1 million users 🥳
Hey everyone!
A few days ago my project volt.fm hit one million users!
This is a huge milestone for the small project that I started 16 months ago.
Background
I got the idea to build volt.fm right after Spotify Wrapped was released two years ago. I was really curious to know what my friends’ stats were and I wanted to show off my stats to them.
So I thought maybe I could create a website that gives people a nice public page that shows their top artists/songs/genres along with their playlists, etc.
Challenges
Scaling to this number of users has been quite challenging. I've had to re-architecture the website a few times to make sure it can handle the large number of users signing up every day.
In the beginning, it didn't even have a database (other than for authenticating users). It just fetched the data from the Spotify API and displayed them. But now its database is 450 GB and grows by 10 GB every 2-3 days.
Tech Stack
My stack is NodeJS/Express/TypeScript/React/Tailwind CSS. I use Postgres as my database and RabbitMQ as my message broker.
Everything runs inside docker on a few DigitalOcean droplets.
Marketing
My biggest channel for acquiring new users has been word of mouth. People love to show off their taste in music, so they share their stats on social media any time they can. This has caused volt.fm to go viral on Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok numerous times.
What's Next?
My goal is to continue giving people more detailed insight into their listening habits and to help them discover new music.
Advertise in the Newsletter
Every month, I send an email to all the users and report their stats. If you have a music-related product/service and would like to promote it to this large community of music lovers, let me know.
Follow me on Twitter
You can read my tweets on building volt.fm (and a few other projects) at twitter.com/soheilpro
Happy to answer any questions.
First of all congratulations. Can I ask how much you pay for hosting per month? And if you experienced downtime with DigitalOcean?
yeah i like to know this also
Congrats on your success! How are you planning to avoid becoming a feature on Spotify? My biggest fear, if I were you, is Spotify making Wrapped available year round, which would limit your value prop. And this would consequently make it much harder to keep users on the platform.
Oh that's a lot of users! Very nice! Congratz!
congratulation on your success. definitely, it is a huge growth
Congrats!
Congratulations on this achievement, @soheilpro.
Do you mind explaining some details on the responsibility of RabbitMQ in your architecture?
Awesome! I wonder if this is the sort of thing Spotify would try to acquire 🤔
Love the idea. Plus, marketing through word of mouth and making your product go viral is what any indie hacker could dream of !!
Great article. Congratulations for reaching your milestone!
Great Soheli!!!!
Nice achievement!
450GB for 1 million users sounds like a lot. What do you store?
Congratulations! 🥳
Incredible milestone! Followed on Twitter.
great progress!
I love how its goes viral and markets itself really. I should do something viral on my next project.
I love Volt! It's always fun to see what I'm mostly listening to.
Congrats 🙏
Huh, cool to see that its possible to create products that don't even have functioning back-ends and users don't even mind. How long did it take you to build out the MVP?
I've looked into the Spotify API and I've been surprised by how confusing it can be. Their documentation doesn't seem well updated and for a company that is so successful one would think they'd invest time into making their API, and those their data, more useable by indie-dev/professional developers.
It has a functioning backend that stores 450gb of data.
@soheilpro this is awesome! Congrats.
Imagine all of those sign ups in front of you.
Your next steps, is there a limit you want to get to? Or an exit strategy?
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This comment was deleted a year ago.
wondering the same thing. This sounds expensive.
If you look at the website, it's explained that he sells ad placement in the monthly stats recap he sends to the users.
It the same model as the hustle basically. Create great content or value and then sell ad space to businesses.
I can see why its been done like that. If you asked the users if they wanted to pay around $2 or $3 per months for such a service, you ll probably get a big NO from them.