alt Hacker NewsThis is really beautiful. One of the most moving things I've seen in weeks. The website and the comments and just the idea of memorial benches.
I'm very surprised it was able to get this much traction despite being launched only 8 years ago, long after the heyday of these sort of sites. How'd you do it?
Built it and they will come.
OK, it was a mixture of things. I told my friends about it and they were sufficiently nerdy to try it out.
I responded to early feedback - specifically about creating a leaderboard. Originally it was all anonymous but people wanted to see how well they'd done.
My wife and I gave an interview to a local BBC radio station which gave it a little bump. Similarly, when it is mentioned on reddit and other sites we pop up and talk about it.
It was also picked up by a couple of academic papers, which gave it a bit of credibility. As did our recent integration with OpenStreetMap.
There's a far amount of schema.org metadata which probably helps with SEO.
But, other than that, who knows? I've had plenty of projects which didn't do as well. Sometimes the Web rewards nice things.