UTS startup Kindershare, a peer-to-peer network facilitating the rental of baby equipment, was recently featured on an episode of A Current Affair focusing on the sharing economy. Founder Vanouhi Nazarian, shares her learnings on preparing her website for the deluge of traffic that followed Kindershare's first TV appearance.
Photo by Unsplash
I can't think of the last time I watched free to air TV live. I'm not a sports fan, and use Netflix and Catchup TV to watch the few shows that I am interested in. Many of my younger friends don't own a TV so I think advertising or promoting through TV makes no sense at all.
Add to that the timing of A Current Affair - right in the middle of parent's bed/bath routine and logically, the answer should have been no.
But, my ego couldn't resist, and so I said yes.
What did I do to prepare?
I'm a huge fan of the Minimum Viable Product - our website's base architecture is best described as 'developing' - we have had a functional product from day one, but I hadn't bothered ensuring our website was scaleable or optimised as there were always other things that were more important to concentrate on.
A quick look through the Oztam Ratings data showed around 850,000 people watched A Current Affair across Australia each night - panic set in! Was our website going to even cope with this?
A quick test using Load Impact gave us ten x 404s in a three minute test with 50 concurrent users - clearly our website was going to crash if even 1/1000th of the audience typed us into their phone while watching TV.
We're in the middle of an upgrade, so we wouldn't be able to change scripts on our home page and push it out without crashing the rest of our site. Our hands were tied with less than five days between when we were first notified and the potential air date.
How to prioritise what to do
After reading about 50 blog articles on how to prepare for surge traffic, we landed at the following action plan with the help of our Chief Technology Officer and offshore development team:
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Install a Content Delivery Network (CDN) - the speed improvements on our site were immense through this one step alone!
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Turn off all non-priority scripts running through GTM
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Upsize web servers and remote desktop servers - we relied heavily on the support we got from Amazon Web Services and had some budget to play with given we were still using the credits through the Springboard SBE program.
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Set up a 404 redirect - having a customised 404 page always looks better.
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Set up a new landing page, which new visitors would reach through a GTM-enabled pop-up.
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Have your emails to new users amended and ready to go.
So was it worth it?
Yes - watching Google Analytics during the four time zones was like watching a GIF - consistent spinning of numbers - it was beautiful to watch. Our architecture held too.
We had a month's worth of traffic to the site in an hour, about a month's worth of sign-ups and, most-importantly - over 20% of those converted less than 48 hours later. And best of all, mum finally got to understand what it was I did all day!
Top tips for other MVP startups
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Install your CDN today - sign up to the free level and configure it properly. When you have a surge event you can upgrade to a paid plan, but most of the fiddly stuff is already done for you.
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Test and test again - we managed to break one of our DKIM email settings when moving across to Cloudflare and for two days our customers were unable to click through any transaction emails.
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Install GTM on your site so you can quickly install / uninstall plugins with minimal coding / testing.
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Check your invoices - our retargeting was suspended because my credit card had maxed out - I realised about 30 mins before air time. A quick reset on a backup credit card and we were all okay!
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