How to get 1000 users in 20 days

(Or, alternatively titled: How Memes Become Dreams)

In the beginning of 2018, I set a New Year’s Resolution for myself. Before the end of the year, I would make something — anything, really — that would be used by 1000 people.

I wanted to get comfortable with other people seeing my work, and I also wanted to hold myself accountable for creating something that people actually would use. I needed to grow up and expand past the fun projects I made just to show myself that I could. I was ready to create real world impact.

Little did I know, I would be achieving my goal with the most useless and unimpressive thing I’ve ever built.

It’s late-November, it’s Thanksgiving Break, and you’re a junior in college. That means you’re three weeks behind on lectures, you have major projects due soon that you’ve barely touched, and you have a fat midterm the Tuesday after break.

At the same time, you start seeing Christmas trees filling school parking lots and you think, holy shit, it’s almost December. How?! You think back to the goals you created for yourself in January and… oh, I haven’t made anything that’s gotten 1000 users yet. You realize that in addition to procrastinating on your schoolwork, you’ve also managed to procrastinate on your personal goals. So, to redeem part of your suffering self-esteem, you decide that you’re going to work toward your New Year’s Resolution.

Sure, I was convinced I had identified a promising market in the meme economy, but now it was time to prove that the need was actually there. I posted on reddit, and specifically on the subreddit, r/WeirdFlexButOK. The post didn’t gain much traction. So, I tried again, this time on r/OddFlex. My post got over 100 upvotes, and then my site got over 300 visitors that day.

I couldn’t believe that something that simple could drive traffic over so effectively. After a few days, however, my daily user count had dropped steeply and I was struggling to identify more subreddits that I could post on.

I then received a comment that caught my attention:

I posted to r/wholesomememes as suggested and also a few other subreddits in the following days. Although I didn’t get reddit-famous with any of them, I noticed a definite spike in my user count every time my post gained a few dozen upvotes. For further visibility, I also posted the link to the site when tagging my friends in relevant memes on Facebook, although that didn’t work quite as well as reddit did. But soon, I reached my goal.

In fewer than twenty days, I surpassed a thousand users. It felt great to see the numbers climb, and when I finally refreshed Google Analytics one day and saw a number over 1000, I did a little dance in my dorm. But, it also felt weird and almost like a lie to say that I had really achieved my New Year’s Resolution, because, as you might’ve noticed by now, the thing I made was kinda stupid.

Regardless of whether I can truly mark my goal off as “done”, I did learn a lot of valuable things throughout this strange… experiment.

I made my New Year’s Resolution quite naively, as now I realize that the idea of a user count is inherently meaningless. I can objectively say that I made something with over 1000 users, but who cares?

Maybe monthly active users, a stickiness ratio, or some variation thereof is better. But still, in the age of social media and virality and rapidly decreasing attention spans, the long-term sustainability and usefulness of a product of something is so much harder to gauge. But it matters so much more than “how many people can we get to visit our site or download our app?”

But it was for the better! Without taking into account the comment I received from a nice redditor, my “product” would be less interesting than it is today. I’ve realized the importance of integrating user feedback and maintaining an openness toward transition, even if it goes against some grand plan that I make. Nothing is predictable, whether in meme sites, startups, presidential elections, or anything else.

That, and entertainment. But who says you can’t do both at the same time? My foray into publicity for the site made me realize that the best ads are the ones that don’t seem like ads.

Thanks for reading! Hope you now have the inspiration to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions in the strangest ways possible.

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