Hacker News Reader

Comment by whiplashoo | Hacker News Reader

I run https://mapchart.net which is a map chart creation tool. You can quickly create a map chart of World, USA, UK, Europe and more with custom colors and descriptions.

It is completely free to use and my only source of income are Adsense ads on the homepage and some sparse donations. Since May, when the site was featured on the front page of Reddit, my audience has increased with a steady rate, along with my ad revenue (almost $500 last month).

I don't really do anything maintenance-wise, except for answering questions from my users. I work on it from time to time, mainly adding new features or new country/regions maps, and I still enjoy it, as it was my first real programming project (I actually submitted it as a final project for EdX's CS50x course!).

View on HN

Great site, I have used it in the past to create a USA states map for a presentation. Did you run any Ad campaigns to get it high places in SERP?

Great example. How long have you been running it? How did you get on the front page of Reddit?

I started it on December 2014, with a pretty ugly interface and only three maps available (World, USA and Europe).

I already had some success on Reddit, where I created interesting map charts with it (like religiosity by US state, most popular browser by country,etc.) and shared the link to the site in the comment. This got me many users that would either come directly from the Reddit post or see another map somewhere and google my site.

The big spike came last May, when I shared it on /r/InternetIsBeautiful (https://www.reddit.com/r/InternetIsBeautiful/comments/4jcadt...) , which is a specific subreddit for internet tools and single-purpose website, and it propelled to the front page.

Awesome. I love your "dogfooding" marketing strategy. Very smart.

I had to google that, but yes, spot-on!

Neat. How did you come up with the idea for this?

I was hooked up with front end development at the time (simple things, the site is still plain HTML/CSS and jQuery) and I wanted to create a simple webpage as a final project. At the same time, I saw an election prediction map for my country, Greece, and tried to find a way to make one for myself, but could not find any tool for it. Thus, I spent some time creating the first map chart page for Greece and then extended it to the World, USA and Europe maps (and more; there are now almost 22 different maps).

The competition in this niche is either stale (old sites that don't have a modern interface and/or many options) or premium services (whole suites of applications that cover a range of options), so it is currently the #1 Google Search result for queries like 'create my own map', 'make a world map', 'custom USA map' etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com