To hell with everything or how to get 100k views in 3 hours of work

Background

I often hear from my friends that they have a super million dollar startup idea. Only this never comes to implementation. Perhaps I would also have done nothing useful, but! Brenson’s book “To hell with everything - take it and do it” pushed me to make a small but useful resource.

I live in Dnepropetrovsk. Everything would be fine, but most people here speak neither Russian nor Ukrainian - surzhik. “That’s probably why they’re talking so that it’s impossible to understand anything.” And once, riding in a minibus, I thought: “Why don’t I make a service in which I can enter the correct and incorrect spellings of Ukrainian words”. To start the implementation, a magic pendal was needed. They became the book of Branson.

Rails g scaffold

The application framework was made on ruby ​​on rails 3, so as not to waste time on govnokoding on php and writing pure sql. I added the first 20 words, but I thought that this number would not be enough to make the resource popular. I found an html page with 1500 words, imported it into csv, and then into sql. It only remained to buy a domain, and create an account on heroku. A couple more actions: git push, heroku db: push, and the resource became available under the name pravylno.com.ua .

Profit?

On the first day, friends and acquaintances learned about the resource. But it was thought that this was not enough for the resource to become really popular. I sent the link to top bloggers and visited resources. And he went to Prague.

A week there were spinning 100 users a day. Fame came unexpectedly - Ibigdan posted a link in his LJ. Many letters of thanks, suggestions and ideas came. Particularly zealous threatened to create an analogue with Ajax and other web 2.0 features.

Two months later, watcher.com.ua woke up, from where Ibigdan again posted a link to LiveJournal.
In total, in 3 hours of my work, the resource received one hundred thousand views, without any investment in advertising, PR, SEO etc.

To hell with everything, take it and do it.
Posted by Eugene Russkikh