kowalczyk.info. There is also a list of the projects Pieter had done so far. This guy is prolific!