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Comment by 0nly1ife | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I'm an indie Facebook developer. My most popular app has over 8 million monthly uniques and 350 million pageviews. I didn't realize how substantial said traffic was until reading this article. I scaled my app to that size on my own over the course of 12 months. I know of other FB devs who scaled bigger apps working solo. If average hackers like us can do it, anyone can. The hard part is building a popular app. Articles about scaling are a means for founders to brag about their success without giving away useful information about what made their app popular in the first place.

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Alexis Ohanian has talked about what made Reddit successful many times. Steve Huffman is talking about the technical side of things. It doesn't come off as bragging to me at all.

Bragging is the wrong word, but it is the first that came to mind. And I was excited to brag about the size of my app when I first read his article.

I just think we spend too much time talking about scaling and not enough time discussing virality.

Scalability stories are generally interesting, as they're about solving problems that out-of-the-box commercial software doesn't. They're interesting to hackers, not all of whom are entrepreneurs.

If you'd like to share a story, however, on using statistical techniques to measure and act on virality, doing multi-variate testing, et al that would be very interesting.

Care to blog about your experiences?

Different application have different scalability characteristics (how much can be cached? how much integration is there?). A certain number may look very impressive for one sort of application, but not so impressive for another.

E.g., some of Yahoo's non-search properties receive tremendous traffic but their scalability stories (while still requiring a great amount of difficult engineering work) aren't as interesting as those of Facebook or other Yahoo properties e.g., Search, Flickr.

Wow, it sounds like your app is extremely popular - that sounds like huge traffic, especially for "scaling to that size in 12 months". Right? I am naive, or is this "fairly common" with decent Facebook games?

What is your application? Are you profitable? Very profitable? (Oh god I hope you are very profitable, or some of my apps are screwed - but then again I guess it really depends on the business model and usage characteristics)

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