Plug on Food Now!

Yesterday, as I was working, I found myself interrupted by an email notification.  Someone had submitted new feedback using the KitchenPC UserVoice page.  This was a nice surprise, as typically I only get new feedback perhaps once a month or so; such feedback is always appreciated.  Then, perhaps ten minutes later, another update from a different user.  Several minutes later, a third!  I thought this was a pretty big “spike” in UserVoice traffic, but I didn’t really have any theories at to what caused it.

About an hour later came the answer.  I received an email from Betsy Wray, an editor for Cooking Club Magazine.  She informed me that they featured KitchenPC in Food Now!, their daily e-newsletter.  She was kind enough to forward me a copy, which can be found here.  This mention just made my day, and I loved reading this positive take on my website!  It’s these little victories that make the tough road of entrepreneurship completely worth it.

Shortly after, I decided to check the database to see if I’d gotten many new users due to this link.  The results nearly knocked me out of my chair.  Within the last couple hours, I had gotten 296 new user signups on the site!  In other words, my user count had almost doubled in a few hours!  I wrote back to Betsy to thank her, and also asked her how many people that email went out to.  Her reply?  Somewhere around 280,000.  Absolutely crazy!  All potential customers, all  people who are interested in cooking, all notified about my site – wow!

I’m also glad to say the site held up flawlessly.  It was still super fast even with all those users hitting it, and the site is still running on a single server with a gig of RAM.

Traffic spike on Google Analytics

That evening, I decided to check the Google Analytics stats.  That day alone, 3,335 unique visitors has checked out the site.  The bounce rate was only around 30%, and the average time on the site was 3 minutes.  The home page was viewed around 4,800 times, 1,441 people searched for recipes, over a thousand people tried out the meal planner, and over a thousand people clicked on the cookbook link.  These are fantastic numbers!

Random Twitter mention

What’s also amazing was the conversion rate.  By the time the day was over, I had 584 new user accounts on my site.  In other words, more than one out of six people who visited the site decided to create an account!  I’m pretty pleased with this number, even though I really have nothing to compare it to.  Yes, yesterday alone brought in more new users than the past three months combined.  I also noticed some buzzing in the Twittersphere about the site, which means some people on that newsletter liked the site at least enough to Tweet about it.

I’m interested in how long this surge in traffic will last, and if it will create any regular users.  I feel like there’s some super genius businessman thing I should do to capitalize on this temporary fame, but honestly I haven’t figured out what to do about it.  Either way, this does mean that thousands of people are at least interested in the concept of my site and hopefully I can deliver a product that meets their expectations and provides something useful.