How we got from "Crickets Chirping" to 60 server rpms in 5 months

We just got covered on ProductHunt. I think this is the perfect time to talk about our story of how we got from "Crickets chirping" to an app where 1000s of users now add a new idea and create projects out of them every second.

We launched germ.io exactly 5 months back. We built a brilliant scalable API - client architecture, and launched our grand vision of helping you bring your ideas to execution in style. We wrote some cool posts, showed off our product and got our first 100 users in a matter of days.

And then, nothing happened. For days, we'd have almost no activity on our usage analytics tools - except the stuff we were doing ourselves. If user love was water, we were standing dehydrated in the middle of the Sahara, running from one mirage to the next.

And if that weren't enough, here we were trying to architect a brilliant scalable product that solved one of mankind's biggest problems, and apps that let you message a "Yo!" were making the news.

We continued building out our product exactly as we planned. Often, we had to overcome the urge to just hack our way through with a crappy back-end - subsisting on five or six users a day who gave us the occasional love.

From there, we closed last month at slightly over 450 weekly active users who put in over 60,000 ideas across 5000 projects. Great numbers, but we just kept going.

Today, we went out for lunch to the same crappy place we go to every day right outside our code dungeon. I looked into our stats on my phone while we ordered and HOLY WHAT THE!! We had over 200 new active users over just the past hour!

One of our early users had shared our product on ProductHunt, and the love had gone (and rather continues to go) viral. By 8am EDT, we had close to 90 upvotes on our story. And we've been seeing 60 requests firing off our servers EVERY MINUTE. That's 1 idea, comment or project being added on germ.io every single second for the past 10 hours.

The feeling of seeing thousands of users realize value in 5 months of your blood and sweat is just unbelievable... Something I really wish every single startup has very very soon...

So what did we learn today? Keep pushing, do the right thing, and stick to your core beliefs no matter how much the world tries to convince you otherwise. You never know which random call in the middle of your lunch break could change your world!